Human engineering study co-author: Humanity should be "like a forest of quiet semiconductor trees"

The co-authors of professor S. Matthew Liao´s paper "Human Engineering and Climate Change" think that online critics have misunderstood what they really mean. One of the authors, Dr  Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, wants people to know that "human engineering on its own is unlikely to fix climate change. The methods we mention are all too weak, indirect and slow."

Sandberg then refers to his "little essay" in order to understand what he really means.

Here are a few highlights of Sandberg´s "essay":


Postbiological and green

My favourite long-term solution is simply to aim for not just a post-industrial civilization but a post-biological one. We can currently roughly foresee how we could go about it. We would fixate our brains (presumably when near biological death), scan them in detail, reconstruct the functional structure and recreate it as software. The successor version would then go on living in virtual reality, with occasional visits to the physical world using a robot, android or just remote controlled human body.
How efficient could a postbiological civilization be? The current IBM roadrunner does 376 million calculations per watts. If we take my mid-range estimates of computing needs, 10^22 to 10^25 FLOPS, then a single emulation would need 10^13 to 10^16 watts. The total insolation of Earth is about 10^17 watts, so this won't do - there would be space for just a few minds on the entire planet. But current research on zettaflops computing suggest we can do much better. A DARPA exascale study suggests we can do 10^12 flops per watt, which means "just" a dozen Hoover dams per mind. Quantum dot cellular automata could give 10^19 flops per watt, putting the energy needs at 200-2000 watts.
That is between 2 and 20 times the current wattage of a current human. However, we bio-humans get our energy through the inefficient method of having plants collect sunshine (at about 3%) efficiency, then we either harvest them and eat a small part of them (expending a lot of agricultural energy) or have animals eat them (at a few percent efficiency) and finally we eat the result, again with a few percent efficiency. A brain emulation of this type would just need a few square meters of solar panels (plus night-time energy storage). In terms of area and energy required, these postbiological humans would have far smaller material requirements than we do. They could also run slower to save energy.
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Maybe the most sustainable thing we could do would be to aim at a future ensconced in cold datacenters under the subtropical deserts of Earth. Humanity would largely look like a forest of quiet semiconductor trees. We would indeed have become plants.

We should probably congratulate Oxford University for hosting such eminent scholars as Dr. Sandberg. The future of humanity seems to be in safe hands!