Vernor Vinge has died

And we don't know how many GPT-4 instances run on any single A100, or if it's the other way around and how many A100s are needed to run a single GPT-4 instance. We also don't know how many tokens/second any given instance produces, so multiple users may be (my guess is they are) queued on any given instance. We have a rough idea how many machines they have, but not how intensively they're being used.

> You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me.

You're double-counting. "If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second" = maximum synapse firing rate * fraction of cells active at any given moment, and the 200 is what you get from assuming it could go at 1000/second (they can) but only 20% are active at any given moment (a bit on the high side, but not by much).

Total = neurons * synapses/neuron * maximum synapse firing rate * fraction of cells active at any given moment * operations per synapse firing

1e11 * 1e3 * 1e3 Hz * 10% (of your brain in use at any given moment, where the similarly phrased misconception comes from) * 1 floating point operation = 1e16/second = 10 PFLOP

It currently looks like we need more than 1 floating point operation to simulate a synapse firing.

> The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring different things.

Things which may turn out to be important for e.g. Hebbian learning. We don't know what we don't know. Our brains are much more sample-efficient than our ANNs.

The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in Vernor Vinge's science fiction. It allows spherical volumes to be enclosed in complete stasis for controllable periods of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as a weapon, and in _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel through the Singularity unchanged.

As far as I know, the bobble is physically impossible. However it may be possible to simulate its effects with other technologies. Here I am especially interested in the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity.

Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Some people may have long term goals that might be disrupted by the Singularity, for example maintaining Danny Hillis's clock or keeping a record of humanity. Others may want to do it if the Singularity is approaching in an unacceptable manner and they are powerless to stop or alter it. For example an anarchist may want to escape a Singularity that is dominated by a single consciousness. A pacifist may want to escape a Singularity that is highly adversarial. Perhaps just the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity can ease people's fears about advanced technology in general.

Singularity tunneling seems to require a technology that can defend its comparatively powerless users against extremely, perhaps even unimaginably, powerful adversaries. The bobble of course is one such technology, but it is not practical. The only realistic technology that I am aware of that is even close to meeting this requirement is cryptography. In particular, given some complexity theoretic assumptions it is possible to achieve exponential security in certain restricted security models. Unfortunately these security models are not suitable for my purpose. While adversaries are allowed to have computational power that is exponential in the amount of computational power of the users, they can only interact with the users in very restricted ways, such as reading or modifying the messages they send to each other. It is unclear how to use cryptography to protect the users themselves instead of just their messages. Perhaps some sort of encrypted computation can hide their thought processes and internal states from passive monitors. But how does one protect against active physical attacks?

The reason I bring up cryptography, however, is to show that it IS possible to defend against adversaries with enormous resources at comparatively little cost, at least in certain situations. The Singularity tunneling problem should not be dismissed out of hand as being unsolvable, but rather deserves to be studied seriously. There is a very realistic chance that the Singularity may turn out to be undesirable to many of us. Perhaps it will be unstable and destroy all closely-coupled intelligence. Or maybe the only entity that emerges from it will have the "personality" of the Blight. It is important to be able to try again if the first Singularity turns out badly.

and: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jgz/aalwa_ask_any_lesswronger_anythi...

"I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes."

About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a single thing.

Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the series and the samples sound much better than the old one. But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I don’t think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one series.