Abstract
We argue that the high energy use by present-day semiconductor computing
technology will prevent the emergence of an artificial intelligence
system that could reasonably be described as a “superintelligence”.
This hard limit on artificial superintelligence (ASI) emerges from the
energy requirements of a system that would be more intelligent but
orders of magnitude less efficient in energy use than human brains. An
ASI would have to supersede not only a single brain, but a large
population of humans, further multiplying the energy requirement. A
hypothetical ASI would likely consume orders of magnitude more energy
than what is available in industrialized society. We estimate the energy
use by ASI with an equation we term the ”Erasi equation”, for the
Energy Requirement for Artificial
SuperIntelligence. Additional efficiency consequences will
emerge from the current unfocussed and scattered developmental
trajectory of AI research. Taken together, these arguments suggest that
the emergence of an ASI is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future
based on current computer architectures, primarily due to energy
constraints, with biomimicry being a possible solution.