That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome.
I believe it was on HN that this discussion came up before, but that's a short sighted way of looking at it. Basically, it doesn't take into account all the interactions of the environment required to turn that "source code" into a person. Sure, the DNA would be sufficient if you were able to accurately simulate cellular actions, protein folding, and physics in general, but we just can't do that yet, and it doesn't look like we'll be able to any time soon.
Why would it need to be in isolation? Machine vision, voice recognition, speech synthesis, robotics -- there's no obvious reason why if we could build such a brain we couldn't find a way for it to interact with people.
Basically, it doesn't take into account all the interactions of the environment required to turn that "source code" into a person.
This is an extremely common, and completely incorrect criticism as applied to AGI complexity estimates.
Here's the way to think of it: the entirety of the information content required to move from non-intelligence to intelligence has to have been figured out some time between single-celled organisms and humans, because the substrate on which our intelligence is implemented literally didn't exist at that point. Which means that any part of the biological machinery that was in place when single-celled organisms ruled the planet does not count towards the complexity of the "intelligence algorithm" itself - it's irrelevant, accidental complexity, not information content that is required to get from "working computer" to "working intelligent computer".
You'll find that almost all of the cellular actions, protein folding, and physics were already working just fine when the single-celled ickies were evolving, so it's all complexity that we can safely ignore, which means we can start the complexity count with DNA. Apart from (IMO) extremely minor epigenetic contributions, the pure-DNA information estimates should provide extremely hard upper bounds on the difficulty of the problem, estimates that we'll probably blow through quite easily once we know what we're doing - evolution rarely finds the optimal solutions to problems, I see no reason to assume that it stumbled across one in this case...
That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome.
I believe it was on HN that this discussion came up before, but that's a short sighted way of looking at it. Basically, it doesn't take into account all the interactions of the environment required to turn that "source code" into a person. Sure, the DNA would be sufficient if you were able to accurately simulate cellular actions, protein folding, and physics in general, but we just can't do that yet, and it doesn't look like we'll be able to any time soon.