Anders Sandberg has posted a nice paper, Monte Carlo model of brain emulation development, wherein he develops a simple statistical model of when brain emulations [= “WBE”] would be feasible, if they will ever be feasible:
Yes, I'm usually talking about ems making copies of themselves. Destructive scans would be feasible first, and I expect enough such scans to be made to fill an em economy. So the arrival of non-destructive scans later becomes a modest effect.
When Robin talks about the copies, I always assume he talks about the people already existing as ems. When we have discussed initial scenarios, he has always been open for the destructive scanning ones - for his scenario to work, there just has to be *some* people who want to copy themselves.
You only need 1 initial "sacrifice", after that you can keep copying and altering traits to end up with a large and diverse EM-population. Perhaps an initial sacrifice isn't even needed: constructing an EM from the ground up might be possible.
I don't make any assumptions about the destructiveness. In fact, I don't see how it would change my model.... Also, I think Robin doesn't base his models on nondestructive scanning either.
It's not completely clear to me whether Robin assumes nondestructive scanning, but his rhetoric seems to imply it. He speaks of people's incentives to make copies of themselves rather that turning themselves into copies. He hasn't (to my knowledge) explored whether destructive scanning leads to his societal conclusions: would destructive scanning eventuate in an EM society?
I don't make any assumptions about the destructiveness. In fact, I don't see how it would change my model. (One could argue that nondestructive scanning is much harder and would require a far longer development time than destructive scanning, hence pushing estimates future-ward. But then one would need to explain why there is no use of earlier easier destructive methods.)
Also, I think Robin doesn't base his models on nondestructive scanning either.
Well, old people might see it as an option: incredibly long life, no more health issues. I'm sure Robin Hanson would want it. If it's technologically possible it will happen.
They may think an EM would be "them" and still not want to become EMs: their minds may be the same but their bodies are not. Even bracketing the economics, will persons flourish as ems to the degree that they might as humans? Will being an EM (as opposed to being a human) ever be an enviable state?
There was a slow growth rate before 1940, then a Moore's law rate after that. I'd think that if the gains have been slowing down lately, then the third term would fit that. But the data won't determine when it stops slowing down and settling to a new third growth rate. So you could pick a distribution over that new third growth rate and do the analysis that way.
I played around with piecewise exponentials today, and found a problem with them. If you give the curve the freedom to bend at a future point in time where there is no data, then of course it can turn in any direction without producing a bad mean square error. So the best we can do in this case is to assume the most recent growth rate continues forever. That seems a bit unsatisfactory.
One approach that might be doable is to get expert opinion about possible upper limits to computation and use that as a distribution of the endpoint of a sigmoid. How much one should trust such opinion is of course another matter, but I am already using the WBE meeting expert opinion about the necessary resolution.
If I remember right, Bela Nagy tested a largish set of curves against this data - exponentials, hyperbolic curves, various other power laws. I'll dig up the paper, but I think the conclusion was that it pointed towards a combination of Wrightean learning and expanding production producing a power law.
Don't Robin's social forecasts depend on the development of nondestructive copying methods? Whereas, Sandberg believes scanning will be destructive.
Does the similarity of their time estimates conceal that they are forecasting fundamentally different inventions: Sandberg, destructive copying; Hanson, nondestructive copying?
"for eons to follow it will always be cheaper to compute new mind states via floppy proteins in huge messy bio systems born in wombs, than to compute them via artificial devices made in factories.
Not exactly. Sandberg's conclusion is that it may always be cheaper to use floppy proteins in huge messy systems than to *compute emulations* of floppy proteins in huge messy systems. That's extremely plausible, because we still can't compute the behavior of even *single* floppy proteins in most cases, and never if taking into account only the mildest complexities of solutes or membranes. It's Vastly easier to just use a protein that to compute it's behavior.
This is no way rules out doing equivalent or similar computations electronically - it just indicates it may be very difficult or impossible to use vast excesses of computing power to do an extravagantly wasteful computation to get around the enormous problems of figuring out how the brain works and writing programs to replace it.
Yes, I'm usually talking about ems making copies of themselves. Destructive scans would be feasible first, and I expect enough such scans to be made to fill an em economy. So the arrival of non-destructive scans later becomes a modest effect.
