Human thought moves at about 10 bits per second—roughly the pace of a conversation. (Scientific American article, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-brain-operates-at-a-stunningly-slow-pace/)
By contrast, our senses deliver about a billion bits per second, most of which the brain filters out before we’re even aware of it.
Experts such as athletes, musicians, and dancers can operate at higher apparent “bit rates.” Years of practice let them rely on muscle memory, freeing the conscious mind from making every decision. Measuring their bit rate is hard but a fast typist’s speed is easier—around 120 words per minute (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute).
Yet even these feats are glacial compared with computer speeds. As someone who has worked with software since the dawn of personal computing, I’m still amazed by the pace of new hardware. Modern graphics processors perform trillions of operations per second. (YouTube, https://youtu.be/pPStdjuYzSI?si=Y_F3v4GZ9kjuXPZj) — NVIDIA Cuda GPU)
It’s difficult to grasp speeds so far beyond human experience. One way is to scale computer operations to human time—for example, imagine if a computer’s cycle time was one-second then look at the resulting scaled up numbers; the delays between operations would stretch to centuries. A chart illustrates this for programmers:
(“Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know”, https://ifunny.co/picture/a-latency-numbers-every-programmer-should-know-it-is-hard-W47dciSK5?s=cl)
Another way is to see the speed in action. Watch these machines sorting and counting tiny objects at mind-bending rates:
• Sorting grapes at 45 mph with puffs of air (YouTube, https://youtu.be/xGdFpwVuPDM?si=Z7i1Kk5nD39LnuQ2)
• Counting small parts at high speed (YouTube, https://youtube.com/shorts/a23yuW0OAcY?si=wN5C03fNOuNlQZMO)
What does all this mean for us? Science fiction has long explored the possibilities:
• Using machines as powerful tools
• Combining humans with computer parts
• Fearing machines surpass us and take over
• Uploading our minds into simulations — (one mind one thumb drive).
• Debating Asimov’s Laws of Robotics
• And much more—an endlessly fertile area of speculation.
When you ask ChatGPT a question and it replies in seconds with pages of coherent text, you know it isn’t a person typing the answer. The results may not be perfect, but they are astonishing—especially when you realize they come from an algorithm predicting the next word.
Writing clearly is hard for me, but with AI’s help I can refine my ideas into something readable. For now, I count myself in the “tool user” category of AI.
(note: I like and use em dashes).
But the question remains:
How can we keep up—thinking at only 10 bits per second?