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Notes -
I have indeed read it, but thank you for the deep dive into the energy expenditures!
It makes sense that mammalian brains are optimizing for low energy expenditure, brains are pound for pound the most expensive tissue to lug around, and space isn't nearly at as much of a premium as in birds.
I think that there's still room for more energy expenditure, the base human brain uses 20 watts, and while I have no firm figures on how much cooling capacity is left in reserve afterwards, I suspect you could ramp it up a significant amount without deleterious effect.
That's just saying that the constraints aren't so tight in the modern environment with abundance of calories, I agree that AIs share very little of said restriction.
5 watts per kg seems to be pretty close to the maximum power output well-trained humans can output for a full hour, so that suggests that a 70 kg human has at least 350 watts of sustained cooling capacity.
Based on sweat production of 2L per hour, that gives an estimate of closer to ~1kW of sustained cooling capacity for an entire human
Bloodflow to the brain is about 45L / h, and brains tolerate temperature ranges of 3-4ºC, so working backwards from that we get that a 160W brain would reach temperatures of about 3ºC higher than arterial blood assuming that arterial bloodflow was the primary heat remover. Probably add in 20-100 watts to account for sweat dissipation on the head. And also the carotid artery is less than a cm in diameter, so bloodflow to the brain could probably be substantially increased if there were evolutionary pressure in that direction.
So yeah, I concur that you could probably squeeze about one more order of magnitude of brain performance out of something roughly human-shaped, if you were not energy constrained (two orders of magnitude would definitely be a stretch for something non-aquatic though).
Thank you for running the numbers again!
I don't think such drastic modification of human cognition will be feasible before an AI singularity shows up, but it's still somewhat reassuring to know that should that not work out, we can still drag our cranial volume kicking and screaming to the power draw of a mid-range GPU haha.
Maybe post your calculations on LessWrong? I don't think anyone has done that particular one before!
Good call
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