4 ms·

This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murd

This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murder for profit, one could easily argue) of the desperately ill and naive. Although I suspect many involved (investors...) may themselves be naive enough to imagine this works. Merging it with a YC/VC “do anything and break any rule to produce growth” mentality - which is great for a business - is wildly unethical. There’s no theoretical basis for “brain uploads” other than middlebrow “tech solves everything” pie-in-the-skyism. There’s no economic basis for getting people in the far future to do you favors. And there’s no medical basis for brain embalming/freezing. If they could do this on pigs and resurrect them after x number of days it would be a different story.

Veedrac 9y ago
By the time we can do this on pigs, the ethical disaster of the fact that billions of people will have died preventable deaths will be at holocaust levels. The only ethical action is to do this well before it's possible, roughly at the point where the probability of it happening at some point in the future crosses the cost-benefit threshold. The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.

Veedrac 9y ago

By the time we can do this on pigs, the ethical disaster of the fact that billions of people will have died preventable deaths will be at holocaust levels. The only ethical action is to do this well before it's possible, roughly at the point where the probability of it happening at some point in the future crosses the cost-benefit threshold. The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.