The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

With machine learning getting so much more cost-efficient, raw computing power is very unlikely to be the bottleneck in achieving human-level AI. Supercomputers already significantly exceed the raw computational requirements to simulate the human brain. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, the world’s top supercomputer as of 2023,[141] can perform on the order of 1018 operations per second. This is already on the order of 10,000 times as much as the brain’s likely maximum computation speed (1014 operations per second).[142] My 2005 calculations in The Singularity Is Near noted 1016 operations per second as an upper bound on the brain’s processing speed (as we have on the order of 1011 neurons with on the order of 103 synapses each firing on the order of 102 times per second).[143] But as I noted then, this was a high estimate to be conservative. In reality, the computation done in an actual brain will ordinarily be much less than this. A range of further research over the past two decades has shown that neurons fire orders of magnitude more slowly—not two hundred times a second, which is around their theoretical maximum, but closer to once a second.[144] In fact, the AI Impacts project estimated, based on the brain’s energy consumption, that the average neuron fires only 0.29 times per second—implying that total brain computation could be as low as around 1013 operations per second.[145] This matches Hans Moravec’s seminal estimate, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The...