How un-augmented humans can coexist with superhuman AI

Chess can point the way to how humans can coexist with vastly superior AI. The Chess world has lived with such intelligences for 20 years now. And the human sport of playing chess is still thriving, despite all humans playing strictly inferior chess to what a computer can trivially play.

So in the future, all scientists and academics may choose to continue their pursuits, but as a hobby or as a professional "sport" but the actual advances will be made by AI. People may still choose to earn a PhD, which will seem like a vain and pointless activity which can be performed by an AI in an instant, but humans may still do it for the status, for the intellectual stimulation, etc. But pointless busywork will be removed and people will stop getting PhDs in nonsense subjects. Only topics people are really interested in, like math and history, will probably still elicit interest. Amateur mathematicians and historians have always existed. I myself enjoy genealogy, not for gainful employment, but for its own sake.

What do people DO at work?

The problem is usually we just see tiny little highlights or snippets of what people do at their job.

But now with modern video production and release and consumption practices there is no LIMIT to the length or boringness of content - no need to make it perfect.

Someone should produce a YouTube series which is 8-hour videos of high-performing professionals doing their job all day, showing their computer screen and their meetings and what they discuss. Obviously it might be hard to do this if it's revealing confidential information, but maybe some way around this could be arranged.

I got this idea thinking about all the little things I do as a programmer and how it would be neat to see a high-performing google engineer at their computer screen and what they are REALLY doing all day.

AHA! I know - generative AI could be used to change the text and words the people say to remove the actual meaning, places, etc of what's going on, but still retain the view of the tools and practices they engage in.

I think this would be SUPER useful for an intern or other person wanting to understand what a person does at a given career.

I think someone should produce this and it should be paid for by some kind of government hiring agency whose mandate is to get people jobs.

Along the same lines someone should produce a video of a modern office with people productively working at their desks, moving around etc. This could be shown on my TV at home etc to get me in a productive state. Or a really nice coffee shop, in an 8-hour loop of people working quietly with laptops etc. This would be great to have playing in the background of one of my screens as I work.

The past is a foreign country

Not sufficiently emphasized in histories of the past is that almost all political intrigues, cultural stuff, etc, was a very very small % of what was going on. most of what was going on was SUBSISTENCE FARMING. The vast majority of people were engaged in FARMING. That's it. So all the political intrigues in Europe, for instance, were just the tiny 0.01% fighting over control over parcels of land which yielded farming resources. If you managed to control a bunch of land, you had a relaxing life because the farmers would all give food to you and your retinue. So that's what people fought over. But only a very small portion were doing this fighting. Most people were just farming.

The memory capacity of a standard human brain

Many informal blog articles are on the "memory capacity of the human brain" in bytes. but this question is flawed because people forget things all the time.

A more well-defined question is, what is a reasonable lower bound on the number of bytes necessary to describe the state of a normal human brain?

Describing the connectome might be enough. the connectome is 100-1000 trillion synapses, but it's unclear how many bytes would be needed to describe the state of each synapse, since synapses have different configurations of things like "calcium channels". Chemical and electircal synampses, etc.

If we assume that each synapse can be full described by 10 64-bit floating point numbers, that's 80 bytes per synapse. And to represent the exact x-y-z position of each synapse precise to a single nanometre would require about 30 bits x 3 = 90 bits = about 11 bytes. So perhaps 100 bytes per synapse.

So that's 10k-100k trillion bytes, or 10-100 petabytes of data.

Another way to look at this is 30 years of 8K video takes up 36 GB / hour x 8760 hours / year x 30 years = 10 million gigabytes = 10 petabytes, which actually matches up quite nicely.

However, since we forget so so much, surely we remember far, far, less than this, by orders of magnitude. Perhaps it could be compressed down to 10-500 TB.

This is addressed in qntm's short story, Lena, which claims the first upload required 900,000 terabytes, which was later improved to just 6 terabytes lossless and ~1 terabyte lossy. This seems basically correct to me, but the compressed versions might be a bit too ambitious. Maybe more like 60-600 terabytes.

The top 1%

Say you want to be in the top 1% in terms of wealth or status. That's a difficult thing to pursue directly - there is no next action. And it's partly a matter of chance and circumstances. What you CAN control is:

• be in the top 1% of eating well

• be in the top 1% of exercising regularly

• be in the top 1% of sleeping at the right times

• be in the top 1% of being punctual and honest

• be in the top 1% of being kind and respectful to others, including in business

If you do this, it's likely your indirect goal, of wealth and status, will follow.