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Mahdi Dibaiee 2022-11-15 15:58:07 +00:00
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_bibliography/references.bib
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@ -519,3 +519,17 @@
year={2012},
url="http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph240/khan1/"
}
@article{hummingbird,
title={What Happens When You Put a Hummingbird in a Wind Tunnel?},
author={Sadiq, Sheraz},
year={2015},
url="https://www.kqed.org/science/28759/what-happens-when-you-put-a-hummingbird-in-a-wind-tunnel"
}
@article{rotman2020we,
title={We’re not prepared for the end of Moore’s Law},
author={Rotman, David},
journal={MIT Technology Review},
year={2020}
}

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_posts/2022-11-15-animals-and-machines.md
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---
layout: post
title: "Animals and Machines: A Misled Comparison"
title: "On Efficiency of Animals and Machines"
subtitle: "I find comparing animals and machines absurd"
date: 2022-11-13 00:00:00
permalink: animals-and-machines/
categories: personal, science
published: false
math: true
author: Mahdi
---
@ -98,10 +97,59 @@ a good human artist, and it sure is not as efficient as a human. I think to say
AI is smarter than humans in any subject, must take into account the efficiency
of the system as well.
Moreover, Stable Diffusion is only capable of doing one thing, a very narrow and
focused task: given text, output images. I'm not dismissing the complexity of
this task, but it is still a narrow task. Every being's world lends it with
innumerable affordances, and an animal surviving in the world has to be able to solve
a lot more problems, and yet, the animal is an order of magnitude more efficient
at using its faculties to survive. Stable Diffusion focuses on one task, and is
extremely energy-inefficient at solving that.
## Hummingbird
My favourite example when it comes to comparing animals and machines, is the
tiny hummingbird, which I think is more impressive than any machine made by
humans, let me explain!
humans.
Hummingbirds can range from as small as 5 centimeters weighing 2 grams up to 23
centimeters and weighing 18 - 24 grams. They can flap their wings 12 times per
second in larger species and around 80 times per second in smaller species.
Some hummingbirds can fly up to 54 kilometers per hour in wind tunnels!
Now these tiny little birds are experts at hovering in the air, and keeping
their long beaks stable while sucking nectar from flowers, and when I say
expert, I mean it! Look at this video of a hummingbird keeping itself stable
while being blown with a 32km/h wind, and I remind you, the
bird itself weighs only a few grams, but can hold itself stable against such
wind!
<iframe class="centered" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JyqY64ovjfY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
How efficient are hummingbirds? In a sense, they actually have the highest
metabolism of any warm-blooded animal, so they end up consuming their own body
weight in nectar every single day {% cite hummingbird %}, but on the other hand,
if we consider human-made machines, can we build any kind of machine with our
current understanding and technology that weighs only a few grams, can hold
itself stable in winds as fast as 32km/h, mates with its own species to produce
offsprings, and only consumes a few grams of flower nectar per day? I'm still
over-simplifying the hummingbird by naming a few actions it takes, but in
reality of course, the animal is much more complex and does a lot more than
this.
# Conclusion
I think comparing such marvels of efficiency with machines is
absurd. We don't come close to making something as efficient and intelligent as
animals with such complexity, and our _intelligent_ tools are only intelligent in a narrow manner, all the while
consuming energy that could feed an animal for _years_ to do what they do.
Our current approach of computation does not seem to lend itself
to such order-of-magnitude efficiency contrast. Moore's Law does not apply
anymore {% cite rotman2020we %} and I don't see us improving CPU efficiency in a
significant manner that brings us closer to biological efficiency of animal
cognition without a breakthrough in the underlying technology and model we use
for computation and cognition.
# References
{% bibliography --cited %}