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The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’—that, somehow, is much harder!”
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second,
Even within the range of present human variation we see that some functions benefit greatly from the labor of one brilliant mastermind as opposed to the joint efforts of myriad mediocrities.
we must countenance a likelihood of there being intellectual problems solvable only by superintelligence and intractable to any ever-so-large collective of non-augmented humans.
might require qualitatively new kinds of understanding or new representational frameworks that are too deep or too complicated for the current edition of mortals to discover or use effectively.
Biological neurons operate at a peak speed of about 200 Hz, a full seven orders of magnitude slower than a modern microprocessor (~ 2 GHz).
Axons carry action potentials at speeds of 120 m/s
to achieve a round-trip latency of less than 10 ms between any two elements in a system, biological brains must be smaller than 0.11 m3. An electronic system, on the other hand, could be 6.1×1017 m3, about the size of a dwarf planet: eighteen orders of magnitude larger.22
