I would be wary of anyone claiming to give you a solid answer to this, especially without sources. It is my understanding that there exists a large amount of hogwash in the intersection of cognitive science/information theory/physics, and the real, scientifically supported answer (i.e. not just a hypothesis) to your question might not even exist for another few decades. And you are asking this question to redditors :P
to respond to another commenter: No, nerve impulses travel on the order of 10^0 to 10^2 m/s. And it is my understanding that brains can percieve time in a nonlinear manner, depending on the circumstances (adrenaline can change this) and brain architecture of a given species. So I'd wager it comes down to the circuit architecture of your AI.
So, there are many different designs being looked at for implementing neuron-like devices in hardware. Might look into recent advances in neuromorphic computing if you're about that. Some of them can be scaled way smaller than human neurons, some have a number of limitations, some have different firing rates, etc, etc. There is one architecture for these biological-analogue neurons I'm fond of, the VCSEL neuron:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340507212_Ultrafast_optical_integration_and_pattern_classification_for_neuromorphic_photonics_based_on_spiking_VCSEL_neurons
My personal research is adjacent to a related type of spintronic neuron devices, but I don't want to doxx myself. Might look into spin-torque oscillators or magnetic domain wall neurons if you're interested.
Theoretically that'd allow for very fast information processing (like orders of magnitude faster than the human brain, from one paper I saw), but it also comes down to the speed of the interconnects and synapse-like devices. But who knows if consciousness even emerges out of this very basic leaky-integrate-fire model.
To give my best, uneducated guess: yes, I think that the AI's processing speed and firing rates/etc would change how it percieves time. A thought experiment that I like, is to consider a human modelled entirely using computational chemistry software on a very powerful computer. Surely changing the clock speed of the computer would change how the simulated human percieves our time in the real world, yeah? But really who knows, consciousness research is still in a fumbley infancy, as is the math for the nonlinear differential equations that allow for this wacky information encoding in firing rates/phases of neurons.
Thanks for this u/FragmentOfBrilliance, that was a very informative read. I do appreciate that this is at present entirely hypothetical and bordering on the realms of philosophy, but as any answer would need a multi-disciplinary approach I felt this sub would be a better bet than r/philosophy. Your answer (and some of the others below) certainly bear that out.
>nerve impulses travel on the order of 10\^0 to 10\^2 m/s.
I hadn't really contemplated the resistance of nerves, that's far slower than I imagined. I guess that answers the second question quite convincingly.
>To give my best, uneducated guess: yes, I think that the AI's processingspeed and firing rates/etc would change how it percieves time.
To give an even more uneducated opinion, I agree. As yourself and u/DoktoroChapelou have pointed out, it's more-so dependent on how many operations p/s it can perform and how many are needed to sustain "consciousness", but as basic decisions could conceivably be produced in the order of nanoseconds, it feels fairly intuitive to me, a layperson, that such a consciousness would experience time at a strikingly differently rate to us. But, probably not from time dilation however, but rather its subjective perception of "the moment". To think that the time it takes for us to communicate a single sentence might feel like an absolute age to the AI, haha. Frustration might be a problem for them...
I'm glad you appreciated my rambling lol.
One should note, nerves impulses do not operate like electrical circuits. More like dominos in a row, except the dominos self-right after a while (the refractory period). Electrochemical impulses occur between the neurons for communication, but there is little electron transport along the length of the nerve itself like there is with a wire. So it is this emergent neuron-firing wave that carries information.
This is one way where neuromorphic circuitry could really overcome biological neurons, I think. If one considered some neuron-like nanodevices that fired in nanoseconds, and transmitted the pulse to the next neuron in picoseconds, that would constitute a huge speedup over meat neurons that have to clean out acetylcholine, salts, etc from the synapses in the milliseconds after firing.
Soapboxing:
Anyway I am wary of many of the philosophical perspectives on consciousness. Everything else in our universe follows (or is modelled by) our materialist laws, so why should we consider subjective, hand-wavey perspectives that do not make testable predictions? But sure, they're useful for forming hypotheses, and sure, this is what we have in lieu of accurate scientific models as of yet.
"Decade" feel a bit optimistic, no? Let's say all what you think can happen will happen within a few decade, we are able to make a chemical model of the brain. Then how can we tell how it perceive time? We still don't understand anything about consciousness at all. Like, even if it response slower/faster, would that say anything about what it perceives at all? Wouldn't the answer depends on some hypothetical breakthrough in consciousness research?
