Humanity's extinction
Abstract:
You are right to argue that colonising Mars would not hedge against some sorts of extinction risk ("Colonising Mars", October 1st). But it is wrong to dismiss the possibility of human extinction as “claptrap”. Some novel or unknown threats, like those from engineered pathogens, might indeed endanger humanity's future.The Unilateralist’s Curse and the Case for a Principle of Conformity
Energetics of the brain and AI
Abstract:
Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? This report will review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of the methods of estimating brain emulation energy requirements.
Turning to AI, there are reasons to believe the energy requirements for de novo AI to have little correlation with brain (emulation) energy requirements since cost could depend merely of the cost of processing higher-level representations rather than billions of neural firings. Unless one thinks the human way of thinking is the most optimal or most easily implementable way of achieving software intelligence, we should expect de novo AI to make use of different, potentially very compressed and fast, processes.