Haven’t read the paper, so sorry if it is explained there, but I disagree with the assumption that human brain is the minimum possible size for an agent. Human brain has some constraints that do not apply to electronic, non-evolved agents.
As an example, my external hard disk drive has a capacity 1.5 TB. How many bytes of information can a human brain store reliably? How many human-style neurons would we need to simulate in order to create a human-like agent capable of memorizing 1.5 TB of arbitrary data reliably? My point is that simply building the 1.5 TB external HDD, plus some interface with the rest of the brain if necessary, is several orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to use a human-like neuron architecture for the same.
Possible additional advantages for a silicon intelligence (besides storage):
It can view its own neurons and edit their weights or configuration.
It can be copied, and plausibly copy itself.
Its memory/storage can be shared/copied/backed up.
It may have access to better, higher-fidelity sensors.
We evolved to perform a set of tasks suitable to a hunter-gatherer environment. It can be trained or configured to perform a set of tasks that is more optimised for today’s world.
It has access to more energy.
It can perform operations faster (Bostrom writes that biological neurons operate at 200 Hz).
It can send signals internally faster (Bostrom writes that axons carry action potentials at 120 m/s, which is 6 OOMs slower than the speed of light).
Haven’t read the paper, so sorry if it is explained there, but I disagree with the assumption that human brain is the minimum possible size for an agent. Human brain has some constraints that do not apply to electronic, non-evolved agents.
As an example, my external hard disk drive has a capacity 1.5 TB. How many bytes of information can a human brain store reliably? How many human-style neurons would we need to simulate in order to create a human-like agent capable of memorizing 1.5 TB of arbitrary data reliably? My point is that simply building the 1.5 TB external HDD, plus some interface with the rest of the brain if necessary, is several orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to use a human-like neuron architecture for the same.
Possible additional advantages for a silicon intelligence (besides storage):
It can view its own neurons and edit their weights or configuration.
It can be copied, and plausibly copy itself.
Its memory/storage can be shared/copied/backed up.
It may have access to better, higher-fidelity sensors.
We evolved to perform a set of tasks suitable to a hunter-gatherer environment. It can be trained or configured to perform a set of tasks that is more optimised for today’s world.
It has access to more energy.
It can perform operations faster (Bostrom writes that biological neurons operate at 200 Hz).
It can send signals internally faster (Bostrom writes that axons carry action potentials at 120 m/s, which is 6 OOMs slower than the speed of light).
Reliable? Your hard disk will be unreadable before long, while the human brain has developed ways to pass information down over generations.