I like this passage by jdp as a concise examples-heavy articulation of a vague idea I’ve had for a while, and wanted to pick it out of his essay Predictable Updates About Identity to be able to point to it going forward:
2. Uploading Is A Continuum And Already Here
Depending on how seriously we want to take the above it could be argued that low fidelity uploading technology has been with us for a long time in the form of literacy and deep learning is simply taking the writing technology tree to its logical conclusion. At first we wrote down small messages and histories on knotted strings and slips of bamboo. Then we invented paper manuscripts that could hold whole lectures and narratives from elite authors, each copy handwritten through painstaking labor. Later the Gutenberg press made publishing available to a much wider circle of both authors and readers by making the act of copying a manuscript cheap once it had been typeset onto metal plates. In the 20th century we invented widely distributed personal publishing devices like the mimeograph, photocopier, and personal computer. In the 1990′s we began to augment our personal computers with a global network called the Internet which combined with increasingly vast digital storage devices to bring the marginal cost of publishing close to zero. The next decade saw us shrink terminals to access this network into handheld devices made possible by further miniaturization and increasingly dense rechargeable batteries. In the 2010′s we used primitive unsupervised learning and deep net embedding models to sort the resulting library of babel into personalized recommendation feeds like Twitter and collective feeds like Reddit that exist in a symbiotic (and increasingly parasitic) relationship with their users. This decade we are beginning to see books evolve into their final form: The miraculous instantiation of the author. Though few are yet taking full advantage of it, deep learning allows us to publish more work than any human audience would care to read and make much more of our mind patterns usefully available than ever before. While it is not yet clear how to publish a sufficient volume of work I expect synthetic data methods and vocal transcription models to fill a lot of the gap until relevant brain-computer interfaces and models trained with them are available.
I like this passage by jdp as a concise examples-heavy articulation of a vague idea I’ve had for a while, and wanted to pick it out of his essay Predictable Updates About Identity to be able to point to it going forward: