While I wouldn’t say whole brain emulation could never happen, this looks to me like it is a very long way out, probably hundreds of years.
What kind of reasoning leads you to this time estimate? Hundreds of years is an awfully long time—consider that two hundred years ago nobody even knew that cells existed, and there didn’t exist any kind of computers.
From your description of the state of the field, I guess we won’t see an uploaded nematode very soon, but getting there in a decade or two doesn’t seem impossible. It seems a bit counter-intuitive to me that learning “no nematode know, but maybe in ten years” would move the point estimate for human uploads by several centuries. Because, what if we had happened to do this literature survey ten years later, and found out that indeed nematodes had been successfully uploaded? If the estimate is sensitive to very small changes like that, it must be very uncertain.
What kind of reasoning leads you to this time estimate? Hundreds of years is an awfully long time
Humans are notoriously poor at providing estimates of probability, and our ability to accurately predict scales that are less than immediate are just as poor. It seems likely that this “hundreds of years” was a short-hand for “there does not seem to be a direct roadmap to achieving this goal from where we currently are, and therefore I must assign an arbitrarily distant point into the future as its most-likely-to-be-achieved date.”
This is purely guesswork / projection on my part, however.
What kind of reasoning leads you to this time estimate? Hundreds of years is an awfully long time—consider that two hundred years ago nobody even knew that cells existed, and there didn’t exist any kind of computers.
From your description of the state of the field, I guess we won’t see an uploaded nematode very soon, but getting there in a decade or two doesn’t seem impossible. It seems a bit counter-intuitive to me that learning “no nematode know, but maybe in ten years” would move the point estimate for human uploads by several centuries. Because, what if we had happened to do this literature survey ten years later, and found out that indeed nematodes had been successfully uploaded? If the estimate is sensitive to very small changes like that, it must be very uncertain.
Humans are notoriously poor at providing estimates of probability, and our ability to accurately predict scales that are less than immediate are just as poor. It seems likely that this “hundreds of years” was a short-hand for “there does not seem to be a direct roadmap to achieving this goal from where we currently are, and therefore I must assign an arbitrarily distant point into the future as its most-likely-to-be-achieved date.”
This is purely guesswork / projection on my part, however.