AI Impacts

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

Preliminary prices for human-level hardware

By Katja Grace, 4 April 2015 Computer hardware has been getting cheap now for about seventy five years. Relatedly, large computing projects can afford to be increasingly large. If you think the human brain is something like

Current FLOPS prices

In November 2017, we estimate the price for one GFLOPS to be between $0.03 and $3 for single or double precision performance, using GPUs (therefore excluding some applications). Amortized over three years, this is $1.1

The cost of TEPS

A billion Traversed Edges Per Second (a GTEPS) can be bought for around $0.26/hour via a powerful supercomputer, including hardware and energy costs only. We do not know if GTEPS can be bought more cheaply elsewhere. We estimate that

Allen, The Singularity Isn’t Near

The Singularity Isn’t Near is an article in MIT Technology Review by Paul Allen which argues that a singularity brought about by super-human-level AI will not arrive by 2045 (as is predicted by Kurzweil). The summarized argument

Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

The Singularity Is Near is a book by Ray Kurzweil. It argues that a technological singularity will occur in around 2045. This appears to be largely based on extrapolation from hardware in combination with a guess for how