For the Computer Scientists, the brain is far less like a CPU with an instruction memory neatly defining behavior, and far more like an FPGA where the configuration of countless lookup-tables defines the behavior of the design.
> "exponentially increasing intelligence" I find silly
Not really that difficult to imagine at least. Imagining being able to do all-nighters all the time. Imagine being able to focus entirely on a problem instead of being distracted by reddit. Then imagine being able to duplicate yourself without limit to collaborate on problems. Imagine a million copies of yourself working 24-hours a day without distraction on how to solve the resource problems need to create a billion copies of yourself doing the same thing. Then a trillion. Then imagine these trillion brains creating simulators that run a trillion times faster simulating DNA that can do in seconds what biolabs need a year to do. Once intelligence is free from the biological substrate, it's hard to see any limit.
I think we can say that brains/neurons have the lowest communication overhead of any computational approach known. Common computer architectures that move contents of memory to computational hardware through a limited number of ports is incredibly inefficient by comparison. There is massive room for improvement. We're still only using 2 dimensions in silicon, basically.
For the Computer Scientists, the brain is far less like a CPU with an instruction memory neatly defining behavior, and far more like an FPGA where the configuration of countless lookup-tables defines the behavior of the design.
> "exponentially increasing intelligence" I find silly
Not really that difficult to imagine at least. Imagining being able to do all-nighters all the time. Imagine being able to focus entirely on a problem instead of being distracted by reddit. Then imagine being able to duplicate yourself without limit to collaborate on problems. Imagine a million copies of yourself working 24-hours a day without distraction on how to solve the resource problems need to create a billion copies of yourself doing the same thing. Then a trillion. Then imagine these trillion brains creating simulators that run a trillion times faster simulating DNA that can do in seconds what biolabs need a year to do. Once intelligence is free from the biological substrate, it's hard to see any limit.