If there are functional brain emulations at some point, how expensive do you think the first ones will be? How soon will they be cheap enough to replace an average human in their job?
For a wide variety of reasons, human whole-brain emulations are unlikely to be used to replace workers. If high-fidelity whole brain emulation becomes available, employers will rapidly seek to acquire improved versions with characteristics that no human has.
The human brain has a series of limitations which could be readily engineered away in a hybrid neuromorphic system. Here are just a few:
Most people cannot reliably remember a twelve-digit number they just heard five minutes later. If an employer could design a worker’s mind, why give it this limitation?
If the goal is to control a piece of equipment or machinery, the best solution may not be to re-purpose simulated neurons running to imaginary fingers. Instead, interface the piece of equipment more directly to the simulated mind.
We require much longer to perform a calculation than computers do, and we often produce the wrong solution. If a simulated worker had to do arithmetic, why would it use neural processing?
The vagus nerve and much of the brain stem seem unnecessary if they not attached to a very human-like body. Why include them in a worker with no body?
Our attention frequently drifts off-task. An optimal worker would not.
Why create a worker which loses its patience or feels disrespected by customers who are vaguely insulting but not worth correcting?
Human workers require monetary rewards and/or job satisfaction. The ideal worker would continue to operate without either. If technology was sufficient to produce a high-fidelity brain emulation, incentives would be very high to engineer these needs out of it.
People need sleep to clear waste products from the brain via the glymphatic system (I recommend that anyone interested in neurology read about this system), perhaps along with other purposes. A hi-fidelity whole-brain emulation might have to simulate this process, but why engineer a worker that gets tired or has to sleep?
People might have moral qualms about shutting down a hi-fidelity whole brain emulation. Employers would prefer to work with systems that they can turn on and off at will.
We should be imagining a future where unpaid hybrid-neuromorphic or algorithmic AI which is quite different from us is performing additional functions in the economy.
Then perhaps we should imagine an economy where human labor is only required for tasks where people specifically prefer that the task is performed by a person.
Some of these modifications seem relatively straightforward (e.g. I’d guess it’s easier to attach an emulated mind to a piece of machinery than to make it a robot body which can then control the machinery). In other cases it seems you are assuming that having a brain emulation means being able to design a mind arbitrarily. Are you supposing that in order to have a brain emulation, you will need a fairly detailed understanding of how minds work, or that you will just be able to play around with emulations a lot more, perhaps destroying and copying them to create artificial selection? (Or something else?)
For instance, it’s not obvious to me how, given a brain emulation, you would create a worker who does not lose focus on the task at hand.
First of all, there are a tremendous number of ways to improve on the human mind, so if you wonder about one example or another, then my point is still valid: Hi-fidelity human whole-brain emulation is not the employer’s best alternative to get work done.
Just to add a few more:
This virtual worker would be able to reference a recording of every conversation it has ever had and replay every encounter pixel-by-pixel.
For that matter, it can reference any conversation in a much larger database.
The virtual worker does not need to metabolize glucose in order to operate, and it does not have a blood supply. Its nutrition levels, oxygen levels and hormone levels are all simulated to begin with, so why not optimize them for performance?
The employer could simulate dosing the virtual worker with performance-enhancing drug, then immediately return it to a condition where the drug was not present.
Suppose two virtual employees were required to solve a problem in tandem. Would they really communicate by forming fake neurological instructions to fake sets of vocal chords, then re-processing this information through fake ears?
Not for long, anyway.
Suppose that a virtual employee was going to operate in a laboratory. The employer could easily give it a software tool which remembers the contents of every flask and vial, and what cabinet each vial is in, for an entire laboratory complex.
There is no need for a virtual employee to ever forget where an object was placed or the contents of a container.
On the question of whether we will know enough to re-engineer a simulated brain prior to the development of high-fidelity whole brain emulation: Way before this technology exists, NIH and international colleagues will produce a far less granular map of the human connectome at every life stage. We will have this map both for workers who are very effective and for workers who are less effective. Employers will select and enhance the effective traits.
Most any method of neurological enhancement available for wetware brains will be at least as effective on virtual brains, and generally more effective. For example, virtual brains need not be attached to livers which metabolize drugs in a non-linear way.
