| > It's pretty obvious that if you want to simulate a brain, a Von Neumann architecture is terrible. People will invent new architectures, just like they invented GPUs and TPUs. It really isn’t. Sure, the Von Neumann architecture doesn’t match our brains, but right now silicon is so much faster than biology that our fundamental problem is elsewhere — our best understanding of what it means to learn from experience doesn’t allow us to make machines which learn as effectively as we do from as little data as we do. And that is the point — we can only (usefully) invent a new architecture like we did TPUs when we have a better idea. Sure, we probably will, but to what schedule? Biology is not obligated to make sense to us. Despite my general optimism about AI, I have to accept the possibility that perhaps the rules governing our own intelligence could (in principle) be as incomprehensible to us as they are to any other primate. > And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones. You seem to have missed my point here, too. I explicitly suggested what you used as a counter-argument — millions of small computers working together. To be precise, I suggested using 217.52 million A12 SoC units, running at 5e12 op/s, and a (guesstimated) 5 W TDP. This gave me an estimated 35,465 real-time human brains at a power cost of 36.8 kW per brain, which consumed roughly 32,200 US dollars of electricity per year, even when making the over-optimistic assumption the chips were the only power requirement (i.e. no network, no cooling). This also gave me a hardware supply cost of about $2,500,000 per brain (assuming the cost of the cheapest iPad using an A12, because I lack any better idea for how to estimate the cost of all other components needed to keep the chip working). If you hit the atomic limit, you get a x900 improvement (I think) on those costs. Which is great [1] if we know enough about how our minds work to replicate them… and my point is that we don’t. [1] except for the social and economic implications when minds powered by sunlight are cheaper than literal slaves given nothing more than the minimum food to keep them alive, which I also hope we’ll deal with but is a totally independent question. |