Notes and Quotes - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom)

Finished on 11/1/20 in Sunshine Coast, Australia.

"If some day we build machine brains that surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. And, as the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence."

"Axons carry action potentials at speeds of 120 m/s or less, whereas electronic processing cores can communicate optically at the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s).21 The sluggishness of neural signals limits how big a biological brain can be while functioning as a single processing unit. For example, to achieve a round-trip latency of less than 10 ms between any two elements in a system, biological brains must be smaller than 0.11 m3. An electronic system, on the other hand, could be 6.1×1017 m3, about the size of a dwarf planet: eighteen orders of magnitude larger."

"The number of neurons in a biological creature is most obviously limited by cranial volume and metabolic constraints, but other factors may also be significant for larger brains (such as cooling, development time, and signal-conductance delays—see the previous point). By contrast, computer hardware is indefinitely scalable up to very high physical limits.25 Supercomputers can be warehouse-sized or larger, with additional remote capacity added via high-speed cables."