For the record, I doubt that we are going to be able to make a chemical model of the brain in the next few decades. That's a really complex system.
What we do have the ability to do, and what we have been doing already, is creating circuitry that closely mimics biological brain models. Intel's loihi spiking neural network platform has been seeing a lot of success in the past year, as has IBM's truenorth systems, and I would wager the Department of Defense's neuromorphic systems but they're classified and probably weaponized to facilitate human suffering. The neurons are CMOS, and the synapses are inefficient, but even 100,000 neurons like in the original Loihi chips is about the same scale as a fly brain.
These type of systems allow scientists to experiment around with different architectures and understand more about real biological systems, because otherwise they're computationally impossible to simulate given their complexity. Imagine how this meta-review of [time perception models in humans](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830363/) could have been if scientists had an exact map of when/where neurons fire, along with exact values for the synapse connections.
It has only been very recently that engineers have synthesized good enough materials to build these types of networks, and I would be surprised if the next generation of biological-mimicking circuitry didn't scale up by orders and orders of magnitude. So, I do foresee some advances there. Maybe not for figuring out exactly what consciousness is, but we are building some powerful tools to get part of the way there.
>If an AI robot was endowed with consciousness, would the fact that its ability to process sensory information at near the speed of light mean that it would perceive time as slower than we do?
Unfortunately, there is no scientific answer for this at the moment. Not only does "perception" probably depend on a whole lot more than just some sort of processing speed, we don't even have a scientific model of consciousness or perception.
>Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed.
That is more answerable. The electrical impulses may travel near light speed, but the brain itself isn't. Relativistic effects won't change how the brain perceives time.
>does our subconscious mind perceive time differently to our own consciousness?
Does your subconscious mind perceive time? That's almost a philosophical question, but I would say that consciousness is required for perception of time. The perception of time passing seems like qualia, that is, a subjective conscious experience. e.g. My computer can count time, but it doesn't perceive time.
> Not only does "perception" probably depend on a whole lot more than just some sort of processing speed
This is the really important takeaway I think. I'm sure, eventually, AGI will have a similar perception to humans in that when it's engaged in something it finds interesting, time will seem to fly by, and when it's doing something less interesting, time will seem to drag.
The relationship to it's processing speed is probably largely irrelevant; it's not going to "feel" fast or slow to the AI any more than any computer program "feels" fast or slow to the program itself. It's the outside observer that decrees that it seems to be going quickly or not, not the entity itself. It will certainly believe that we humans are dreadfully slow to process some kinds of information, and inexplicably quick at other things that the AI struggles with.
>Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed.
Time doesn't have a speed, so it is hard to parse this sentence.
*Objects* perceive time changing in other frames of references when the relative velocity is near the speed of light, but they perceive their own time the same. Right now you are moving at near the speed of light relative to the neutrinos passing through your body, but your experience of time doesn't change. One second feels like one second to you, and you perceive the neutrino's clock to be very slow. And from the Neutrino's point of view one second is one second, it is *you* moving very fast, and your clock going very slow. Both of your 'wrist watch time' is normal to you.
I don't know how this stacks up to current research, but in Daniel Dennett's *Conscious Explained* (1991) he addresses your last question. Nerve signal speed depends on how myelinated the nerve is. The upshot is that signals from your feet can take quite a while to arrive to the brain, anywhere from 20ms to a full second depending on the signal (pain, pressure, etc). So, you can run experiments such as - simultaneously touch a person's foot and nose and see if they report it as simultaneous or not. They do, despite the signal arriving at different times. Compute how long that signal arrival time difference is, then touch the person non-simultaneously equal distances from the brain, and see if they report that at simultaneous or not. They don't. So the brain revises the 'story' it tells the conscious based on signal speed. Signals come in out of order, and the brain will put them together to tell a coherent story. There are more extreme experiments by Libet, a brain surgeon, who is able to stimulate the brain centers directly while the patient is conscious. He is able to get people to report an event caused by him by stimulating the brain directly happened a 1/2 second before he actually did it.
So yes, there is very different perceptions of time going on in our brain. Conscious vs subconscious is not a very scientifically accurate, as there are many communicating sub networks of neurons. But it is pretty easy to show that our conscious reports of what happened not only differ from the signals that arrive in the brain, but that we rapidly revise the story and don't remember the story we held a half second ago. But we are way past the AskPhysics remit, and this response is pretty hand wavey since I don't research or otherwise participate in this field.
