I don't know why but tech industry folks tend to be very resistant to the stupendous complexity of biological systems. The way biology builds functionality into structure can result in incredible space efficiency. Like neurons, for example. People assume the computational aspect of a neuron is only a tiny part of the structure of a neuron, when we have no reason to believe that. That is to say, people think you can equal its ability with a model many orders of magnitude less complex than a neuron. They don't want to think about the implications of that assumption being wrong.
I always find myself coming back to the dragonfly brain. A dragonfly brain needs exactly sixteen neurons to take input from the 30,000 ommatidia in its eyes, use that information to plot the three-dimensional flight path of airborne prey, compute an intercept course, and send those signals to the wing muscles.
How many transistors do we need for that? Input from 30,000 camera pixels, tracking moving objects in 3D space, computing vectors. Now you have a neuron to transistor efficiency ratio. Now multiply that by 86 billion. One brain. AGI's gonna take a hot minute, folks.
I don't know why, but certain people tend to be very resistant to the stupendous power of information systems. One such information system, the dragonfly brain, is amazing, and another such information system, the human brain, may never be sufficient to understand it... in the raw. But it is a proven fact that human brains can build tools and other information systems.
Take that DJI drone. For the sake of argument, let's assume it took 300 000 years to develop: that's for how long we know anatomically modern humans have been around. We could reduce it to 10000 years, to account only for modern estates and concentration of resources in such quality that people get time to do science, invent new things, and imprint all of that in the web of human culture (another information system). Anyhow, humans have developed a thing that flies and has a camera, and the two things are connected, in 300000 years. Insects evolved 2.6 billion years after life appeared on Earth. Is the DJI drone not as amazing as the dragonfly? And if not, but we keep making new versions of it for the next 1000 years, will it be able to catch up to the dragonfly?
I always find myself coming back to the dragonfly brain. A dragonfly brain needs exactly sixteen neurons to take input from the 30,000 ommatidia in its eyes, use that information to plot the three-dimensional flight path of airborne prey, compute an intercept course, and send those signals to the wing muscles.
How many transistors do we need for that? Input from 30,000 camera pixels, tracking moving objects in 3D space, computing vectors. Now you have a neuron to transistor efficiency ratio. Now multiply that by 86 billion. One brain. AGI's gonna take a hot minute, folks.