AI Impacts

Supporting AI Impacts

By Katja Grace, 21 May 2015 We now have a donations page. If you like what we are doing as much as anything else you can think of to spend marginal dollars on, I encourage you to support this project! Money will go to more

The Maes-Garreau Law

The Maes-Garreau law posits that people tend to predict exciting future technologies toward the end of their lifetimes. It probably does not hold for predictions of human-level AI. Contents ClarificationEvidenceImplications Clarification From Wikipedia: The Maes–Garreau law is the statement that

AI Timeline predictions in surveys and statements

Surveys seem to produce median estimates of time to human-level AI which are roughly a decade later than those produced from voluntary public statements. Details We compared several surveys to predictions made by similar groups of

MIRI AI Predictions Dataset

The MIRI AI predictions dataset is a collection of public predictions about human-level AI timelines. We edited the original dataset, as described below. Our dataset is available here, and the original here. Interesting features of the dataset

By Martin Grandjean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualization#/media/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualization.png

A new approach to predicting brain-computer parity

By Katja Grace, 7 May 2015 How large does a computer need to be before it is ‘as powerful’ as the human brain? This is a difficult question, which people have answered before, with much uncertainty. We have

Brain performance in TEPS

Traversed Edges Per Second (TEPS) is a benchmark for measuring a computer’s ability to communicate information internally. Given several assumptions, we can also estimate the human brain’s communication performance in terms of TEPS, and use this

Glial Signaling

The presence of glial cells may increase the capacity for signaling in the brain by a small factor, but is unlikely to qualitatively change the nature or extent of signaling in the brain. Contents SupportNumber

Scale of the Human Brain

The brain has about 10¹¹ neurons and 1.8-3.2 x 10¹⁴ synapses. These probably account for the majority of computationally interesting behavior. Contents SupportNumber of neurons in the brainNumber of synapses in the brainNumber of synapses in the neocortexNumber of synapses

Neuron firing rates in humans

Our best guess is that an average neuron in the human brain transmits a spike about 0.1-2 times per second. Contents SupportBias from neurons with sparse activityAssorted estimatesInformal estimatesEstimates of rate of firing in human neocortexEstimates of rate

Metabolic Estimates of Rate of Cortical Firing

Cortical neurons are estimated to spike around 0.16 times per second, based on the amount of energy consumed by the human neocortex. They seem unlikely to spike much more than once per second on average, based on this