Well to be clear there is no easy path to 6 OOM in further energy efficiency improvement. At a strictly trends-prediction level that is of same order as the gap between a 286 and an nvidia RTX 4090, which took 40 years of civilization level effort. At a circuit theory level the implied ~1e15/s analog synaptic ops in 1e-5J is impossible without full reversible computing, as interconnect is only ~90% of the energy cost, not 99.999%, and the minimal analog or digital MAC op consumes far more than 0.1eV. So not only can it not even run conventional serial algorithms or massively parallel algorithms, it has to use fully reversible parallel logic. Like quantum computing, its still unclear what maps usefully to that paradigm I’m reasonably optimistic in the long term but ..
I’m skeptical that even the implied error bit correction rate energy costs would make much sense on the surface of the earth. An advanced quantum or reversible computer’s need for minimal noise and thus temperature to maintain coherence or low error rate is just a symptom of reaching highly perfected states of matter, where any tiny atomic disturbance can be catastrophic and cause a cascade of expensive-to-erase errors. Ironically such a computer would likely be much larger than the brain—this appears to be one of the current fundemental tradeoffs with most reversible computation, it’s not a simple free lunch (optical computers are absolutely enormous, superconducting circuits are large, reversibility increases area, etc) . At scale such systems would probably only work well off earth, perhaps far from the sun or buried in places like the darkside of the moon, because they become extremely sensitive to thermal noise, cosmic rays, and any disorder. We are talking about arcilect level tech in 2048 or something, not anything near term.
So instead I expect we’ll have a large population of neurmorphic AGI/uploads well before that.
Well to be clear there is no easy path to 6 OOM in further energy efficiency improvement. At a strictly trends-prediction level that is of same order as the gap between a 286 and an nvidia RTX 4090, which took 40 years of civilization level effort. At a circuit theory level the implied ~1e15/s analog synaptic ops in 1e-5J is impossible without full reversible computing, as interconnect is only ~90% of the energy cost, not 99.999%, and the minimal analog or digital MAC op consumes far more than 0.1eV. So not only can it not even run conventional serial algorithms or massively parallel algorithms, it has to use fully reversible parallel logic. Like quantum computing, its still unclear what maps usefully to that paradigm I’m reasonably optimistic in the long term but ..
I’m skeptical that even the implied error bit correction rate energy costs would make much sense on the surface of the earth. An advanced quantum or reversible computer’s need for minimal noise and thus temperature to maintain coherence or low error rate is just a symptom of reaching highly perfected states of matter, where any tiny atomic disturbance can be catastrophic and cause a cascade of expensive-to-erase errors. Ironically such a computer would likely be much larger than the brain—this appears to be one of the current fundemental tradeoffs with most reversible computation, it’s not a simple free lunch (optical computers are absolutely enormous, superconducting circuits are large, reversibility increases area, etc) . At scale such systems would probably only work well off earth, perhaps far from the sun or buried in places like the darkside of the moon, because they become extremely sensitive to thermal noise, cosmic rays, and any disorder. We are talking about arcilect level tech in 2048 or something, not anything near term.
So instead I expect we’ll have a large population of neurmorphic AGI/uploads well before that.