Comment on Existential Risk and Public Relations

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:12:43 GMT

We need brain-level hardware (within an order of magnitude or so) if machines are going to be cost-competitive with humans.

I don't see why that is. If you were talking about ems, then the threshhold should be 1:1 realtime. Otherwise, for most problems that we know how to program a computer to do, the computer is much faster than humans even at existing speeds. Why do you expect that a computer that's say, 3x slower than a human (well within an order of magnitude) would be cost-competitive with humans while one that's 10^4 times slower wouldn't?

Discuss