> It’s not at all, energy is a hard constraint to capability.
We can put a lot more power flux through an AI than a human body can live through; both because computers can run hot enough to cook us, and because they can be physically distributed in ways that we can't survive.
That doesn't mean there's no constraint, it's just that the extent to which there is a constraint, the constraint is way, way above what humans can consume directly.
Also, electricity is much cheaper than humans. To give a worked example, consider that the UN poverty threshold* is about US$2.15/day in 2022 money, or just under 9¢/hour. My first Google search result for "average cost of electricity in the usa" says "16.54 cents per kWh", which means the UN poverty threshold human lives on a price equivalent ~= just under 542 watts of average American electricity.
The actual power consumption of a human is 2000-2500 kcal/day ~= 96.85-121.1 watts ~= about a fifth of that. In certain narrow domains, AI already makes human labour uneconomic… though fortunately for the ongoing payment of bills, it's currently only that combination of good-and-cheap in narrow domains, not generally.
* I use this standard so nobody suggests outsourcing somewhere cheaper.
We can put a lot more power flux through an AI than a human body can live through; both because computers can run hot enough to cook us, and because they can be physically distributed in ways that we can't survive.
That doesn't mean there's no constraint, it's just that the extent to which there is a constraint, the constraint is way, way above what humans can consume directly.
Also, electricity is much cheaper than humans. To give a worked example, consider that the UN poverty threshold* is about US$2.15/day in 2022 money, or just under 9¢/hour. My first Google search result for "average cost of electricity in the usa" says "16.54 cents per kWh", which means the UN poverty threshold human lives on a price equivalent ~= just under 542 watts of average American electricity.
The actual power consumption of a human is 2000-2500 kcal/day ~= 96.85-121.1 watts ~= about a fifth of that. In certain narrow domains, AI already makes human labour uneconomic… though fortunately for the ongoing payment of bills, it's currently only that combination of good-and-cheap in narrow domains, not generally.
* I use this standard so nobody suggests outsourcing somewhere cheaper.