I am excited about the concept of uploading, but as I’ve discussed with fellow enthusiasts… I don’t see a way to a working emulation of a human brain (much less an accurate recreation of a specific human brain) that doesn’t go through improving our general understanding of how the human brain works. And I think that that knowledge leads to unlocking AI capabilities. So it seems like a tightly information-controlled research project would be needed to not have AI tech leapfrogging over uploading tech while aiming for uploads.
Edit: to be extra clear, I’m trying to speak to people out who might not have thought this through that there is a clear strategic rationale to think that ‘private uploading-directed-research is potentially good, but open uploading-directed-research is very risky and bad.’ Because of my particular bias towards believing in the importance of studying the human brain, I suspect that the ML capabilities side-effects of such research would be substantially worse than the average straightforward ML capabilities advance.
If anyone cares, my own current take (see here) is “it’s not completely crazy to hope for uploads to precede non-upload-AGI by up to a couple years, with truly heroic effort and exceedingly good luck on numerous fronts at once”. (Prior to writing that post six months ago, I was even more pessimistic.) More than a couple years’ window continues to seem completely crazy to me.
I am excited about the concept of uploading, but as I’ve discussed with fellow enthusiasts… I don’t see a way to a working emulation of a human brain (much less an accurate recreation of a specific human brain) that doesn’t go through improving our general understanding of how the human brain works. And I think that that knowledge leads to unlocking AI capabilities. So it seems like a tightly information-controlled research project would be needed to not have AI tech leapfrogging over uploading tech while aiming for uploads.
Edit: to be extra clear, I’m trying to speak to people out who might not have thought this through that there is a clear strategic rationale to think that ‘private uploading-directed-research is potentially good, but open uploading-directed-research is very risky and bad.’ Because of my particular bias towards believing in the importance of studying the human brain, I suspect that the ML capabilities side-effects of such research would be substantially worse than the average straightforward ML capabilities advance.
If anyone cares, my own current take (see here) is “it’s not completely crazy to hope for uploads to precede non-upload-AGI by up to a couple years, with truly heroic effort and exceedingly good luck on numerous fronts at once”. (Prior to writing that post six months ago, I was even more pessimistic.) More than a couple years’ window continues to seem completely crazy to me.