from Hacker News

The human mind is in a recession

by anjel on 2/17/25, 2:14 AM with 51 comments

  • by titanomachy on 2/17/25, 3:19 AM

    “ For all the talk of artificial intelligence, the most efficient computer on Earth remains the human brain. It can perform the same number of operations per second as the world’s supercomputers, but only requires power equivalent to a fridge lightbulb.”

    This is kind of like saying my cat can perform the same number of operations as a supercomputer, because he is full of neurons which do information processing. Sure, I guess. But the number of floating point operations I can do per second is a whole lot less than 1.

  • by anjel on 2/17/25, 2:14 AM

  • by nis0s on 2/17/25, 2:55 AM

    The human mind needs help in the form augmentation of its capabilities and capacity, but I am not convinced invasive implants are the way for two reasons: 1) you’ll need brain surgery every time you decide to change hardware for any reason, which will suck if you’re immunocompromised for any reason, which can also happen naturally as you age; 2) invasive hardware will be hard to remove at will.

    I think there are different ways to augment human cognition without implants, and these less invasive methods need to be considered first. One simple and tractable method which may be easy to implement, but hard to perfect, is to create a mechanism for offloading tasks as a learned “thought process” to any number of autonomous agents called on demand. If the system relies on vocalization, then it’s not different from voice assistants, whereas if it relies on multi-step prompting, then it’s not reducing the cognitive load of the person using it. There are various nuances even for this relatively simple concept, but I think it’s one of the more doable research quests.

  • by getnormality on 2/17/25, 2:52 AM

    Is there anything noteworthy in this article? It seems to be pure conventional wisdom. It could have been written by ChatGPT.

    Brain function is important to the economy? Not using your brain might make it less functional? No way, man. I'm spinning in my chair.

  • by Animats on 2/17/25, 5:25 AM

    There's also the concern that a bout of mild COVID costs about 3 IQ points.[1] The damage may be cumulative, but nobody seems to be following up on that, or tracking re-infection data, any more. What will this mean over 20 years?

    [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-i...

  • by xnx on 2/17/25, 2:37 PM

    Good opportunity to remember how fantastically amazing the human brain is: 86 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of other neurons, resulting in trillions of connections. Our most advanced research effort struggle to understand even a tiny scanned cube of it.

    The most complex structure we know of and we've all got one.

  • by bookofjoe on 2/18/25, 2:59 AM

  • by dysgenics9876 on 2/17/25, 2:37 AM

    yes but the main reason doesn't appear in the article