It seems unlikely to me that there is potential to make large brain based intelligence advancements beyond the current best humans using human evolved biology. There will be distance scaling limitations linked to neural signal speeds.
Then there is Jeff Hawkins ‘thousand brains’ theory of human intelligence that our brains are made up of thousands of parallel processing cortical columns of a few mm cross section and a few mm thick with cross communication and recursion etc, but that fundamental processing core probably isn’t scalable in complexity, only in total number—your brain could perhaps be expanded to handle thinking about more things in parallel at once, but not at much higher levels of sophistication without paying a large coordination speed price (and evolution places a premium on reaction speed for animals that encounter violence)
I look at whales and other mammals with much much larger than human brains and wonder why they are not smarter—some combination of no evolutionary driver and perhaps a lot of their neurons are dedicated to delay-line processing needed for processing sonar and controlling large bodies with long signaling delays.
Regardless, if AI is a dominant part of our future then it seems likely to me that regardless of whether the future is human utopia or dystopia, non-transhuman humans will not exist in significant numbers in a few hundred years. Neural biology and perhaps all biology is going to be superseded as maladapted to the technological future.
I think number of neurons in neocortex (or even more prefrontal cortex—but unfortunately i didn’t quickly find how big the orca prefrontal cortex is—though I’d guess it to still be significantly bigger than for humans) is a much much better proxy for intelligence of species than brain size (or encephalization quotient). (E.g. see the wikipedia list linked in my question here.)
(Also see here. There are more examples, e.g. a Blue and yellow macawhas 1.9 billion, whereas brown bears have only 250million.)
EDIT: Tbc I do think that larger bodies require more neurons in touch-sense and motor parts of the neocortex, so there is some effect of how larger animals need a bit larger brains to be similarly smart, but I don’t think this effect is very strong.
But yeah there are other considerations too, which is why I am only at 50% that orcas could do science significantly better than humans if they tried.
It seems unlikely to me that there is potential to make large brain based intelligence advancements beyond the current best humans using human evolved biology. There will be distance scaling limitations linked to neural signal speeds.
Then there is Jeff Hawkins ‘thousand brains’ theory of human intelligence that our brains are made up of thousands of parallel processing cortical columns of a few mm cross section and a few mm thick with cross communication and recursion etc, but that fundamental processing core probably isn’t scalable in complexity, only in total number—your brain could perhaps be expanded to handle thinking about more things in parallel at once, but not at much higher levels of sophistication without paying a large coordination speed price (and evolution places a premium on reaction speed for animals that encounter violence)
I look at whales and other mammals with much much larger than human brains and wonder why they are not smarter—some combination of no evolutionary driver and perhaps a lot of their neurons are dedicated to delay-line processing needed for processing sonar and controlling large bodies with long signaling delays.
Regardless, if AI is a dominant part of our future then it seems likely to me that regardless of whether the future is human utopia or dystopia, non-transhuman humans will not exist in significant numbers in a few hundred years. Neural biology and perhaps all biology is going to be superseded as maladapted to the technological future.
I think number of neurons in neocortex (or even more prefrontal cortex—but unfortunately i didn’t quickly find how big the orca prefrontal cortex is—though I’d guess it to still be significantly bigger than for humans) is a much much better proxy for intelligence of species than brain size (or encephalization quotient). (E.g. see the wikipedia list linked in my question here.)
(Also see here. There are more examples, e.g. a Blue and yellow macaw has 1.9 billion, whereas brown bears have only 250million.)
EDIT: Tbc I do think that larger bodies require more neurons in touch-sense and motor parts of the neocortex, so there is some effect of how larger animals need a bit larger brains to be similarly smart, but I don’t think this effect is very strong.
But yeah there are other considerations too, which is why I am only at 50% that orcas could do science significantly better than humans if they tried.