As I jog at sunrise each day, I am reminded that we should not take nature for granted. Our illusion of superiority relative to nature is unwarranted.
Even though birds knew long ago how to fly by flapping their wings, starting with the Archaeopteryx lithographica 150 million years ago, the Wright Brothers accomplished the first powered human flight in 1903, just 120 years ago — the last percent of a percent of human history.
The latest technology that we boast about is artificial intelligence (AI) of Large Language Models (LLMs). But training a single LLM like ChatGPT-3, consumes a power of up to 10 gigawatt-hour (GWh), equivalent to the yearly electricity consumption of over 1,000 U.S. households. For comparison, the human brain operates on a power budget of about 12 watts, an order of magnitude lower than a typical desktop or a common light bulb. Instead of the giant computer rooms used to operate LLMs, the human brain is stored in a compact enclosure, limited by the physical scale of the birth canal during delivery.
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