Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Peter Gerdes's avatar

I was only suggesting cutting a feature like speech in the specific example of a case where it wouldn't be particularly needed, e.g., a case where what is needed is simply image categorization but at a level that requries human level judgement and inference ability (so maybe simply flagging pictures offering interesting intelligence information from spy satellites or tourist's instagram feeds). Many other tasks would require keeping things like speech but would likely find other aspects of our biological predispositions problematic like our constant paranoid concern over being taken advantage of the subsystems that make us deal badly with status insults.

Basically, I would imagine that most jobs we would have for ems could be best done and most easily done by algorithms that only capture part of the whole human package. The em version of someone on a help line would be stripped of normal concerns about status and insults so one could swear at it all day and it wouldn't get offended (it would need to understand your emotional valence just not have the normal human emotional response). The em version of a programmer would be stripped of sexual subsystems as well as concerns over personal glory or success.

It doesn't really take a very large change in how something behaves for normal people to no longer process it as not really human and I would suspect these modifications would only get more extreme with time. As processing power is presumably the scarce quantity any extraneous mental circuits one can eliminate would be a win.

Expand full comment
Joe's avatar

Thanks for the reply (and sorry for the lateness of mine).

I agree that longer-term, human-like minds might be more closely integrated into a higher level of organisation. But why would this involve cutting features like speech and higher-level cognition? These seem pretty valuable within higher-level organisations such as firms and work groups today.

Also, do cells in multicellular organisms really have most of the features stripped from single-celled organisms? As I understand it, many of the systems that support multicellular life originally developed for different purposes in unicellular organisms. For example, the mechanisms used to differentiate cell types by activating different sets of genes are also used within single-celled organisms to alter gene expression based on conditions within the cell, e.g. to activate lactase-producing genes in the presence of lactose.

Finally, since multi-cellular life is more complex than single-celled life, not less, wouldn't your analogy suggest that we will similarly see this higher level of organisation give rise to more complex and interesting features than those of individual minds, rather than fewer?

Expand full comment
23 more comments...

No posts