RE: A response to @mattclarke's Brilliant piece on Different Immortality Tickets

The amount of power and cooling required to create a computer even theoretically as powerful as the human brain would require gigawatts of power, megawatts of cooling, enough real estate for a small farm and enough water for a small town.

Thanks for sharing all this. I haven't spoke to George Gilder in over a year, but at that time he was working on his next book, Life after Silicon, where he said will delve into the fact that carbon-based computation (like goes on inside the human brain) dwarfs anything any non-organic 'machine' or machine-learning algorithm could ever produce (and power consumption per computational cycle is a huge part of that).

I have long agreed with Gilder's notion that computers and AI can never replace human intelligence and, as such, is not to be feared (at least on that basis).

Here is a clip where Gilder ends saying:

The human mind is the paramount manifestation of intelligence in the universe, and AI is just a machine that scarcely competes at all.

As I teach my students, there are two things humans are uniquely able to do, which machines will never be able to replace: judgment and creativity.

I define 'judgment' as the ability to make a rationally irrational decision. It's that point at which I decide to go against what all the 'historical data' would say is the 'best' or 'optimal' decision; however, that decision to go against what the 'data' say, is not merely randomly going against historical precedent -- it is rational.

I am rationally choosing to exercise my 'judgment' in contradiction to what the 'data' say I should do. Machines will never be able to perform that function (imho). If they ever ARE able to do that, then (and only then) they would merit the term 'artificial intelligence'.

Similarly, creativity involves knowing the boundary between merely being novel and being novel yet truly interesting and insightful. Machines can create something entirely 'new' but the machine cannot distinguish between whether something is 'new enough' to be considered artful or 'too new' to the point of being incoherent and chaotic. This is not to say that a machine cannot create something that humans might view as 'creative'. The problem is that the machine has no way of knowing or sensing whether it is being creative or merely chaotic.

As such, the human link to creativity can never be replaced by machines. Machines can be a 'tool' to help creative humans increase their creativity, by helping them push the boundaries and explore novelty at an accelerated pace, but the true act of creativity ultimately resides solely within the realm of the human mind.