Great post, thanks! I would not have guessed that brains are this impressive.
Re: algorithms of the brain, I could still imagine that the ‘algorithms’ we rely on for higher concepts (planning, deciding on moral values, etc.) are more wasteful with regards to resources. But your arguments certainly reshape my expectations for AI
Some typos/a suggestion:
“The predicted wire energy is 10−19W/bit/nm” J/bit/nm ”[...] a brain-size ANN will cost almost 3kW” 3kJ ”if we assume only 10% of synapses are that large, the minimal brain synaptic volume is about 10^18 nm”—nm^3
″10^18 nm of total wiring length, and thus at least an equivalent or greater total wiring volume (in practice [,,,]” maybe “volume (i.e. $10^18 nm^3$; in practice [...]”
Thanks! And thanks for the typo catches. I agree that the higher level software that runs on the brain (multi-step algorithms) - the mind—is more evolutionarily recent, a vastly larger search space, still evolving rapidly, etc. I added a note in the beginning to clarify this article is specifically not arguing for high efficiency or near optimality for mental software.
Great post, thanks! I would not have guessed that brains are this impressive.
Re: algorithms of the brain, I could still imagine that the ‘algorithms’ we rely on for higher concepts (planning, deciding on moral values, etc.) are more wasteful with regards to resources. But your arguments certainly reshape my expectations for AI
Some typos/a suggestion:
“The predicted wire energy is 10−19W/bit/nm” J/bit/nm
”[...] a brain-size ANN will cost almost 3kW” 3kJ
”if we assume only 10% of synapses are that large, the minimal brain synaptic volume is about 10^18 nm”—nm^3
″10^18 nm of total wiring length, and thus at least an equivalent or greater total wiring volume (in practice [,,,]” maybe “volume (i.e. $10^18 nm^3$; in practice [...]”
Thanks! And thanks for the typo catches. I agree that the higher level software that runs on the brain (multi-step algorithms) - the mind—is more evolutionarily recent, a vastly larger search space, still evolving rapidly, etc. I added a note in the beginning to clarify this article is specifically not arguing for high efficiency or near optimality for mental software.