Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

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The main issue is that the death of moore's law somehow implies that there won't be any progress in chip manufacturing and we'll always use the computing technology we have now because at some point you reach sizes of single atoms. But this is wrong as we don't need node shrinks, we need different improvements. And human brains are the proof that they are physically possible.

Human brains, if you ignore brains of mammals larger than us, are the most complex "computers" we know of. And they are much more efficient at that and their assembly doesn't require huge buildings full of machines that cost billions of dollars.

Their existence means it's possible to reach such efficiency at manufacturing and heat dissipation. It means further progress, like the one we had until now, is possible. It seems that we currently are several orders of magnitude away from what human brains achieve.

Of course human flight doesn't use flapping wings nor do computers have to work 100% like brains. But they should at least be as efficient until we give up and say "no improvements are possible".

It's possible with organic chemistry, but what about inorganic chemistry? It's possible with carbon based chemistry, but what about silicon-based chemistry? I'm not convinced that it's impossible to build a human-mind-level consciousness in silicon, but I'm skeptical.

Human brains actually move real stuff around for their computation [1]. Like are like abacusses or some complex clock. Silicon based computers move electrons around which are much smaller and have much less weight. However, you might be right that silicon based computers won't allow further improvements.

So maybe one day we will build computers based on organic chemistry. If they are cheaper and more efficient and work as well as silicon based computers, there is certainly a case to build them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential

The fact that the brain exists says absolutely nothing about the future of chip manufacturing. It is on a completely different plane than Moore's law: neurons are only as small as .004mm at minimum. What you're suggesting isn't an improvement, it's starting over completely from scratch.

But just to humor you, today's best processors have a transistor density of roughly 25M transistors per mm^2. The human brain has a neuron density of 14K neurons per mm^3. And of course, the human brain has a volume 250x the average desktop processor.

What about sub-atomic particles? It sounds artificially limiting, academically speaking, to say that a single atom is as small as we can go.

yeah, after nanometers we've still got picometers, femtometers, attometers, angstrom, fermi ... lots of room before we hit planck! intel, get your shit together!

Human brains are the most efficient at some problems. This is trivial to demonstrate: try multiplying two 10 digit numbers in your head. Now pick up a calculator and do the same in a fraction of time, using a fraction of power, and with perfect accuracy.

Computers are better than humans at some problems but I'd argue that this is because they can use their available computational powress much better than human brains can, even if it's much less. Computers are still much worse at driving cars for example and their power consumption is a real problem. If you could have done more computations for the same power budget, or with a power budget of tens of kilowatts, the problem might be solvable.

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