So If I donate 2 million USD over the course of my life and I expect to save around 2000 lives this clearly loses out to causing human uploading to come even 1 hour earlier. Two problems:
I expect the cost of saving a life to go up in the future. So traditional charity will probably result in fewer lives saved. At what rate should I expect the cost of saving a life to change? Does Givewell attempt to graph this?
I have to figure out whether 2 million donated over the next several decades can plausibly cause uploading to happen sooner.
When uploading is first available, I expect it to be expensive, and for the available hardware to be limited in capacity. I assume $2M would make a noticeable impact on the uploading rate available. (Even if capacity grows rapidly due to singularity effects, I suspect this would be slow on the time scale of hours, unless some sort of manufacturing magic happens before uploading does.)
So you should trivially be able to bring about faster uploading if you’re willing to set up a charity with long term planning skills to do so. How much uploading bandwidth do you expect $2M to buy?
I expect most new things to first be available in small quantity at expensive prices and low quality, especially if you’re literally talking about putting them to use in the first hours or days after they become possible. In fact, no non-trivial examples that involve any specialized hardware at all come to mind. Am I missing any major ones? Are there major reasons uploading would be different?
Why expect specialized hardware to be a bottleneck? Most software programs don’t require very specialized hardware.
If computation per dollar continues on trend to far surpass minima for brain emulation, then I would expect final bottlenecks to be in brain-scanning or (more likely) understanding the neuroscience, not shaving cycles off the computation of Hodgkin-Huxley.
So If I donate 2 million USD over the course of my life and I expect to save around 2000 lives this clearly loses out to causing human uploading to come even 1 hour earlier.
Two problems:
I expect the cost of saving a life to go up in the future. So traditional charity will probably result in fewer lives saved. At what rate should I expect the cost of saving a life to change? Does Givewell attempt to graph this?
I have to figure out whether 2 million donated over the next several decades can plausibly cause uploading to happen sooner.
This is a problem I am extremely interested in. Please PM me and/or write a post if you come up with anything.
When uploading is first available, I expect it to be expensive, and for the available hardware to be limited in capacity. I assume $2M would make a noticeable impact on the uploading rate available. (Even if capacity grows rapidly due to singularity effects, I suspect this would be slow on the time scale of hours, unless some sort of manufacturing magic happens before uploading does.)
So you should trivially be able to bring about faster uploading if you’re willing to set up a charity with long term planning skills to do so. How much uploading bandwidth do you expect $2M to buy?
So do you expect uploading in the next several decades, or big slowdowns in the improvement of computation per dollar?
I expect most new things to first be available in small quantity at expensive prices and low quality, especially if you’re literally talking about putting them to use in the first hours or days after they become possible. In fact, no non-trivial examples that involve any specialized hardware at all come to mind. Am I missing any major ones? Are there major reasons uploading would be different?
Why expect specialized hardware to be a bottleneck? Most software programs don’t require very specialized hardware.
If computation per dollar continues on trend to far surpass minima for brain emulation, then I would expect final bottlenecks to be in brain-scanning or (more likely) understanding the neuroscience, not shaving cycles off the computation of Hodgkin-Huxley.
I’m pretty sure it was the brain-scanning that evand had in mind when referring to “specialized hardware”.
Exactly.