[ExI] Obama keen on brain mapping

Alan Grimes ALONZOTG at verizon.net
Fri Apr 5 18:12:04 UTC 2013


Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 05/04/2013 06:21, Alan Grimes wrote:
>> What the heck is an upload transition? 

> The transition from a world where brain emulation is not possible to a 
> world where it is doable.

Ok, but why is that, at all, remarkable?

> The issue I am concerned about is that the economic and social impact 
> of being able to copy human capital and achieve effective immortality 
> is... pretty big. Copyable human capital makes economic growth models 
> blow up: Robin Hanson's uploading economics papers are on the 
> conservative end. 

I attended one of his presentations on the subject.

> In the past transitions to slightly faster economic growth rates and 
> new means of production have led to pretty dramatic effects on the 
> lives of people (consider the industrial revolution, globalisation, 
> de-industrialisation), but most have developed rather slowly. Yes, I 
> think most of these have improved things overall, but during the 
> transition there is plenty of pain and some people get an extra unfair 
> helping.

Those are political problems, having no intrinsic relationship to 
uploading.

> In upload transition scenarios, there are good reasons to think that a 
> very sudden transition would cause a lot of drama - massive first 
> mover advantages, big rewards for ignoring moral or legal rules, 
> entirely new players gaining enormous wealth and power, big challenges 
> to existing legal and social systems, new kinds of enslaveable agents 
> not accepted by everybody as being persons, and so on. I am working on 
> a proper paper on the topic, but our preliminary finding is that out 
> of the list of putative causes of war and social conflicts rapid 
> uploading transitions manages to check lots of boxes.

Yeah, it's that ignoring moral or legal rules that bothers me the most. 
I don't think most of the laws on the books are actually just, but 
considering the laws which are just, and the morals which are proper, 
what can we do to enforce those?

> If you think brain emulation is impossible, then this analysis doesn't 
> matter. If you think it is irrelevant because of some other future 
> technology, fine, but consider that there is a certain risk that that 
> technology does not arrive fast enough.

I am completely indifferent to the date when uploading arrives. A later 
date might improve my ability to construct defenses, other than that I 
don't care.

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