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The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. While his time frame estimates mig

by rl3 11y ago

The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. While his time frame estimates might be sound given that context, I'd argue they're wildly inaccurate given a more likely scenario: such things will be brought into existence first via a super-intelligent agent, if at all. If that proves to be the case, the time frame for brain uploading becomes roughly bound to the advent of AGI. When that happens, the same entity capable of creating our brain upload mechanism would likely be capable of endowing humans with effectively immortal bodies just the same. In other words, technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world (assuming there is a singularity in the first place), and who knows what that will look like.

Retric 11y ago
There is a huge range from slightly smarter than human AI vs the kind of 'magic' AI it would take to make the singularity happen. An AI that's 10% smarter than any human would probably not be that noticeable outside of testing, as it's not obvious who the smartest person in a room is. And it would take a decade of study to catch up to the cutting edge on just one field. 10x that and your doubling the rate of progress that a single person was making, but that's not really going to change much. Suppose we develop an AI that's 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do. Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much. A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that's both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much. To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it's self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI. After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.
- MichaelBurge 11y ago
  Once the work of getting the first human-level or better AI is out the door, engineers are really good at mass-producing it or optimizing it. I could see someone investing in a factory to manufacture a billion of them within 10 years, once someone has demonstrated that it's possible.
  - Retric 11y ago
    You’re implicitly assuming the first AI runs on cheap hardware. It seems more likely the first general AI to take more far more than 1 million in hardware and requires a lot of hands on interaction. This makes pumping out 1 billion of them far more difficult than your suggesting.
- rl3 11y ago
  Most fast-takeoff AGI scenarios usually involve a singular intelligence created from an algorithm that easily scales based on how much computing power is allocated to it. Combined with the notion of computing overhang[0], it's possible that our very first AGI could far exceed human intelligence, such that it would have capacity for rapid self-improvement right from the start. I'm not saying this will necessarily be the case; slower takeoff scenarios are certainly a possibility, albeit an unlikely one (IMHO). Another point to consider is that computing hardware is vastly superior to the human brain both in its capacity for raw calculation, and its sheer speed in terms of raw latency. Keeping that in mind, assume we have created an AGI simulation that's approximately equal in complexity relative to the human brain. Not intelligence, just complexity of the simulation itself. Now consider that AGI is not bound by biological constraints, and would not necessarily be structured in similar fashion to the human brain. This lends itself to potentially far more efficient architectures, and with that, the realization of AGI at a computational cost far below that of simulating a complete human brain. Moreover, given a completely alien architecture, it's not hard to imagine the cognitive side of such a simulation interfacing rather directly with traditional modes of computation. To illustrate, imagine comparing a human being to an identical human being that has a microprocessor integrated into their brain. Both humans may have nearly identical capacity for abstract intelligence, but the one with the microprocessor is going to be effectively far more intelligent, simply because their capacity for dealing with raw data and calculations is vastly superior. It's not hard to imagine a similar dynamic coming into play with AGI. [0] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Computing_overhang http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Computing_overhang
  - baddox 11y ago
    > Most fast-takeoff AGI scenarios usually involve a singular intelligence created from an algorithm that easily scales based on how much computing power is allocated to it. Still, it's pretty easy to imagine this not resulting in the sort of "runaway" intelligence most often associated with the notion of singularity. What if general intelligence is inherently extremely computationally complex? Imagine that the level of intelligence is represented by a number n, and say that human intelligence is n=100. If the computational complexity of intelligence is, say, O(1000^n), we won't expect to see hardware that's twice as intelligent as humans any time soon even if we know the algorithm.
kordless 11y ago
> who knows what that will look like Some brains will want to run on some sort of trusted infrastructure and be stored in an immutable datastore. Mine for example. Or... Consider for a moment there will be a singularity in the future. What if it's a critical, recursive part of existence? If there is a singularity coming, it's likely to have happened before now. I'm not saying we're not experiencing it for the first time here, but maybe this is the nature of things...to be recursive in creation of a thing and then that thing eventually discovering its true nature of oneness. Maybe we're the big uploaded uni-brain already, but sliver of it chose this reality for ourselves because we can all come here and exist together separately on a somewhat level playing field. Some may choose something else for themselves eventually, like uploading their brains to...wherever this is running. Me? I sorta like it here and want to stick around for a while.
- rl3 11y ago
  It's certainly possible that our existence is the result of one or more ancestor simulations. My personal cracked-out theory is that time and space are both infinite, and thus computation is infinite. As such, our observable universe may be the result of an infinite number of ancestor simulations. Another facet of that theory which I enjoy pondering is the notion that the supernatural may exist (souls, ghosts, reincarnation, etc)—just in a simulation layer that exists above our own, but one that is still tied to our physical universe. Inaccessible but real. A more grim yet equally interesting twist on that would be the supernatural existing within our current physical universe, quantifiable and ultimately accessible (some day), but presently not yet discovered by science. Often all things supernatural or spiritual have a sense of morality imposed upon them, but I imagine such a finding would strongly suggest that the supernatural, if it existed, would be just as uncaring and cold as the physical universe, since it would itself part of the physical universe.
  - kordless 11y ago
    Remember, bandwidth doesn't increase on the same curves as compute and storage. That means, regardless of where you are in this universe, you can't upload everything in one spot to the other spot. This would work well for arguing for a recursive universe model. Compute may be unlimited, but you are limited in your ability to hog all of it all at once.
epistasis 11y ago
>The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. I don't see that assumption anywhere in his text, nor in any of his arguments, and I don't see how a non-human mechanism is not susceptible to any of the physical requirements that he lays out.
it_is_Magical 11y ago
> technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world That's some magical thinking, right there.
- rl3 11y ago
  While I'm flattered you created this account just to troll me, I can't help but agree. Perhaps you've heard of Clarke's Third Law?

by rl3 11y ago

Retric 11y ago

There is a huge range from slightly smarter than human AI vs the kind of 'magic' AI it would take to make the singularity happen. An AI that's 10% smarter than any human would probably not be that noticeable outside of testing, as it's not obvious who the smartest person in a room is. And it would take a decade of study to catch up to the cutting edge on just one field. 10x that and your doubling the rate of progress that a single person was making, but that's not really going to change much. Suppose we develop an AI that's 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do. Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much. A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that's both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much. To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it's self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI. After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.

