That's the endgame, but on the other hand, we already have one, it's called "humanity". No reason to believe that another one would be much cheaper. Interacting with the real world is __expensive__. It's the most expensive thing of all.
Very true. Living cells are ~4-5 orders of magnitude more functional-information-dense than the most advanced chips, and there is a lot more living mass than advanced chips.
But the networking potential of digital compute is a fundamentally different paradigm than living systems. The human brain is constrained in size by the width of the female pelvis.
So while it's expensive, we can trade scope-constrained robustness (replication and redundancy at many levels of abstraction), for broader cognitive scale and fragility (data centers can't repair themselves and self-replicate).
Going to be interesting to see it all unfold... my bet is on stacking S-curves all the way.
> Living cells are ~4-5 orders of magnitude more functional-information-dense than the most advanced chips,
In what sense is this true? That sounds suspiciously like cubic meter of dirt is more advanced than an iPhone because there are 6-7 orders of magnitude more atoms in the dirt.
Well, sort of, but functional-information is a specifically defined term that you can google. "Advanced" is vague and in this context not very helpful.
functional information is basically the amount of data (bits) necessary to explain all the possible functions matter can perform based on its unique configuration (in contrast to random). I am sure I partially butchered this explanation... but hopefully its close enough to catch my drift.
Life is optimized to process and learn from the real world, and it is insanely efficient at it and functional-information dense. (It might even be at the theoretical limit) Our most advanced technology is still 4-5 orders of magnitude behind it.
The capabilities of your iPhone are extremely narrow when compared to a handful of dirt. To you it may seem the opposite, but you are probably mixing up utility to you with functional capability. Your iPhone is has more functional utility to you, but the same amount dirt has way more general functional utility. (Your iphone isn't capable of self-replication, self-repair, and self-nonself distinction aka autopoiesis)
> Living cells are ~4-5 orders of magnitude more functional-information-dense than the most advanced chips, and there is a lot more living mass than advanced chips.
I believe you but I would love to know where this number came from just so I can read more about it
It's napkin math so take it with a pinch of salt, but I am calculating the information stored in genome, assuming 2 bits per base pair, reducing to estimated 88% coding fraction to get the functional bits, and then dividing by cell volume. Did this for a few different types of cells and then averaged the result to around 1–10 Mbit/μm³
# If there are any bioinformaticians around please come eviscerate or confirm this calc #
Then compared it to TSMC 2nm research macro of (38.1 Mbit/mm^2) normalized to cell scale: 0.00019 Mbit/μm³
You are comparing the fastest writable memory available (SRAM) vs biological non-volatile memory that is essentially read only. Samsung's 280 layer NAND reaches 28,5 Gbit per mm^2. I don't know how you would convert that to a volume, but if we simply multiply by 1000x for simplicity, it would be much closer to 0.19 Mbit/μm³, but even then you have to remember that NAND flash is still writable at pretty high speeds.
This is true, I was only comparing functional information density (unique functional genome bps), not read/write speeds.
I was also taking the information from a genome and then dividing it by the volume of a cell, but there are many instances of the genome in a cell. I didn't count all instances because they aren't unique.
There's a lot to unpack with this comparison and my approximation was crude, but the more I've dug into this comparison the more apparent how incredibly efficient life is at managing and processing and storing information. Especially if you also consider the amino acids, proteins, etc as information. No matter how you slice it, life seems orders of magnitude more efficient by every metric.
I'd like to think there's a paper somewhere where someone has carefully unpacked this and formally quantified it all.
Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn't aware, and so I just dug into it.
From what I can tell, science used to point to this as the only/primary limit to human-brain size, but more recently the picture seems a lot less clear, with some indications that pelvis size doesn't place as hard of a constraint as we thought and there are other constraints such as metabolic (how many calories the mother can sustain during pregnancy and lactation).
So overall I'd say you are technically correct, even though this doesn't really materially change the point I was making; which is that the size of the human brain is constrained in ways that the size of data centers are not.