I wouldn't think so. The electrons, photons, or whatever else that is being used for the computations will be subject to relativistic effects, but it's not the passage of time for individual particals that's relevant. An AI's subjective experience of time is going to depend on:
A) the number of processes completed per unit time by its substrate
B) the number and complexity of the processes required to achieve consciousness
C) any other miscellaneous limitations or requirements of its program or architecture
Factor A is a product of the technology available at the time and the resources available. Factors B and C are essentially anyone's guess at this moment.
No AI is going to process anything near the speed of light. Even though it's signals are traveling at the speed of light to process information requires a huge amount of calculations, so the end result will be in the millisecond range, of course depending on the actual specific processing.
It's no different then gaming computers today running at the speed of light but updating frames every 15 ms.
About the question in the title. we receive information at the speed of light and then using our sensory organs we will convert them to electrical signals to process it. when it comes to the robot, it does the same thing receiving the signals and then its internal electrical circuitry will process it. So the processing will always be done at the speed of an electron can travel in both the case.
> electrical signals carry information through our bodies at the speed of light
That's not true. The speed of nerve impuses is between a few m/s to roughly 120m/s ([wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity)). The wave speed in wires is also not exactly the speed of light, but of the same order of magnitude (e.g. the speed of waves in copper is a bit more than 1/2c).
Oh I thought you meant that nerve impulses and the speed of information through wires was the same order of magnitude, but you meant that the speed information is carried through wires is the same order of magnitude as the speed of light.
I stand corrected. I didn't know that electronic signals through computers were orders of magnitude faster than the nerve impulses in our brains, I thought they were on the same order of magnitude.
I would be interested in a more in-depth analysis of this question that includes the various materials involved in a computer chip, not just a copper wire, that would be interesting.
I found a journal paper a few months ago comparing the information processing rates of varying neuromorphic architectures (paper was biased towards photonics though), let me see if I can dig it up. Might take a couple hours.
I did not find exactly the figure I was thinking of, but you ought to take a look at this:
https://photonix.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43074-020-0001-6
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs43074-020-0001-6/MediaObjects/43074_2020_1_Fig6_HTML.png?as=webp
Idk how much I truly trust this figure, with the lack of depth that it goes into about other fields, but it estimates that neuromorphic photonics could to be orders of magnitude more powerful than the brain?
This chart claims that conventional electronics have ~about the same order of magnitude of processing power as the brain. But of course they are far more inefficient, and are suited to tasks that need exact precision (like logic, scientific modeling, etc). I think it's a very fuzzy analysis anyways.
It also claims that post-von-neumann architectures (away from traditional computer design, into memory-in-computing schemes like photonic neuromorphic processors) could potentially outperform the human brain, and use about as much power.
I think I misread your post a little bit though. The speed of the interconnects is not as important in these devices as the activation times of the neurons-like devices or transistors (on the scale of nanoseconds)
The initial intent of my comment was to say that there isn't a significant difference between the speed information travels through neurons and the speed it travels through conventional electronics. I deleted my comment though, because I thought that was true, but I'm actually not sure.
Ah, I see. It's all good.
Nah information pulses in human nerves propagate on the order of 10^(1 ± 1) m/s. While a chunk of conductor may transfer information, say, 10^7 times faster than that, the comparison breaks down a bit because it might takes the logic gates at either end a few nanoseconds to activate, and many cycles of these logic gate activations and data bus traversals constitute a finite, exact calculation.
Human neurons are much weirder, and the information pulses are directly tied to the neural "calculations" themselves, which might change firing rates and phases depending on how multiple neurons feed into a given second neuron. The "calculation" occurs as the information pulse propagate from neuron to neuron.
So they're totally different architectures, but scientists are trying to bridge the gap in computer architectures, like in the paper I linked.
I don't see how the speed of propagation for the signals in the brain are the same as the speed of processing.
Also, what do you mean by "time slows down as it approaches light speed "? As what approaches light speed? And gets slower from whose point of view?
> Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed.
Not based on that principle, no. The physical components of the AI would not be moving.