As for attention in particular, yes, I do feel comfortable that given all of the research work being applied to that specific issue, there is a good chance that we will have a grasp of the neurological basis behind attention way prior to the time when we can do high-fidelity whole brain emulation.
Being able to alter the mechanism behind, for example, attention, rewards or pain may require a lot less than an arbitrary ability to re-engineer the brain.
There is another way to come at this issue- let’s suppose that we are talking about doing office work like budget or accounting.
Why in the world would an employer want its virtual accountant to enter numbers into a spreadsheet using imaginary fingers typing into an imaginary keyboard?
They are likely to find a better way.
If the virtual employee was tasked to do some writing, they would be more effective with some kind of direct access to quotations, a dictionary and a thesaurus, rather than reading such documents with fake eyes.
Tremendous incentives would exist to re-engineer every important software package and reference work in a way that is specifically tailored to make these virtual employees more efficient.
In a very short time, all of these various optimizations will cause the system to diverge from being human.
I agree various optimizations like these will be made, at least in the absence of anything else radical getting in the way of this trajectory. Though I tend to think improved memories and different modes of communication and the like would not make humans all that inhuman in the scheme of things. These don’t seem much more extreme than the addition of the pencil, the telephone and coffee to our set of tools.
So, I am just going to make one more pass at this-what we have is:
A simulated brain which does not die and has substantially engineered emotions and a different rewards system.
Perhaps operating at ten or a hundred times the speed
Which does not have to be paid in money
With a new kind of connection to other brains
A new kind of connection to machinery
Which does not see with eyes or hear with ears
Which can include a hundred versions of itself, each of which was trained in a different language or job specialty
With a vast ability to calculate and remember
Has neither hunger, thirst nor sexuality
Which feels pain or pleasure largely on command
No hormones, no sleep, no heartbeat
This system seems quite different from you, me, or a social unit of a number of people which has access to computers. For that matter this whole vision is just an interim phase on the way to something that strings neurologically-inspired elements and algorithms together in entirely novel ways, or abandons neurological inspiration entirely.
An algorithmic economy of many human-like whole brain emulations is not a consistent future vision. We should be thinking about various kinds of neuromorphic systems with diverse modes of cognitive function that replaces capitalism as we know it with something at least considerably different.
If there are functional brain emulations at some point, how expensive do you think the first ones will be? How soon will they be cheap enough to replace an average human in their job?
For a wide variety of reasons, human whole-brain emulations are unlikely to be used to replace workers. If high-fidelity whole brain emulation becomes available, employers will rapidly seek to acquire improved versions with characteristics that no human has.
The human brain has a series of limitations which could be readily engineered away in a hybrid neuromorphic system. Here are just a few:
Most people cannot reliably remember a twelve-digit number they just heard five minutes later. If an employer could design a worker’s mind, why give it this limitation?
If the goal is to control a piece of equipment or machinery, the best solution may not be to re-purpose simulated neurons running to imaginary fingers. Instead, interface the piece of equipment more directly to the simulated mind.
We require much longer to perform a calculation than computers do, and we often produce the wrong solution. If a simulated worker had to do arithmetic, why would it use neural processing?
The vagus nerve and much of the brain stem seem unnecessary if they not attached to a very human-like body. Why include them in a worker with no body?
Our attention frequently drifts off-task. An optimal worker would not.
Why create a worker which loses its patience or feels disrespected by customers who are vaguely insulting but not worth correcting?
Human workers require monetary rewards and/or job satisfaction. The ideal worker would continue to operate without either. If technology was sufficient to produce a high-fidelity brain emulation, incentives would be very high to engineer these needs out of it.
People need sleep to clear waste products from the brain via the glymphatic system (I recommend that anyone interested in neurology read about this system), perhaps along with other purposes. A hi-fidelity whole-brain emulation might have to simulate this process, but why engineer a worker that gets tired or has to sleep?
People might have moral qualms about shutting down a hi-fidelity whole brain emulation. Employers would prefer to work with systems that they can turn on and off at will.
We should be imagining a future where unpaid hybrid-neuromorphic or algorithmic AI which is quite different from us is performing additional functions in the economy.
Then perhaps we should imagine an economy where human labor is only required for tasks where people specifically prefer that the task is performed by a person.
