But no company has ever managed to parlay this into world domination
Eventual failure aside, the East India Company gave it a damn good shake. I think if we get an AI to the point where it has effective colonial control over entire countries, we can be squarely said to have lost.
Also keep in mind that we have multiple institutions entirely dedicated to the purpose of breaking up companies when they become big enough to be threatening. We designed our societies to specifically avoid this scenario! That, too, comes from painful experience. IMO, if we now give AI the chances that we’ve historically given corporations before we learnt better, then we’re dead, no question about it.
Sure, but surely that’s how it feels from the inside when your mind uses a LRU storage system that progressively discards detail. I’m more interested in how much I can access—and um, there’s no way I can access 2.5 petabytes of data.
I think you just have a hard time imagining how much 2.5 petabyte is. If I literally stored in memory a high-resolution poorly compressed JPEG image (1MB) every second for the rest of my life, I would still not reach that storage limit. 2.5 petabyte would allow the brain to remember everything it has ever perceived, with very minimal compression, in full video, easily. We know that the actual memories we retrieve are heavily compressed. If we had 2.5 petabytes of storage, there’d be no reason for the brain to bother!