  Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that
give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? This report
will review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of
the methods of estimating brain emulation energy requirements. Turning to AI,
there are reasons to believe the energy requirements for de novo AI to have
little correlation with brain (emulation) energy requirements since cost could
depend merely of the cost of processing higher-level representations rather
than billions of neural firings. Unless one thinks the human way of thinking is
the most optimal or most easily implementable way of achieving software
intelligence, we should expect de novo AI to make use of different, potentially
very compressed and fast, processes.
