How much power does the human body use? Evolution is less survival of the fittest, and more survival of the most efficient. The calculation is simple. A typical caloric intake is 2500 kilocalories—known simply as Calories, in the United States—per day. This is the equivalent of
120 watts. This is rather impressive. You and I are kept alive with about as much power as in used by a standard incandescent light-bulb. Furthermore, the brain only requires 20% of the body's energy usage, which comes—that is, 24 watts.
How does this compare to computers? Personal computers use a modest 65 to 250 watts, but don't possess the ability to match the functions of the human mind. Artificial intelligence is, for now, run on supercomputers. For example,
WATSON consumes 85 kilowatts—the equivalent of roughly 1,000 PCs.
Koomey's law is similar to Moore's law, but deals with the energy usage of computers. It states that the number of calculations for every unit of energy doubles every one-and-a-half years. A quick calculation shows that WATSON could match the human brain in energy usage by the 2030s. These computers only mimic one aspect of human cognition, but how these technologies will be used remains uncertain—there are a number of possibilities I intend to explore more fully.
That being said, I'm confident that human minds are not at risk of obsolescence. The human brain is incredibly efficient, and already possesses a powerful set of skills. Furthermore, the problem solving capabilities of groups of people exceeds the sum of the parts. What is not clear is the number of people who will be able to take part in these kinds of activities.
Dustin,
ReplyDeleteHuman brians won't be at risk of obsolescence? What if synthetic intelligences (I prefer this term to AI) become overwhelmingly numerous? Mark Bahner has blogged for a decade about how we are likely to exceed a trillion human brain equivalents by 2033 and keep going from there. Here's a post on it.
http://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2005/11/why_economic_gr.html
It's hard to see what our brains will be left to do once synthetic intelligence takes over for all our thinking needs.
Computers are impressive, but they do very specific tasks. The brain doesn't really do calculations--this analogy seems to have been invented by computer scientists, who are predisposed to view the brain as a computer. There's an idea from artificial intelligence called Moravec's paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox. The kinds of intelligence valued by computer scientists--being able to do complicated calculations--are relatively simple tasks for computers. Emulating other functions of the brain appears to be more difficult.
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