They are very careful to not mention certain things in their video: nothing involving the computational nature of the human identity / “consciousness”. Nothing we would call “whole brain emulation”.
I have little doubt that what they choose to mention, and what they choose not to mention, in their video is driven more by signalling considerations than by what they consider to be technologically (in)feasible. Can they do what they claim? Create a model of the human brain detailed enough to obtain non-trivial information about brain diseases and computational processes used in the brain, but coarse enough to not have moral implications? Of course I do not know the answer to this question.
Mentioning it would pattern-match to “science fiction” rather than “serious research” in the intended audience’s minds. It would cost them credibility.
How so? They should be thinking about it (meaning purposefully dodging it if they want to conceal thinking about it?)Personally, I doubt they are at that point yet at all.
1 billion dollars earmarked for whole brain simulation makes it seem a lot more likely that we’ll brute force a naive version of AI well before we have the ability to prove any kind of friendliness. If that AI is seeded by the simulated brain of an actual human though… who knows. I’d like to think that if it were my brain and at some point I became singularity-scale intelligent that I wouldn’t create a horrible future for humanity (by our present day perspective) but it’s pretty hard to claim that with any confidence.
The Human Brain Project seems to have garnered some media attention recently. None of it particularly deep or informative, what are your thoughts?
They are very careful to not mention certain things in their video: nothing involving the computational nature of the human identity / “consciousness”. Nothing we would call “whole brain emulation”.
I have little doubt that what they choose to mention, and what they choose not to mention, in their video is driven more by signalling considerations than by what they consider to be technologically (in)feasible. Can they do what they claim? Create a model of the human brain detailed enough to obtain non-trivial information about brain diseases and computational processes used in the brain, but coarse enough to not have moral implications? Of course I do not know the answer to this question.
Kurzweil, who is widely agreed to be rather optimistic in his predictions, predicts
They seem t be purposefully dodging talking about moral significance of the simulated brain, which is worrying...
Mentioning it would pattern-match to “science fiction” rather than “serious research” in the intended audience’s minds. It would cost them credibility.
IIRC, the Nature or Ars Technica article mentioned that something like 1% of the funds will be going to ethicists and philosophers.
How so? They should be thinking about it (meaning purposefully dodging it if they want to conceal thinking about it?)Personally, I doubt they are at that point yet at all.
1 billion dollars earmarked for whole brain simulation makes it seem a lot more likely that we’ll brute force a naive version of AI well before we have the ability to prove any kind of friendliness. If that AI is seeded by the simulated brain of an actual human though… who knows. I’d like to think that if it were my brain and at some point I became singularity-scale intelligent that I wouldn’t create a horrible future for humanity (by our present day perspective) but it’s pretty hard to claim that with any confidence.
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