[extropy-chat] Singularity Drugs

[Russell Wallace]

On 4/14/06, Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not necessarily. For example, one might imagine some sort of "tweak" which
> would enhance intelligence at the cost of dramatically increased energy
> consumption. Something like this would be selected against over the millenia
> of human evolution, as energy/food was generally hard to come by. In
> contemporary society however, energy/food is quite easy to get -- indeed, we
> have huge diet/exercise industries dedicated to trying to get people to
> consume less food or use more energy.
>

In principle, sure; the extreme case of this would be uploading to a digital
substrate that gives 1000-fold speedup by using 20 kilowatts of power
instead of 20 watts. My guess, for what it's worth, is that you won't get
any significant degree of that with a simple chemical tweak to the existing
hardware. (I remember reading that the mitochondria in the brain aren't far
from their limits already.)
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