sanil

Why limit ourselves to our planet? 12 OOMs is well within reason if we were a type 2 civilization and had access to all the energy from our sun (our planet as a whole only receives 1/10^10 of it).

Encryption wouldn't really be an issue - we can simply tune our algorithms to use slightly more complicated assumptions. After all, one can just pick a problem that scales as O(10^(6n)), where n could for example be secret key length. If you have 12 orders of magnitude more compute, just make your key 2 times larger and you still have your cryptography.

Thought of how small computers (phones etc) would scale also came to me.... (read more)

Very interesting question!

My observations:

1. 12 OOMs is a lot
2. 12 OOMs is like comparing computational capacity of someone who just started learning arithmetics to a computer that an average person could obtain
3. You mainly focused on modern AI approaches and how they would scale. With 12 OOMs, it's possible that other approaches would be used. See galactic algorithms for example.
4. It might be useful to look at this through the lens of computational complexity. Here's a table of expected speedups:

Hence, we should expect exponentially complex brute force problems to perform 10 times better. With this, you'd only need 1 year to simulate something that would have taken 10 years. Quite nice for problems like quantum... (read 384 more words →)