Commenting on a few minor points from Scott’s post, since I meant to write a full reply at some point but haven’t had the time:
But also, there are about 10^15 synapses in the brain, each one spikes about once per second, and a synaptic spike probably does about one FLOP of computation. [...] So a human-level AI would also need to do 10^15 floating point operations per second? Unclear.
I’d say ‘clearly not, for some possible AI designs’; but maybe it will be true for the first AIs we actually build, shrug.
Or you might do what OpenPhil did and just look at a bunch of examples of evolved vs. designed systems and see which are generally better:
Why aren’t there examples like ‘amount of cargo a bird can carry compared to an airplane’, or ‘number of digits a human can multiply together in ten seconds compared to a computer’?
Seems like you’ll get a skewed number if your brainstorming process steers away from examples like these altogether.
‘AI physicist’ is less like an artificial heart (trying to exactly replicate the structure of a biological organ functioning within a specific body), more like a calculator (trying to do a certain kind of cognitive work, without any constraint at all to do it in a human-like way).
Commenting on a few minor points from Scott’s post, since I meant to write a full reply at some point but haven’t had the time:
I’d say ‘clearly not, for some possible AI designs’; but maybe it will be true for the first AIs we actually build, shrug.
Why aren’t there examples like ‘amount of cargo a bird can carry compared to an airplane’, or ‘number of digits a human can multiply together in ten seconds compared to a computer’?
Seems like you’ll get a skewed number if your brainstorming process steers away from examples like these altogether.
‘AI physicist’ is less like an artificial heart (trying to exactly replicate the structure of a biological organ functioning within a specific body), more like a calculator (trying to do a certain kind of cognitive work, without any constraint at all to do it in a human-like way).