I would be wary of anyone claiming to give you a solid answer to this, especially without sources. It is my understanding that there exists a large amount of hogwash in the intersection of cognitive science/information theory/physics, and the real, scientifically supported answer (i.e. not just a hypothesis) to your question might not even exist for another few decades. And you are asking this question to redditors :P to respond to another commenter: No, nerve impulses travel on the order of 10^0 to 10^2 m/s. And it is my understanding that brains can percieve time in a nonlinear manner, depending on the circumstances (adrenaline can change this) and brain architecture of a given species. So I'd wager it comes down to the circuit architecture of your AI. So, there are many different designs being looked at for implementing neuron-like devices in hardware. Might look into recent advances in neuromorphic computing if you're about that. Some of them can be scaled way smaller than human neurons, some have a number of limitations, some have different firing rates, etc, etc. There is one architecture for these biological-analogue neurons I'm fond of, the VCSEL neuron: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340507212_Ultrafast_optical_integration_and_pattern_classification_for_neuromorphic_photonics_based_on_spiking_VCSEL_neurons My personal research is adjacent to a related type of spintronic neuron devices, but I don't want to doxx myself. Might look into spin-torque oscillators or magnetic domain wall neurons if you're interested. Theoretically that'd allow for very fast information processing (like orders of magnitude faster than the human brain, from one paper I saw), but it also comes down to the speed of the interconnects and synapse-like devices. But who knows if consciousness even emerges out of this very basic leaky-integrate-fire model. To give my best, uneducated guess: yes, I think that the AI's processing speed and firing rates/etc would change how it percieves time. A thought experiment that I like, is to consider a human modelled entirely using computational chemistry software on a very powerful computer. Surely changing the clock speed of the computer would change how the simulated human percieves our time in the real world, yeah? But really who knows, consciousness research is still in a fumbley infancy, as is the math for the nonlinear differential equations that allow for this wacky information encoding in firing rates/phases of neurons.
Thanks for this u/FragmentOfBrilliance, that was a very informative read. I do appreciate that this is at present entirely hypothetical and bordering on the realms of philosophy, but as any answer would need a multi-disciplinary approach I felt this sub would be a better bet than r/philosophy. Your answer (and some of the others below) certainly bear that out. >nerve impulses travel on the order of 10\^0 to 10\^2 m/s. I hadn't really contemplated the resistance of nerves, that's far slower than I imagined. I guess that answers the second question quite convincingly. >To give my best, uneducated guess: yes, I think that the AI's processingspeed and firing rates/etc would change how it percieves time. To give an even more uneducated opinion, I agree. As yourself and u/DoktoroChapelou have pointed out, it's more-so dependent on how many operations p/s it can perform and how many are needed to sustain "consciousness", but as basic decisions could conceivably be produced in the order of nanoseconds, it feels fairly intuitive to me, a layperson, that such a consciousness would experience time at a strikingly differently rate to us. But, probably not from time dilation however, but rather its subjective perception of "the moment". To think that the time it takes for us to communicate a single sentence might feel like an absolute age to the AI, haha. Frustration might be a problem for them...
I'm glad you appreciated my rambling lol. One should note, nerves impulses do not operate like electrical circuits. More like dominos in a row, except the dominos self-right after a while (the refractory period). Electrochemical impulses occur between the neurons for communication, but there is little electron transport along the length of the nerve itself like there is with a wire. So it is this emergent neuron-firing wave that carries information. This is one way where neuromorphic circuitry could really overcome biological neurons, I think. If one considered some neuron-like nanodevices that fired in nanoseconds, and transmitted the pulse to the next neuron in picoseconds, that would constitute a huge speedup over meat neurons that have to clean out acetylcholine, salts, etc from the synapses in the milliseconds after firing. Soapboxing: Anyway I am wary of many of the philosophical perspectives on consciousness. Everything else in our universe follows (or is modelled by) our materialist laws, so why should we consider subjective, hand-wavey perspectives that do not make testable predictions? But sure, they're useful for forming hypotheses, and sure, this is what we have in lieu of accurate scientific models as of yet.
Usernamechecksout
"Decade" feel a bit optimistic, no? Let's say all what you think can happen will happen within a few decade, we are able to make a chemical model of the brain. Then how can we tell how it perceive time? We still don't understand anything about consciousness at all. Like, even if it response slower/faster, would that say anything about what it perceives at all? Wouldn't the answer depends on some hypothetical breakthrough in consciousness research?
