Some back of the envelope style calculations:
You have 10 billion nerve cells in your brain, with an average of 10,000 synapses per nerve cell. Each of these fires about 100 times a second, within an order of magnitude. If each firing carries one bit of information, this puts the bandwidth of your brain to around 10 quadrillion bits every second or about a petabyte per second.
Compare that to the bandwidth of the internet, which in 2004 was a mere 4,200 petabytes per year, or just 141 gigabytes/second. That is, in 2004, the amount of data transferred on the entire internet is just 0.0135% the bandwidth going on in an average person.
If we're being extremely optimistic and assuming that the internet will double its bandwidth every year, then it will take roughly 13 years for the internet to reach the bandwidth of a single human brain, and another 35-ish years to reach the thinking power of the world's population.
These calculations aren't entirely fair (not to mention horribly inexact) for a lot of reasons. In particular, there is a lot of error in both directions: the internet isn't going to grow that fast, and the human brain has a lot of redundancy. Regardless, fun talking point.
1 comment:
Some people think each firing is >1 bit because information is encoded in the shape of the spike.
It's nice that numbers about the internet are more exact.
What about if you look at all the bandwidth inside computers on the internet too? Say there's important information travelling between cpu <-> storage.
My computer's "pv" program thinks it can read from the hard drive at 50 MB/sec. If I pipe through a "tr" command that presumably forces the data to flow through the CPU, I get 10 MB/sec.
If there were only 1 million computers on the internet in 2004 that's 70 times more bandwidth than that 140gb/sec on the internet. Still way less than the your human brain numbers.
Does this local within-machine bandwidth contribute to overall information processing capability? It's not densely connected with many other nodes like internet machines potentially are. So no automatic skynet AI from that. But if I was a skynet-like entity i would leverage this information processing resource a lot.
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