"The human body is an astonishing machine. The result of billions of years of evolution, it can build itself from a small child to a full-grown adult using only materials found lying around and shoved into its mouth. It's self-powering and self-repairing. At any given moment it is performing thousands of intricate miracles of chemical synthesis.

But there are plenty of jobs for which the human body is just completely outclassed by machines. A power drill, a quadcopter, and a minifridge are all cheap purchases that accomplish feats our bodies never could. Evolution never designed us to drill holes, fly, or keep things cold, so it's not surprising that we can't do those things, even though none of them are fundamentally difficult under the laws of physics.

We can tell a similar story regarding the human brain. An equally astonishing artifact, it consumes a fraction of the power of a laptop. Starting only with the information encoded in our DNA (well under one gigabyte), and substantially self-taught, it masters everything from fine motor skills to trigonometry. But of course it can't hold a candle to modern silicon at, for instance, arithmetic. The processor in a low-end smartphone can multiply more pairs of 1000-digit numbers in one second than a person would manage in their lifetime.

Fundamentally, there is nothing very difficult about multiplying 1000-digit numbers. You just need to multiply each pair of digits, and add the results. That's a total of a few million operations, each of which is so simple that it could be encoded in a handful of atoms and completed in a fraction of a nanosecond. A smartphone CPU, itself far from an optimal design for this task, can multiply two 1000-digit numbers using the energy content of roughly 0.00003 grams of fat - a droplet possibly too small to see. The same task would take you or me weeks, even ignoring the virtual certainty of mistakes. We suck at multiplication.

This shouldn't be surprising. There are no fundamental principles that make multiplication inherently challenging, but evolution didn't design us for the task."

more @

https://open.substack.com/pub/amistrongeryet

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Dogs and horses also make great adjuncts to humans.

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wavewatcher - >ww - >wavewatcher, again

I could love a car that is as smart as a horse, but will be totally creeped out if an AI produces a believable simulation of the emotional communication ability of a dog.

-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

it can build itself from a small child to a full-grown adult using only materials found lying around and shoved into its mouth.

I love the writing!

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I was right.