Well, we're opining about a statement about the world. Is the universe only 200 terabytes of information?

"Biological lifeforms seem to be able to train/develop general intelligence from much, much less."

This statement is hard to defend. The brain takes in 125 MB / second, and lives for 80 years, taking in about 300+ petabytes over our lifetime.

But that's not the real kicker. It's pretty unfair to say that humans learn everything they know from birth -> death. A lot of that learning bias was worked out through evolution... which takes that 300+ petabytes and multiplies it by... many lifetimes.

> A lot of that learning bias was worked out through evolution... which takes that 300+ petabytes and multiplies it by... many lifetimes.

That also seems several orders of magnitude off. Would you suspect that a human that only experiences life through H.264-compressing glasses, MP3-recompressing headphones etc. does not develop a coherent world model?

What about a human only experiencing a high fidelity 3D rendering of the world based on an accurate physics simulation?

The claim that humans need petabytes of data to develop their mind seems completely indefensible to me.

> A lot of that learning bias was worked out through evolution... which takes that 300+ petabytes and multiplies it by... many lifetimes.

Isn't that like saying that you only need the right data? In which case I'd completely agree :)