this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Computer power doesn't scale infinitely, unless you mean building a world mind and powering if off of the spinning singularity at the center of the galaxy like a type 3 civilization, and that's sci-fi stuff. We still have to worry about bandwidth, power, cooling, coding and everything else that going into running a computer. It doesn't just "scale". There is a lot that goes into it, and it does have a ceiling. Quantum computing may alleviate some of that, but I'll hold my applause until we see some useful real world applications for it.
Furthermore, we still don't understand how the mind works, yet. There are still secrets to unlock and ways to potentially augment and improve it. AI is great, and I fully support the advancement in technology, but don't count out humans so quickly. We haven't even gotten close to human level intelligence and GOFAI, and maybe we never will.
As I said that answer seems incredibly arrogant in the face of evolutionary pressure and logarithmic growth.
The laws of physics still apply. We already have to do all kinds of crazy tricks to make transistors as small as they are and not leak electrons all over the place due to quantum tunneling. The best thing we figured out how to do is just pile on more CPU/GPU cores.
It's also arrogant to assume we will continue on this exponential industrial-revolution growth of the last 300 years and not plateau as a species again for the next thousand. We could be looking at an eon of just burnin' away our oil while we try to cling more and more to whatever other energy impinges on this pitiful little planet, trapped in our local space unable to use our pathetic spacecraft to push us any further.
The laws of physics are no less or more applicable to our own biology in terms of complexity, density, scale, and information capacity and in most ways is far less efficient and accurate than their silicon counterparts.
There is nothing to suggest the growth in computer intelligence is going to stop occurring or it's doing anything but just getting started.