> That's the medium - but how many bits of information, after compression, are exchanged in a conversation between humans? We don't really know, but it is much

> That's the medium - but how many bits of information, after compression, are exchanged in a conversation between humans? We don't really know, but it is much more than 10 bits a second. > He's saying that the amount of information contained in the combination of these human communication mechanisms can be compressed to about 10 bits per second. No what he said is humans type, input text through a keyboard, on average at the speed of 10 bits a second. > Imagine us talking for a minute, compressed to a movie script. Your wetware could easily use my expressions to come up with an estimate of my happiness, sincerity, confidence, truthfulness, sarcasm (and so on) on a scale of 1-10. These values might change from sentence to sentence. If you're very observant, in 60 seconds you might get 10 estimates for each of a dozen emotions with 3-bit fidelity from these observations - only a few bits per second of actual information transferred. You're assuming all of our communication happens through our consciousness, which is just not true. People don't consciously evaluate each other's facial expressions and use formulas to draw a conclusion. > I would perhaps speak 200 English words in that minute. 200 words, averaging 4.5 characters each, with a 20% compression ratio, is only on the order of 4 bytes per second. And most of that is overhead for grammar. Most of the words people use are 'overhead for grammar'? Sorry, this is just false. Also keep in mind that human language is very complex, we do not understand how it works. Our processing of language does not happen in our consciousness. > The medium is irrelevant. The question is how much information can be exchanged. And computers win that with no contest. You have no idea how much information humans exchange. Your view of human thought and communication is very simplistic. These are things which we (bleeding edge science) do not understand yet. Furthermore, there is no contest because there is no purpose in any kind of contest, computers don't win or lose, they are used for different purposes.