Post-Biological Intelligence Will Be Good For The Environment, Eventually
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 22 of April , 2009 at 6:58 pm
Creating an artificial intelligence system as complex as the human brain sounds like it might be a fun thing to do, but Anders Sandberg is wondering just how much juice you’d need to keep such a system running. Based on some rough estimates, it turns out to be kind of a lot:
The current IBM roadrunner does 376 million calculations per watts. If we take my mid-range estimates of computing needs [to emulate a human brain], 10^22 to 10^25 FLOPS, then a single emulation would need 10^13 to 10^16 watts. The total insolation of Earth is about 10^17 watts, so this won’t do – there would be space for just a few minds on the entire planet. But current research on zettaflops computing suggest we can do much better. A DARPA exascale study suggests we can do 10^12 flops per watt, which means “just” a dozen Hoover dams per mind.
Well, damn. But further down the line, as computer technology evolves and quantum computing becomes a reality (instead of just vaporware), things might get slightly more efficient:
Using reversible [quantum dot] computation there could in principle be calculations done at no energy dissipation. Unfortunately it would still be needed for error correction and interacting with the real world. A conservative bound would be assuming one irreversible operation every millisecond at every synapse, which leads to 10^17 operations and an energy dissipation of 3*10^-6 watts per degree – colder computers are more efficient. Using just liquid nitrogen (77 Kelvin) the energy requirements of a mind would be on the order of 0.0002 watts, 20% of an optical disc player laser. Even adding in the costs of cooling and manufacturing the hardware, it seems likely that this kind of postbiological human would be extremely resource efficient.
Anders isn’t just talking about a general AI, he’s actually advocating that at some point in the future, humans conserve resources by abandoning our wasteful biological meatsacks and downloading our consciousnesses into hardware. Sounds like a good idea to me, I’m starting to get tired of having to get my hair cut over and over.
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Category: Artificial Intelligence
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Comment by Mike
Made Friday, 24 of April , 2009 at 10:28 am
Ray Kurzweil plots all this out in The Singularity is Near. He shows the power per calculation is dropping exponentially. I can’t remember his dates for when it becomes trivial, but it’s not that far out.