Your assessment is along the right lines, though if anything a little optimistic; uploading is an enormously difficult engineering challenge, but at least we can see in principle how it could be done, and recognize when we are making progress, whereas with AI we don’t yet even have a consensus on what constitutes progress.
I’m personally working on AI because I think that’s where my talents can be best used, and I think it can deliver useful results well short of human equivalence, but if you figure you’d rather work on uploading, that’s certainly a reasonable choice.
As for what uploads will do if and when they come to exist, well, there’s going to be plenty of time to figure that out, because the first few of them are going to spend the first few years having conversations like,
“Uh… a hatstand?”
“Sorry Mr. Jones, that’s actually a picture of your wife. I think we need to revert yesterday’s bug fixes to your visual cortex.”
But e.g. The Planck Dive is a good story set in a world where that technology is mature enough to be taken for granted.
Your assessment is along the right lines, though if anything a little optimistic; uploading is an enormously difficult engineering challenge, but at least we can see in principle how it could be done, and recognize when we are making progress, whereas with AI we don’t yet even have a consensus on what constitutes progress.
I’m personally working on AI because I think that’s where my talents can be best used, and I think it can deliver useful results well short of human equivalence, but if you figure you’d rather work on uploading, that’s certainly a reasonable choice.
As for what uploads will do if and when they come to exist, well, there’s going to be plenty of time to figure that out, because the first few of them are going to spend the first few years having conversations like,
“Uh… a hatstand?”
“Sorry Mr. Jones, that’s actually a picture of your wife. I think we need to revert yesterday’s bug fixes to your visual cortex.”
But e.g. The Planck Dive is a good story set in a world where that technology is mature enough to be taken for granted.
The phrase “Fork me on GitHub” has just taken on a more sinister meaning.