[paganel]

It’s much cheaper to feed a human brain and a human body compared to “feeding” an AGI, I’m talking about menial (and maybe not so menial) tasks like garbage collecting. Under capitalism cheaper is generally used as the preferred option.

[mrshadowgoose]

Do you have literally any evidence of this extremely bold claim? Especially considering we don't even have AGI yet?

In your non-existent calculations, have you taken into account the 20-30 years of energy and resources it typically costs to train a typical human intelligence for a specific task?

Have you considered that general intelligence uses on the order of 10 watts? Even if AGI ends up using 10x this, have you considered that 100 watts is a rounding error in comparison to the power use involved in all the industrial processes that humans currently coordinate?

[ben_w]

Green500 top supercomputer, gets 65Gflops/W.

65Gflops/W = 6.5e10 operations per joule = 2.34×10^17 per kWh

Assume $0.05/kWh electricity: (2.34×10^17 operations/kWh) / ($0.05/kWh) = 4.68×10^18 operations per US dollar

Human brain computational estimates are all over the place, but one from ages ago is 36.8×10^15 flops ≈ 3.7e16 operations/second ≈ 1.3e20 operations/hour: https://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/

Given previously calculated cost, this is equivalent to a human that costs $28.31/hour.

Of course, as we haven't actually done this yet, we don't know if that computational estimate is correct, nor if we do or don't need to give it off-hours and holidays.

Still, general explanation is there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to energy efficiently in computation; calling this Moore's Law may be inaccurate, but the reality happens to have rhymed thus far.

[mitthrowaway2]

Do you think it's plausible that computers might someday have the potential to come down in cost-for-performance?

Cars eventually became cheaper than horses...

[paganel]

> Do you think it's plausible that computers might someday have the potential to come down in cost-for-performance?

I have no idea. I do think though that it's a matter of energy, and that us, humans, are way better at creating it and putting it to use compared to potential future AGI-capable machines. Lungs + the blood system are just such an efficient thing, especially if you also look at the volume/space they occupy compared to whatever it is that would power that future AGI-capable machine.

> Cars eventually became cheaper than horses...

In large parts of the world donkeys, cows/oxes and horses are still cheaper and more efficient [1] compared to tractors, just look at many parts of India and most of Africa. Of course, us living in the West tend to not think about those parts of the world all that often, as we also tend to mostly think about the activities that we usually carry out (like having to travel between two distant cities, a relatively recent phenomenon).

[1] "More efficient" in the sense that if you're an African peasant and your tractor breaks down in the middle of no-where then you're out of luck, as the next tractor-repair shop might be hundreds of kms away. That means you won't get to plow your land, that means famine for you and your family. Compared to that, horses/oxes (to give just an example) are more resilient.