MichaelBurge 11y ago
Once the work of getting the first human-level or better AI is out the door, engineers are really good at mass-producing it or optimizing it. I could see someone investing in a factory to manufacture a billion of them within 10 years, once someone has demonstrated that it's possible.
- Retric 11y ago
  You’re implicitly assuming the first AI runs on cheap hardware. It seems more likely the first general AI to take more far more than 1 million in hardware and requires a lot of hands on interaction. This makes pumping out 1 billion of them far more difficult than your suggesting.
rl3 11y ago
Most fast-takeoff AGI scenarios usually involve a singular intelligence created from an algorithm that easily scales based on how much computing power is allocated to it. Combined with the notion of computing overhang[0], it's possible that our very first AGI could far exceed human intelligence, such that it would have capacity for rapid self-improvement right from the start. I'm not saying this will necessarily be the case; slower takeoff scenarios are certainly a possibility, albeit an unlikely one (IMHO). Another point to consider is that computing hardware is vastly superior to the human brain both in its capacity for raw calculation, and its sheer speed in terms of raw latency. Keeping that in mind, assume we have created an AGI simulation that's approximately equal in complexity relative to the human brain. Not intelligence, just complexity of the simulation itself. Now consider that AGI is not bound by biological constraints, and would not necessarily be structured in similar fashion to the human brain. This lends itself to potentially far more efficient architectures, and with that, the realization of AGI at a computational cost far below that of simulating a complete human brain. Moreover, given a completely alien architecture, it's not hard to imagine the cognitive side of such a simulation interfacing rather directly with traditional modes of computation. To illustrate, imagine comparing a human being to an identical human being that has a microprocessor integrated into their brain. Both humans may have nearly identical capacity for abstract intelligence, but the one with the microprocessor is going to be effectively far more intelligent, simply because their capacity for dealing with raw data and calculations is vastly superior. It's not hard to imagine a similar dynamic coming into play with AGI. [0] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Computing_overhang http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Computing_overhang
- baddox 11y ago
  > Most fast-takeoff AGI scenarios usually involve a singular intelligence created from an algorithm that easily scales based on how much computing power is allocated to it. Still, it's pretty easy to imagine this not resulting in the sort of "runaway" intelligence most often associated with the notion of singularity. What if general intelligence is inherently extremely computationally complex? Imagine that the level of intelligence is represented by a number n, and say that human intelligence is n=100. If the computational complexity of intelligence is, say, O(1000^n), we won't expect to see hardware that's twice as intelligent as humans any time soon even if we know the algorithm.

kordless 11y ago

> who knows what that will look like Some brains will want to run on some sort of trusted infrastructure and be stored in an immutable datastore. Mine for example. Or... Consider for a moment there will be a singularity in the future. What if it's a critical, recursive part of existence? If there is a singularity coming, it's likely to have happened before now. I'm not saying we're not experiencing it for the first time here, but maybe this is the nature of things...to be recursive in creation of a thing and then that thing eventually discovering its true nature of oneness. Maybe we're the big uploaded uni-brain already, but sliver of it chose this reality for ourselves because we can all come here and exist together separately on a somewhat level playing field. Some may choose something else for themselves eventually, like uploading their brains to...wherever this is running. Me? I sorta like it here and want to stick around for a while.

rl3 11y ago
It's certainly possible that our existence is the result of one or more ancestor simulations. My personal cracked-out theory is that time and space are both infinite, and thus computation is infinite. As such, our observable universe may be the result of an infinite number of ancestor simulations. Another facet of that theory which I enjoy pondering is the notion that the supernatural may exist (souls, ghosts, reincarnation, etc)—just in a simulation layer that exists above our own, but one that is still tied to our physical universe. Inaccessible but real. A more grim yet equally interesting twist on that would be the supernatural existing within our current physical universe, quantifiable and ultimately accessible (some day), but presently not yet discovered by science. Often all things supernatural or spiritual have a sense of morality imposed upon them, but I imagine such a finding would strongly suggest that the supernatural, if it existed, would be just as uncaring and cold as the physical universe, since it would itself part of the physical universe.
- kordless 11y ago
  Remember, bandwidth doesn't increase on the same curves as compute and storage. That means, regardless of where you are in this universe, you can't upload everything in one spot to the other spot. This would work well for arguing for a recursive universe model. Compute may be unlimited, but you are limited in your ability to hog all of it all at once.

epistasis 11y ago

>The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. I don't see that assumption anywhere in his text, nor in any of his arguments, and I don't see how a non-human mechanism is not susceptible to any of the physical requirements that he lays out.

it_is_Magical 11y ago

> technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world That's some magical thinking, right there.

rl3 11y ago
While I'm flattered you created this account just to troll me, I can't help but agree. Perhaps you've heard of Clarke's Third Law?