Nitpick: your computation speed example is WAY off. Random googling suggests that as of ’09, the world’s fastest computer was behind a single human brain by a factor of ~500.
Your other examples are more or less physical technologies, and it is not at all clear that they are a valid reference class for computational technologies.
There are many ways of measuring computation speed. The one I suggested—FLOPS or floating point operations per second—is admittedly biased toward machines. I’m pretty confident that, using this metric—the one I originally specified—that I was WAY off in the opposite direction—fast machines beat humans by a factor of a trillion or more. How many 7 digit numbers can you add in a second without error?
FLOPS and clock speed are not the same thing. The clock speed of the human brain (possible neuronal firings per second is like 100-1000 Hz). However, the brain is also massively parallel, and FLOPS estimates for the brain vary widely. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 100 teraFLOPS to 100 exaFLOPS. Kurzweil estimates 20 PetaFLOPS, but admits that it could be much higher.
Nitpick: your computation speed example is WAY off. Random googling suggests that as of ’09, the world’s fastest computer was behind a single human brain by a factor of ~500.
Your other examples are more or less physical technologies, and it is not at all clear that they are a valid reference class for computational technologies.
There are many ways of measuring computation speed. The one I suggested—FLOPS or floating point operations per second—is admittedly biased toward machines. I’m pretty confident that, using this metric—the one I originally specified—that I was WAY off in the opposite direction—fast machines beat humans by a factor of a trillion or more. How many 7 digit numbers can you add in a second without error?
FLOPS and clock speed are not the same thing. The clock speed of the human brain (possible neuronal firings per second is like 100-1000 Hz). However, the brain is also massively parallel, and FLOPS estimates for the brain vary widely. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 100 teraFLOPS to 100 exaFLOPS. Kurzweil estimates 20 PetaFLOPS, but admits that it could be much higher.