Comment by jodrellblank

What does efficiency or finesse have to do with it? Motorocycles still exist despite needing a global supply chain and looking blocky and chunky. An intelligence that needs a datacenter and a multi-megawatt power supply could still exist.

> "average latency between compute regions goes up."

This Google'd article[1] says a brain could have 20mS of latency from front to back. We can ping over a hundred miles in that time with today's packet switched public networks, and light can travel 3,750 miles in that time. That's enough space to make a big 'brain' computer.

> "Then comes the problem of heat dispersion"

Biological brains have to stay alive, and have to be energy efficient because food can be scarce. Computers can be cooled with liquid nitrogen[2] without dying, or be under the ocean, in the Arctic, in space, even assuming a superintelligence couldn't come up with new architectures or new cooling methods. Infinite growth, or growth up to the upper bounds of theoretical physics is unlikely, I grant you that, but (assuming it can be done with computers at all) there seems to be a lot of room for a lot of growth.

[1] https://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/2023/03/09/understanding-the...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/overclocking-a-cpu-to-7-ghz-with-the...