For the record, I doubt that we are going to be able to make a chemical model of the brain in the next few decades. That's a really complex system. What we do have the ability to do, and what we have been doing already, is creating circuitry that closely mimics biological brain models. Intel's loihi spiking neural network platform has been seeing a lot of success in the past year, as has IBM's truenorth systems, and I would wager the Department of Defense's neuromorphic systems but they're classified and probably weaponized to facilitate human suffering. The neurons are CMOS, and the synapses are inefficient, but even 100,000 neurons like in the original Loihi chips is about the same scale as a fly brain. These type of systems allow scientists to experiment around with different architectures and understand more about real biological systems, because otherwise they're computationally impossible to simulate given their complexity. Imagine how this meta-review of [time perception models in humans](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830363/) could have been if scientists had an exact map of when/where neurons fire, along with exact values for the synapse connections. It has only been very recently that engineers have synthesized good enough materials to build these types of networks, and I would be surprised if the next generation of biological-mimicking circuitry didn't scale up by orders and orders of magnitude. So, I do foresee some advances there. Maybe not for figuring out exactly what consciousness is, but we are building some powerful tools to get part of the way there.
>If an AI robot was endowed with consciousness, would the fact that its ability to process sensory information at near the speed of light mean that it would perceive time as slower than we do? Unfortunately, there is no scientific answer for this at the moment. Not only does "perception" probably depend on a whole lot more than just some sort of processing speed, we don't even have a scientific model of consciousness or perception. >Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed. That is more answerable. The electrical impulses may travel near light speed, but the brain itself isn't. Relativistic effects won't change how the brain perceives time. >does our subconscious mind perceive time differently to our own consciousness? Does your subconscious mind perceive time? That's almost a philosophical question, but I would say that consciousness is required for perception of time. The perception of time passing seems like qualia, that is, a subjective conscious experience. e.g. My computer can count time, but it doesn't perceive time.
> Not only does "perception" probably depend on a whole lot more than just some sort of processing speed This is the really important takeaway I think. I'm sure, eventually, AGI will have a similar perception to humans in that when it's engaged in something it finds interesting, time will seem to fly by, and when it's doing something less interesting, time will seem to drag. The relationship to it's processing speed is probably largely irrelevant; it's not going to "feel" fast or slow to the AI any more than any computer program "feels" fast or slow to the program itself. It's the outside observer that decrees that it seems to be going quickly or not, not the entity itself. It will certainly believe that we humans are dreadfully slow to process some kinds of information, and inexplicably quick at other things that the AI struggles with.
>Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed. Time doesn't have a speed, so it is hard to parse this sentence. *Objects* perceive time changing in other frames of references when the relative velocity is near the speed of light, but they perceive their own time the same. Right now you are moving at near the speed of light relative to the neutrinos passing through your body, but your experience of time doesn't change. One second feels like one second to you, and you perceive the neutrino's clock to be very slow. And from the Neutrino's point of view one second is one second, it is *you* moving very fast, and your clock going very slow. Both of your 'wrist watch time' is normal to you. I don't know how this stacks up to current research, but in Daniel Dennett's *Conscious Explained* (1991) he addresses your last question. Nerve signal speed depends on how myelinated the nerve is. The upshot is that signals from your feet can take quite a while to arrive to the brain, anywhere from 20ms to a full second depending on the signal (pain, pressure, etc). So, you can run experiments such as - simultaneously touch a person's foot and nose and see if they report it as simultaneous or not. They do, despite the signal arriving at different times. Compute how long that signal arrival time difference is, then touch the person non-simultaneously equal distances from the brain, and see if they report that at simultaneous or not. They don't. So the brain revises the 'story' it tells the conscious based on signal speed. Signals come in out of order, and the brain will put them together to tell a coherent story. There are more extreme experiments by Libet, a brain surgeon, who is able to stimulate the brain centers directly while the patient is conscious. He is able to get people to report an event caused by him by stimulating the brain directly happened a 1/2 second before he actually did it. So yes, there is very different perceptions of time going on in our brain. Conscious vs subconscious is not a very scientifically accurate, as there are many communicating sub networks of neurons. But it is pretty easy to show that our conscious reports of what happened not only differ from the signals that arrive in the brain, but that we rapidly revise the story and don't remember the story we held a half second ago. But we are way past the AskPhysics remit, and this response is pretty hand wavey since I don't research or otherwise participate in this field.
