Communication between highly parallelized processes is actually not as easy as one might think; in fact, it's a major area of research in the field of supercomputing.
Also, computer clock speeds may be considerably faster than the rate at which neurons fire, but that doesn't mean that computers are inherently faster. One clock cycle is the time is takes a processor to execute one basic instruction, but the brain does many things within a handful of neuron firings that would take a huge number of instructions for a computer to do (one of the best examples is the way brains can just casually ignore all the unnecessary sensory information flowing in while focusing on something specific, as you're doing now by reading only this line of text and ignoring the surrounding environment, which is a feat no AI can perform even given considerably more time to do so). So it is by no means certain that a superhuman AI, if we were to create one, would necessarily be able to operate at a higher speed than ordinary people--indeed, such an achievement would be far more than just an incremental improvement.
More important than those points, though, is the fact that the field is nowhere near reaching such a milestone. What we have is a bunch of task-specific algorithms that are beginning to outperform humans at their highly specialized tasks (playing Go, for instance), but there is no AI that can possibly perform a basic task that any human can perform that requires any generalized cognitive capabilities (for example, if I show you a picture of a man holding a fish and looking triumphant, you would know that there's water nearby, but to my knowledge no computer can make that deduction).
If you look at modern CAPTCHAs (CAPTCHA stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"), you'll notice that they involve identifying pictures that contain specific objects whose forms vary widely but are always easily recognizable to humans. So even basic object recognition remains a considerable challenge for modern AIs, let alone drawing associations between the recognized objects and other areas of knowledge, even though both are tasks which are absolutely trivial for a human brain. That should give you an idea of how far we are from anything resembling artificial general intelligence.
I’m aware that current ‘AI’ is overrated and we are no where near the knowledge or computational power required to make a general AI. I was responding to the idea that having an AI as smart as a human would be no big deal, because once it exists, it can be speed up as computational power allows (maybe depending on ability to parallelise the AI program) and it’s thought processes parallelised. If that’s not possible it can still duplicated and collaborate.
Communication between highly parallelized processes is actually not as easy as one might think; in fact, it's a major area of research in the field of supercomputing.
Also, computer clock speeds may be considerably faster than the rate at which neurons fire, but that doesn't mean that computers are inherently faster. One clock cycle is the time is takes a processor to execute one basic instruction, but the brain does many things within a handful of neuron firings that would take a huge number of instructions for a computer to do (one of the best examples is the way brains can just casually ignore all the unnecessary sensory information flowing in while focusing on something specific, as you're doing now by reading only this line of text and ignoring the surrounding environment, which is a feat no AI can perform even given considerably more time to do so). So it is by no means certain that a superhuman AI, if we were to create one, would necessarily be able to operate at a higher speed than ordinary people--indeed, such an achievement would be far more than just an incremental improvement.
More important than those points, though, is the fact that the field is nowhere near reaching such a milestone. What we have is a bunch of task-specific algorithms that are beginning to outperform humans at their highly specialized tasks (playing Go, for instance), but there is no AI that can possibly perform a basic task that any human can perform that requires any generalized cognitive capabilities (for example, if I show you a picture of a man holding a fish and looking triumphant, you would know that there's water nearby, but to my knowledge no computer can make that deduction).
If you look at modern CAPTCHAs (CAPTCHA stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"), you'll notice that they involve identifying pictures that contain specific objects whose forms vary widely but are always easily recognizable to humans. So even basic object recognition remains a considerable challenge for modern AIs, let alone drawing associations between the recognized objects and other areas of knowledge, even though both are tasks which are absolutely trivial for a human brain. That should give you an idea of how far we are from anything resembling artificial general intelligence.
I’m aware that current ‘AI’ is overrated and we are no where near the knowledge or computational power required to make a general AI. I was responding to the idea that having an AI as smart as a human would be no big deal, because once it exists, it can be speed up as computational power allows (maybe depending on ability to parallelise the AI program) and it’s thought processes parallelised. If that’s not possible it can still duplicated and collaborate.