Re: Hardware Progress

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Sat Jun 23 2001 - 13:57:22 MDT


"Amara D. Angelica" wrote:
>
> Dani Eder said:
>
> >The latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the
> >world has just been published (www.top500.org). The
> >sum of all 500 machines now is at 108 Tflops, which,
> >using Moravec's estimate, is equivalent to 1.08 human
> >brain power.
>
> Ray Kurzweil estimates 20,000 TF/s for human
> brain power, based on a nominal neural-firing speed
> of 200 instructions per second for each connection
> (100 TF/s x 200). This is 200 times higher
> than Hans Moravec's figure, which doesn't include the
> neural-firing speed.
>
> Kurzweil estimates that "supercomputers will achieve
> one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers
> will do so by around 2020."
>

And yet he also points out in recent presentations that it may be
possible to implement human-equivalent functionality using 1000 times
less "power" in computers. He gives an example of the auditory
subsystem.

Do you ever get the feeling there is a bit of cognitive dissonance
there with him? He seems to want to have a human-centric future, even
out past 2030, yet the technology trends don't seem to point that way
when you look closely... hopefully this dissonance will lead him to
a more SL4 kind of reasoning. Or perhaps he is simply presenting a more
conservative side in public?

-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.intelligence.org/


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