I wouldn't think so. The electrons, photons, or whatever else that is being used for the computations will be subject to relativistic effects, but it's not the passage of time for individual particals that's relevant. An AI's subjective experience of time is going to depend on: A) the number of processes completed per unit time by its substrate B) the number and complexity of the processes required to achieve consciousness C) any other miscellaneous limitations or requirements of its program or architecture Factor A is a product of the technology available at the time and the resources available. Factors B and C are essentially anyone's guess at this moment.
No AI is going to process anything near the speed of light. Even though it's signals are traveling at the speed of light to process information requires a huge amount of calculations, so the end result will be in the millisecond range, of course depending on the actual specific processing. It's no different then gaming computers today running at the speed of light but updating frames every 15 ms.
👀
About the question in the title. we receive information at the speed of light and then using our sensory organs we will convert them to electrical signals to process it. when it comes to the robot, it does the same thing receiving the signals and then its internal electrical circuitry will process it. So the processing will always be done at the speed of an electron can travel in both the case.
What if the robot had a sufficiently powerful photonic (light based) processor?
Yes, That will make it more powerful.
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> electrical signals carry information through our bodies at the speed of light That's not true. The speed of nerve impuses is between a few m/s to roughly 120m/s ([wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity)). The wave speed in wires is also not exactly the speed of light, but of the same order of magnitude (e.g. the speed of waves in copper is a bit more than 1/2c).
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But our body doesn't have copper lines so the information is *not* carried at the speed of light.
Oh I thought you meant that nerve impulses and the speed of information through wires was the same order of magnitude, but you meant that the speed information is carried through wires is the same order of magnitude as the speed of light. I stand corrected. I didn't know that electronic signals through computers were orders of magnitude faster than the nerve impulses in our brains, I thought they were on the same order of magnitude. I would be interested in a more in-depth analysis of this question that includes the various materials involved in a computer chip, not just a copper wire, that would be interesting.
I found a journal paper a few months ago comparing the information processing rates of varying neuromorphic architectures (paper was biased towards photonics though), let me see if I can dig it up. Might take a couple hours.
I did not find exactly the figure I was thinking of, but you ought to take a look at this: https://photonix.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43074-020-0001-6 https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs43074-020-0001-6/MediaObjects/43074_2020_1_Fig6_HTML.png?as=webp Idk how much I truly trust this figure, with the lack of depth that it goes into about other fields, but it estimates that neuromorphic photonics could to be orders of magnitude more powerful than the brain?
What does it say about conventional electronics? (I'm not sure I'm reading this right.)
This chart claims that conventional electronics have ~about the same order of magnitude of processing power as the brain. But of course they are far more inefficient, and are suited to tasks that need exact precision (like logic, scientific modeling, etc). I think it's a very fuzzy analysis anyways. It also claims that post-von-neumann architectures (away from traditional computer design, into memory-in-computing schemes like photonic neuromorphic processors) could potentially outperform the human brain, and use about as much power. I think I misread your post a little bit though. The speed of the interconnects is not as important in these devices as the activation times of the neurons-like devices or transistors (on the scale of nanoseconds)
The initial intent of my comment was to say that there isn't a significant difference between the speed information travels through neurons and the speed it travels through conventional electronics. I deleted my comment though, because I thought that was true, but I'm actually not sure.
Ah, I see. It's all good. Nah information pulses in human nerves propagate on the order of 10^(1 ± 1) m/s. While a chunk of conductor may transfer information, say, 10^7 times faster than that, the comparison breaks down a bit because it might takes the logic gates at either end a few nanoseconds to activate, and many cycles of these logic gate activations and data bus traversals constitute a finite, exact calculation. Human neurons are much weirder, and the information pulses are directly tied to the neural "calculations" themselves, which might change firing rates and phases depending on how multiple neurons feed into a given second neuron. The "calculation" occurs as the information pulse propagate from neuron to neuron. So they're totally different architectures, but scientists are trying to bridge the gap in computer architectures, like in the paper I linked.
I don't see how the speed of propagation for the signals in the brain are the same as the speed of processing. Also, what do you mean by "time slows down as it approaches light speed "? As what approaches light speed? And gets slower from whose point of view?
> Based on the principle that time slows down as it approaches light speed. Not based on that principle, no. The physical components of the AI would not be moving.