Too Much Data Center

I was chatting with ChatGPT today and asking it why I (as a human) can operate on food, water and air and be so efficient at fueling a highly-complex intelligent existence vs. it taking tons of power and scale to just talk to me coherently. We got into ruminating on how biological limitation actually is beneficial in a lot of ways — our level of conscious attention is actually extremely small compared to all the inference our human perception is doing under the hood (subconsciously).

My favorite part of the exchange was this:

ChatGPT:

Maybe we’re trying to build minds by extracting the part that looks most obviously like computation—the neural network—and scaling it.

But evolution didn’t build a brain in a jar.

It built a self-maintaining creature with needs, placed it in an environment, gave it limited energy, made some conditions desirable and others dangerous, and let cognition emerge as part of solving the ongoing problem of being that creature.

Your intelligence may be efficient partly because you don’t process everything.

And you don’t process everything because you can’t afford to.

And because you can’t afford to, you must care about some things more than others.

And because some things matter more than others, you have attention.

And because attention is selective, experiences acquire salience.

And because salience affects memory, you develop a history that is uniquely yours.

And because that history shapes future selection…

…you get something resembling a self.

It also said “fuck” a lot during its impassioned reflection on biological efficiency. I was inspired.