When Robin talks about the copies, I always assume he talks about the people already existing as ems. When we have discussed initial scenarios, he has always been open for the destructive scanning ones - for his scenario to work, there just has to be *some* people who want to copy themselves.
One way destructive-only scanning alters the landscape is that it means the interests of the mass of organics is pitted against the EMs' interests.
You only need 1 initial "sacrifice", after that you can keep copying and altering traits to end up with a large and diverse EM-population. Perhaps an initial sacrifice isn't even needed: constructing an EM from the ground up might be possible.
They'll be dying of something, for this discussion it doesn't matter whether that's cancer at age 80 or some new form of dementia at age 150.
Will people still be dying of such things a century out?
I don't make any assumptions about the destructiveness. In fact, I don't see how it would change my model.... Also, I think Robin doesn't base his models on nondestructive scanning either.
It's not completely clear to me whether Robin assumes nondestructive scanning, but his rhetoric seems to imply it. He speaks of people's incentives to make copies of themselves rather that turning themselves into copies. He hasn't (to my knowledge) explored whether destructive scanning leads to his societal conclusions: would destructive scanning eventuate in an EM society?
I don't make any assumptions about the destructiveness. In fact, I don't see how it would change my model. (One could argue that nondestructive scanning is much harder and would require a far longer development time than destructive scanning, hence pushing estimates future-ward. But then one would need to explain why there is no use of earlier easier destructive methods.)
Also, I think Robin doesn't base his models on nondestructive scanning either.
Well, old people might see it as an option: incredibly long life, no more health issues. I'm sure Robin Hanson would want it. If it's technologically possible it will happen.
They may think an EM would be "them" and still not want to become EMs: their minds may be the same but their bodies are not. Even bracketing the economics, will persons flourish as ems to the degree that they might as humans? Will being an EM (as opposed to being a human) ever be an enviable state?
There are quite a lot of people who believe the EM would be "them". Though of course none of them have ever had to put that belief to the test.
There was a slow growth rate before 1940, then a Moore's law rate after that. I'd think that if the gains have been slowing down lately, then the third term would fit that. But the data won't determine when it stops slowing down and settling to a new third growth rate. So you could pick a distribution over that new third growth rate and do the analysis that way.
I played around with piecewise exponentials today, and found a problem with them. If you give the curve the freedom to bend at a future point in time where there is no data, then of course it can turn in any direction without producing a bad mean square error. So the best we can do in this case is to assume the most recent growth rate continues forever. That seems a bit unsatisfactory.
One approach that might be doable is to get expert opinion about possible upper limits to computation and use that as a distribution of the endpoint of a sigmoid. How much one should trust such opinion is of course another matter, but I am already using the WBE meeting expert opinion about the necessary resolution.
If I remember right, Bela Nagy tested a largish set of curves against this data - exponentials, hyperbolic curves, various other power laws. I'll dig up the paper, but I think the conclusion was that it pointed towards a combination of Wrightean learning and expanding production producing a power law.
Don't Robin's social forecasts depend on the development of nondestructive copying methods? Whereas, Sandberg believes scanning will be destructive.
Does the similarity of their time estimates conceal that they are forecasting fundamentally different inventions: Sandberg, destructive copying; Hanson, nondestructive copying?
"for eons to follow it will always be cheaper to compute new mind states via floppy proteins in huge messy bio systems born in wombs, than to compute them via artificial devices made in factories.
That seems crazy implausible to me. - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c..."
Not exactly. Sandberg's conclusion is that it may always be cheaper to use floppy proteins in huge messy systems than to *compute emulations* of floppy proteins in huge messy systems. That's extremely plausible, because we still can't compute the behavior of even *single* floppy proteins in most cases, and never if taking into account only the mildest complexities of solutes or membranes. It's Vastly easier to just use a protein that to compute it's behavior.
This is no way rules out doing equivalent or similar computations electronically - it just indicates it may be very difficult or impossible to use vast excesses of computing power to do an extravagantly wasteful computation to get around the enormous problems of figuring out how the brain works and writing programs to replace it.