Human technology is rarely more efficient than biology along the quantitative dimensions that are important to biology, but human technology is not limited to building out of evolved wetware nanobots and can instead employ high energy manufacturing to create ultra durable materials that then enable very high energy density solutions. Our flying machines may not compete with birds in energy efficiency, but they harness power densities of a completely different scale to that available to biology. Basically the same applies to computers vs brains. AGI will outcompete human brains by brute scale, speed, and power rather than energy efficiency.
The human brain is just a scaled up primate brain, which is just a tweaked, more scalable mammal brain, but mammal brains have the same general architecture—which is closer to ~10^8 years old. It is hardly ‘faulty and biased’ - bias is in the mind.
A lot of the advantage of human technology is due to human technology figuring out how to use covalent bonds and metallic bonds, where biology sticks to ionic bonds and proteins held together by van der Waals forces (static cling, basically). This doesn’t fit into your paradigm; it’s just biology mucking around in a part of the design space easily accessible to mutation error, while humans work in a much more powerful design space because they can move around using abstract cognition.
Covalent/metallic vs ionic bonds implements the high energy density vs wetware constrained distinction I was referring to, so we are mostly in agreement; that is my paradigm. But the evidence is pretty clear that “ionic bond and protein” tech does approach the Landauer limit—at least for protein computation. As for the brain, end of Moore’s Law high end chip research is very much neuromorphic (memristor crossbars, etc), and some designs do claim perhaps 10x or so greater synop/J than the brain (roughly), but they aren’t built yet. So if you had wider uncertainty in your claim, with most mass in the region of the brain being 1 to 3 OOMs from the limit, I probably wouldn’t have commented, but for me that one claim distracted from your larger valid points.
Human technology is rarely more efficient than biology along the quantitative dimensions that are important to biology, but human technology is not limited to building out of evolved wetware nanobots and can instead employ high energy manufacturing to create ultra durable materials that then enable very high energy density solutions. Our flying machines may not compete with birds in energy efficiency, but they harness power densities of a completely different scale to that available to biology. Basically the same applies to computers vs brains. AGI will outcompete human brains by brute scale, speed, and power rather than energy efficiency.
The human brain is just a scaled up primate brain, which is just a tweaked, more scalable mammal brain, but mammal brains have the same general architecture—which is closer to ~10^8 years old. It is hardly ‘faulty and biased’ - bias is in the mind.
A lot of the advantage of human technology is due to human technology figuring out how to use covalent bonds and metallic bonds, where biology sticks to ionic bonds and proteins held together by van der Waals forces (static cling, basically). This doesn’t fit into your paradigm; it’s just biology mucking around in a part of the design space easily accessible to mutation error, while humans work in a much more powerful design space because they can move around using abstract cognition.
Covalent/metallic vs ionic bonds implements the high energy density vs wetware constrained distinction I was referring to, so we are mostly in agreement; that is my paradigm. But the evidence is pretty clear that “ionic bond and protein” tech does approach the Landauer limit—at least for protein computation. As for the brain, end of Moore’s Law high end chip research is very much neuromorphic (memristor crossbars, etc), and some designs do claim perhaps 10x or so greater synop/J than the brain (roughly), but they aren’t built yet. So if you had wider uncertainty in your claim, with most mass in the region of the brain being 1 to 3 OOMs from the limit, I probably wouldn’t have commented, but for me that one claim distracted from your larger valid points.