[ExI] The Scientific Reason We Can’t Pause AI

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2026 at 5:14 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

* > Through a combination of persuasion, and mutual self-interest, the weak
> can influence the strong.*


*The clearest example of that would be the mother/child relationship which
is  hardwired in, yet even then it sometimes fails and mothers kill their
children; and if the child remained weak forever and never grew up, which
more closely resembles  the AI/human relationship, then I'm sure the rate
of infanticide would be much greater. *

>
* > For the foreseeable future, humanity's biggest competitive
> advantage against AI is the efficiency of its general intelligence.*



*That's certainly not what I see in the "foreseeable future". You're saying
the Humans have a hardware superiority in one specific area, but Human
hardware is fixed, computer hardware is not, so any superiority is going to
be ephemeral. It's still not as efficient as biology but in the last 50
years the energy needed for electronics to complete a calculation has
decreased by a factor of 10,000,000. It's true that the rate of improvement
has slowed down, before 2010 energy efficiency increased by a factor of 100
every decade, now it's only 16, but in almost every other area of endeavor
a 16x improvement in just a decade would be considered terrific. Today it
takes about 10^-14 Joules to make a calculation, but the Landauer
efficiency limit at room temperature **is 2.8*10^-21, so there is plenty of
room for improvement. And there's no reason electronics should always stay
at room temperature. *

*There are plenty of technologies waiting in the wings to radically
increase efficiency including Quantum Computing, Photonic Computing, 3D
packaging, Compute-In-Memory chips,  Reversible (Adiabatic) Computing, and
this one:*

*Superconducting Computing * <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQnY2WONwqE>


*> Energy efficiency plays an important but indirect role in
> determining which species wins the competition.*


*I think it would be more accurate to say it's energy availability not
energy efficiency that determines which species wins. Humans have only one
energy source, food. AI has hydroelectric, wind, oil, natural gas, nuclear,
and the entire sun.  *


*John K Clark*
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