[posnet]

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

[gary17the]

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB).

[AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025".

Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human brains.

Astonishing.

[dekhn]

One point about storage- it's economically driven. If there was a demand signal (say, the government dedicated a few hundred billion dollars to a single storage systems), hard drive manufacturers could deploy much more storage in a year. I've pointed this out to a number of scientists, but none of them could really think of a way to get the government to spend that much money just to store data without it curing a senator's heart disease.

[falcor84]

I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scanning, but once we do, we may likely discover that a huge portion of it is redundant.

In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade. Lena [0] tells of the first successfully uploaded scan taking place in 2031, and I'm concerned that reality won't be far off.

[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

[ibeforee]

We don’t know to even model that state: do we need the position and velocity and charge of every atom, or can a neuron be approximated by a bfloat?

[shpx]

If you can preserve and scan the tissue in a way that lets you scan the same area multiple times you wouldn't need to digitize the whole thing. Put the slices on rotating platters with a microscope for each platter and read parts of the brain on demand. It's a hard drive but instead of magnets storing the bits of an image of the sample, it's the actual physical sample.

[treprinum]

AI folks dream about creating superintelligence to guide our lives but all we can do is drosophilla's brain.

[userbinator]

It's very lossy and unreliable storage, however. To use an analogy, it's only a huge amount of ECC that keeps things (just barely) working.

[bahrant]

wow