DATA SOURCES & ASSUMPTIONS
Birth Rate Data
Current: ~132.4M births/year (2025) = ~4.2 births/second
Historical peak: 146M births in 2012. Projected stable at 130-140M through 2050s.
Human Brain Processing Estimates
Conservative: 10^14 ops/s - Moravec's retinal processing extrapolation
Moderate: 10^16 ops/s - Synapse count × firing rate estimate
Aggressive: 10^18 ops/s - Full neural complexity estimate
Note: MIPS ≈ operations/second for comparison purposes. Actual brain computation is non-comparable.
Chip Production Data
2007: 2×10^20 IPS global capacity (Hilbert & Lopez, 2012)
2021: 1.15T semiconductor units shipped (WSTS)
2023: NVIDIA shipped ~550K H100s @ 4 petaFLOPS = 2.2×10^21 FLOPS
2024: NVIDIA ~2M H100-equiv, $130B data center revenue (SEC 10-K)
2025: Epoch AI projects 6.5-7M AI GPUs; installed base ~4M H100-equiv
Hardware FLOPS/$ doubles every ~2.5 years (Epoch AI GPU dataset)
Inspiration
Charles Stross, Accelerando (2005): "Sometime in this century laboring women will produce
forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world,
fab lines will churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power."
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