I think that human specialization is the direct result of our ability to communicate. As our communication bandwidth with other humans increases, we can specialize more, since information we don’t have is likely to be accessible from someone else.

This is in its early stages – the idea of Wikipedia, or the Internet in general as an ‘outboard brain’ is well known.

Now imagine the effects if we could plug our brains directly into the Internet: stream entire thought videos up and down. It would be as if we had evolved telepathy. Of course, since we haven’t evolved to use telepathy it would take a lot of getting used to, but the brain is plastic and I imagine it could only lead over time to even more specialization.

In essence, humanity would become a distributed super brain.

But perhaps such high bandwidth connections are impossible or impractical with biological brains. There’s no reason to suppose the same limitation would hold with uploaded brains or AIs. Again the end result is a distributed super brain.

Freeman Dyson has argued that biotechnology will enable a horizontal transfer of genes that will mean the end of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. I think AI is another route to the same end: with a distributed super brain there would be no individuality as we know it. No competition. No natural selection by death of nonfit individuals: only nonfit thoughts.

We have evolved as individuals, and it will be hard to let go of our egos. But on the plus side there will be no slavery. No malthusian death of individuals because they can’t compete. Everything good about the individuals will be preserved, every idea which is more insightful than anyone else’s. Everything except … individuality.

If this sounds bad to you, consider what it’s like for an individual with multiple personality disorder. Multiple egos in one brain? I believe it’s rather unpleasant. Then consider that sufficiently high bandwidth telepathy would effectively unite multiple brains into one. If each brain retains its ego, you have the equivalent of super brain multiple personality disorder. Once you have that level of connection – do all those egos still serve any real purpose?

For those with a religious bent, absorption into the super mind would be the ultimate in enlightenment.

To my mind, it certainly beats starving to death while a handful of corporation owners get rich off cheap robot mind labour.

Even if this super brain scenario is avoidable – can anyone here think of a better alternative?

2… We already know there’s such a path – I’m not planning to criticise that;

3… I take more seriously. Anders is a brain scientist who wants to get into the whole superintelligence deal – I can understand that. Robin is a bit of a mystery. Maybe he formed his views long ago, and they got stuck? I can only speculate. I don’t know much about Nick’s views here. Smart folk, sure – but there are smart folk on the other side of the argument too. I have previously voiced my suspicion that the scenario is a whole lot of wishful thinking. Everyone involved seems to want to save the human race! Whereas I can’t see much that will stand the test of time. Certainly our brains are one of the least likely things to persist – through being so obviously and clearly a load of obsolete junk.

4… Leaves me cold – why throw good money after bad, just because not much extra cash is involved?

5… Is an issue which we can think most clearly about without brain emulations, IMO;

6… Fame, glory and converts? Hmm. Maybe;

7… Right. I don’t think a critique would be worthless – just there are rather more important things than this particular issue.

Indeed, because the whole project is both so difficult and so unrewarding, I sometimes wonder if there will be many humans around by the time it becomes technically possible.

A few reasons:

1. Insofar as brain emulation can be shown to have a substantial probability over a time scale, that puts an upper bound on ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios.

2. Showing a path to emulation also shows a path to potential neuromorphic AI and AI informed by neuroscientific discoveries.

3. Anders, Robin, and FHI have put a substantial amount of effort into analyzing and synthesizing information related to these scenarios, and think that they are to be taken seriously. Given their level of knowledge, intelligence, and care in thought, it’s important to see how they could disagree with you. Do they have additional information about the subject? Do you not believe each other to be Bayesian wannabes, accurately or inaccurately?

4. The prior work in modeling emulation scenarios reduces the marginal effort of further contributions (especially posting analyses that have already been worked out).

5. Results indicating hard or soft takeoff in emulations suggest dynamics to think about when considering initially hand-coded AI.

6. You may persuade smart careful thinkers of your point of view, if you are indeed correct.

7. Academics’ motivation to investigate a topic is often increased when they get careful, informative, and interesting engagement. Encouraging people like the FHI thinkers with interesting feedback, and efforts of critique that are commensurate with their own research efforts, is a good thing for the future of huamnity and humantiy-derived life.

Unfortunately, I’m not inclined to spend time exploring the “what if emulated brains came first” scenario.

I am more inclined to put together a presentation explaining why I think such a scenario is not worth bothering with. That doesn’t seem terribly important either – I mean: surely there can’t be that many people who take such material seriously. Emulated brains haven’t exactly rocked the IT world so far. The whole idea seems like a joke to me – and, as such, it hardly seems worth bothering to criticise it