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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

You're off by about three orders of magnitude.

A human consuming 2000 kcal/day (conservative estimate) uses about 2.32 kWh per day. Over 75 years, that's roughly 64,000 kWh.

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Oh, right i did a conversion wrong. Woops. In any case, a rounding error when talking about gigawatts of generation capacity

We're efficient once we have the energy, sure. How much energy does it take to go from raw sunlight to a calorie your body is actually able to use, and finally to your dinner table?

All of our food was alive before we ate it. All calories used by living things are efficient. Life is an end unto itself. It does not need to justify its existence by the moral code of technocrat materialism. The fact that this discussion is being had on this board in good faith is morally condemning of our worldview.

Since the original point of this chain was a comparison between the energy efficiency of biological vs machine learning, then we need to be trying to understand if the machine is more efficient than the human. You don't need to make some moral or philosophical argument about existential justification to accept that taking a more efficient approach is better, in that it generally enables more life for the same energy.

If the true, total cost of a machine to perform some task is less than a person to do the same task, then the machine should do it and the person should move to do what the machine cannot. This means more energy is available for everything else, living included.

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