Tech Executives Cast Humans as 20-Watt 'Meat Computers' Against 1.2 Billion-Watt AI
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 24
Tech Executives Cast Humans as 20-Watt 'Meat Computers' Against 1.2 Billion-Watt AI
4 articles · Updated · The New York Times · May 24
A growing group of AI leaders is publicly describing people as "meat computers," pushing a view that human cognition is limited next to machine intelligence.
Elon Musk wrote last summer that humans are "dumb meat computers" compared with digital superintelligence, while OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy said the era of AI research done by humans between sleep and meetings is "long gone."
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison sharpened the comparison at a 2025 event, contrasting a 20-watt human brain with a 1.2 billion-watt AI brain.
The language revives an older academic habit of comparing minds to machines, but its spread into executive rhetoric shows how AI boosters are framing humans as biologically constrained systems beside scalable digital models.
As AI gets smarter, what makes our 'meat computer' brains uniquely valuable and irreplaceable?
Can we trust amoral AI with our future if it cannot truly grasp human values?
With AI set to replace millions of jobs, are we prepared for the economic fallout?