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Mechanistic method estimates suggesting that 10 13-10 17 FLOP/s is enough to match the human brain’s task-performance seem plausible to me.

The science here is very far from settled.įor those open to speculation, though, here’s a summary of what I’m taking away from the investigation: They are back-of-the-envelope calculations, offered alongside initial discussion of complications and objections. See the conclusion for a list that describes them in more detail, and summarizes my evaluation of each. Here are some of the numbers these methods produce, plotted alongside the FLOP/s capacity of some current computers.įigure 1: The report’s main estimates.

But if sound, these methods would provide evidence that certain budgets are, at least, big enough ( if you had the right software, which may be very hard to create – see discussion in section 1.3). None of these methods are direct guides to the minimum possible FLOP/s budget, as the most efficient ways of performing tasks need not resemble the brain’s ways, or those of current artificial systems. Use the communication bandwidth in the brain as evidence about its computational capacity (the “ communication method”).Use the brain’s energy budget, together with physical limits set by Landauer’s principle, to upper-bound required FLOP/s (the “ limit method”).Identify a portion of the brain whose function we can already approximate with artificial systems, and then scale up to a FLOP/s estimate for the whole brain (the “ functional method”).Estimate the FLOP/s required to model the brain’s mechanisms at a level of detail adequate to replicate task-performance (the “ mechanistic method”).I consulted with more than 30 experts, and considered four methods of generating estimates, focusing on floating point operations per second (FLOP/s) as a metric of computational power. How powerful is sufficiently powerful? I investigated what we can learn from the brain about this.

Let’s grant that in principle, sufficiently powerful computers can perform any cognitive task that the human brain can.