Here’s what I’d agree with: Specific cell functions are near a local optimum of usefulness, in terms of small changes to DNA that could have been supported against mutation with the fraction of the selection budget that was allocated to those functions in the ancestral environment.
This formulation explains why human scurvy is allowed—producing vitamin C was unimportant in our ancestral environment, so the gene for it was allowed to degrade. And it doesn’t fault us for not using fusion to extract energy from food—there’s no small perturbation to our current digestive tract that starts a thermonuclear reaction.
It’s probably just wrong. For a trivial disproof : I will assume as stated that human neurons are at the Landauer limit.
Well we know from measurements and other studies that nerve cells are unreliable. This failure to fire, exhausting their internal fuel supply so they stop pulsing when they should, all the numerous ways the brain makes system level errors, and the slow speed of signaling mean as a system the brain is nowhere close to optimal. (I can provide sources for all claims) That Landauer limit is for error free computations. When you inject random errors you lose information and system precision, and thus a much smaller error free system would be equal in effectiveness to the brain.
This is likely why we are hitting humanlike performance in many domains with a small fraction of the estimated compute and memory of a brain.
Also when you talk about artificial systems: human brain has no expansion ports, upload or download interfaces, any way to use a gigawatt of power to solve more difficult problems, etc.
So even if we could never do better for the 20 watts the brain uses, in practice that doesn’t matter.
How do you view the claim that human cells are near a critical upper limit?
Here’s what I’d agree with: Specific cell functions are near a local optimum of usefulness, in terms of small changes to DNA that could have been supported against mutation with the fraction of the selection budget that was allocated to those functions in the ancestral environment.
This formulation explains why human scurvy is allowed—producing vitamin C was unimportant in our ancestral environment, so the gene for it was allowed to degrade. And it doesn’t fault us for not using fusion to extract energy from food—there’s no small perturbation to our current digestive tract that starts a thermonuclear reaction.
It’s probably just wrong. For a trivial disproof : I will assume as stated that human neurons are at the Landauer limit.
Well we know from measurements and other studies that nerve cells are unreliable. This failure to fire, exhausting their internal fuel supply so they stop pulsing when they should, all the numerous ways the brain makes system level errors, and the slow speed of signaling mean as a system the brain is nowhere close to optimal. (I can provide sources for all claims) That Landauer limit is for error free computations. When you inject random errors you lose information and system precision, and thus a much smaller error free system would be equal in effectiveness to the brain.
This is likely why we are hitting humanlike performance in many domains with a small fraction of the estimated compute and memory of a brain.
Also when you talk about artificial systems: human brain has no expansion ports, upload or download interfaces, any way to use a gigawatt of power to solve more difficult problems, etc.
So even if we could never do better for the 20 watts the brain uses, in practice that doesn’t matter.