I did some calculations with a bunch of assumptions and simplifications but here’s a high estimate, back of the envelope calculation for the data and “tokens” a 30 year old human would have “trained” on:
Visual data: 130 million photoreceptor cells, firing at 10 Hz = 1.3Gbits/s = 162.5 MB/s over 30 years (aprox. 946,080,000 seconds) = 153 Petabytes
Auditory data: Humans can hear frequencies up to 20,000 Hz, high quality audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz satisfying Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, if we assume a 16bit (cd quality)*2(channels for stereo) = 1.41 Mbits/s = .18 MB/s over 30 years = .167 Petabytes
Tactile data: 4 million touch receptors providing 8 bits/s (assuming they account for temperature, pressure, pain, hair movement, vibration) = 5 MB/s over 30 years = 4.73 Petabytes
Olfactory data: We can detect up to 1 trillion smells , assuming we process 1 smell every second and each smell is represented a its own piece of data i.e. log2(1trillion) = 40 bits/s = 0.0000050 MB/s over 30 years = .000004 Petabytes
Taste data: 10,000 receptors, assuming a unique identifier for each basic taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami) log2(5) 2.3 bits rounded up to 3 = 30 kbits/s = 0.00375 MB/s over 30 years = .00035 Petabytes
This amounts to 153 + .167 + 4.73 + .000004 + .00035 = 158.64 Petabytes assuming 5 bytes per token (i.e. 5 characters) this amounts to 31,728 T tokens
This is of course a high estimate and most of this data will clearly have huge compression capacity, but I wanted to get a rough estimate of a high upper bound.
Here’s the google sheet if anyone wants to copy it or contribute
Where’s Nick Bostrom? I’ve been wondering about this. I haven’t seen anything published recently by him or hear him talk, besides that small New York Times piece. It would be great to hear his take in depth about this recent AI progress.