Some of these modifications seem relatively straightforward (e.g. I’d guess it’s easier to attach an emulated mind to a piece of machinery than to make it a robot body which can then control the machinery). In other cases it seems you are assuming that having a brain emulation means being able to design a mind arbitrarily. Are you supposing that in order to have a brain emulation, you will need a fairly detailed understanding of how minds work, or that you will just be able to play around with emulations a lot more, perhaps destroying and copying them to create artificial selection? (Or something else?)
For instance, it’s not obvious to me how, given a brain emulation, you would create a worker who does not lose focus on the task at hand.
First of all, there are a tremendous number of ways to improve on the human mind, so if you wonder about one example or another, then my point is still valid: Hi-fidelity human whole-brain emulation is not the employer’s best alternative to get work done.
Just to add a few more:
This virtual worker would be able to reference a recording of every conversation it has ever had and replay every encounter pixel-by-pixel.
For that matter, it can reference any conversation in a much larger database.
The virtual worker does not need to metabolize glucose in order to operate, and it does not have a blood supply. Its nutrition levels, oxygen levels and hormone levels are all simulated to begin with, so why not optimize them for performance?
The employer could simulate dosing the virtual worker with performance-enhancing drug, then immediately return it to a condition where the drug was not present.
Suppose two virtual employees were required to solve a problem in tandem. Would they really communicate by forming fake neurological instructions to fake sets of vocal chords, then re-processing this information through fake ears?
Not for long, anyway.
Suppose that a virtual employee was going to operate in a laboratory. The employer could easily give it a software tool which remembers the contents of every flask and vial, and what cabinet each vial is in, for an entire laboratory complex.
There is no need for a virtual employee to ever forget where an object was placed or the contents of a container.
On the question of whether we will know enough to re-engineer a simulated brain prior to the development of high-fidelity whole brain emulation: Way before this technology exists, NIH and international colleagues will produce a far less granular map of the human connectome at every life stage. We will have this map both for workers who are very effective and for workers who are less effective. Employers will select and enhance the effective traits.
Most any method of neurological enhancement available for wetware brains will be at least as effective on virtual brains, and generally more effective. For example, virtual brains need not be attached to livers which metabolize drugs in a non-linear way.
As for attention in particular, yes, I do feel comfortable that given all of the research work being applied to that specific issue, there is a good chance that we will have a grasp of the neurological basis behind attention way prior to the time when we can do high-fidelity whole brain emulation.
Being able to alter the mechanism behind, for example, attention, rewards or pain may require a lot less than an arbitrary ability to re-engineer the brain.
There is another way to come at this issue- let’s suppose that we are talking about doing office work like budget or accounting.
Why in the world would an employer want its virtual accountant to enter numbers into a spreadsheet using imaginary fingers typing into an imaginary keyboard?
They are likely to find a better way.
If the virtual employee was tasked to do some writing, they would be more effective with some kind of direct access to quotations, a dictionary and a thesaurus, rather than reading such documents with fake eyes.
Tremendous incentives would exist to re-engineer every important software package and reference work in a way that is specifically tailored to make these virtual employees more efficient.
In a very short time, all of these various optimizations will cause the system to diverge from being human.
I agree various optimizations like these will be made, at least in the absence of anything else radical getting in the way of this trajectory. Though I tend to think improved memories and different modes of communication and the like would not make humans all that inhuman in the scheme of things. These don’t seem much more extreme than the addition of the pencil, the telephone and coffee to our set of tools.
I like your concrete list.
So, I am just going to make one more pass at this-what we have is:
A simulated brain which does not die and has substantially engineered emotions and a different rewards system.
Perhaps operating at ten or a hundred times the speed
Which does not have to be paid in money
With a new kind of connection to other brains
A new kind of connection to machinery
Which does not see with eyes or hear with ears
Which can include a hundred versions of itself, each of which was trained in a different language or job specialty
With a vast ability to calculate and remember
Has neither hunger, thirst nor sexuality
Which feels pain or pleasure largely on command
No hormones, no sleep, no heartbeat
This system seems quite different from you, me, or a social unit of a number of people which has access to computers. For that matter this whole vision is just an interim phase on the way to something that strings neurologically-inspired elements and algorithms together in entirely novel ways, or abandons neurological inspiration entirely.
An algorithmic economy of many human-like whole brain emulations is not a consistent future vision. We should be thinking about various kinds of neuromorphic systems with diverse modes of cognitive function that replaces capitalism as we know it with something at least considerably different.