Re:The Doomsday Invention
by Chathamization on Sunday December 13, 2015 @11:50PM
(#10729475)
The supercomputer that just simulated one second's worth of brain activity (K computer) cost $1.25 billion to design and build and $10 million a year to operate. Now, I don't have experience with supercomputers, but I doubt that you'd just be able to slap in some extra ram and get a big speed up.
It seems likely that the first simulated human level intelligences, at whatever point in the future they pop up, will at first be extremely costly and extremely slow. We don't really know if, say, connecting two supercomputers two simulate twice as many virtual neurons would make it more effective or if it would make it too unstable to do anything (how would a human brain with twice as many neurons react? It might just be mentally unstable and unproductive). But even a simple doubling experiment like that would probably take a long time to plan out and realize.
With an AI, you just dump that money directly into the brain by slapping on more compute power and storage. It'd be a direct increase in ability to its will. I'm not sure what exactly the raw costs would be (maybe it would still cost more than hiring a human), but at least it seems like it'd be a much more efficient use of each dollar.