5. According to the PhilPapers Surveys, 56.5% of philosophers endorse physicalism, vs. 27.1% who endorse non-physicalism and 16.4% “other.” I expect the vast majority of philosophers who endorse physicalism to agree that a sufficiently detailed simulation of a human would be conscious. (My understanding is that biological naturalism is a fringe/unpopular position, and that physicalism + rejecting biological naturalism would imply believing that sufficiently detailed simulations of humans would be conscious.) I also expect that some philosophers who don’t endorse physicalism would still believe that such simulations would be conscious (David Chalmers is an example—see The Conscious Mind). These expectations are just based on my impressions of the field.
6. From an email from a physicist friend: “I think a lot of people have the intuition that real neural activity, produced by real chemical reactions from real neurotransmitters, and real electrical activity that you can feel with your hand, somehow has some property that mere computer code can’t have. But one of the overwhelming messages of modern physics has been that everything that exists—particles, fields, atoms, etc, is best thought of in terms of information, and may simply *be* information. The universe may perhaps be best described as a mathematical abstraction. Chemical reactions don’t come from some essential property of atoms but instead from subtle interactions between their valence electron shells. Electrons and protons aren’t well-defined particles, but abstract clouds of probability mass. Even the concept of “particles” is misleading; what seems to actually exist is quantum fields which are the solutions of abstract mathematical equations, and some of whose states are labeled by humans as “1 particle” or “2 particles”. To be a bit metaphorical, we are like tiny ripples on vast abstract mathematical waves, ripples whose patterns and dynamics happen to execute the information processing corresponding to what we call sentience. If you ask me our existence and the substrate we live on is already much weirder and more ephemeral than anything we might upload humans onto.”
12. I could also imagine a future in which the two key properties I list in the next paragraph - (a) moral value and human rights (b) human-level-or-above capabilities—were totally separated. That is, there could be a world full of (a) AIs with human-level-or-above capabilities, but no consciousness or moral value; (b) digital entities with moral value and conscious experience, but very few skills compared to AIs and even compared to today’s people. Most of what I say in this piece about a world of “digital people” would apply to such a world; in this case you could sort of think of a “digital people” as “teams” of AIs and morally-valuable-but-low-skill entities.
4. It’s also possible there could be conscious “digital people” who did not resemble today’s humans, but I won’t go into that here—I’ll just focus on the concrete example of “digital people” that are virtual versions of humans.
9. This statement is based on my understanding of conventional wisdom plus the fact that recorded video and audio often seems quite realistic, implying that the camera/microphone didn’t fail to record much important information about its source.
11. This report concludes that a computer costing ~$10,000 today has enough computational power (10^14 FLOP/s, a measure of computational power) to be within 1⁄10 of the author’s best guess at what it would take to replicate the input-output behavior of a human brain (10^15 FLOP/s). If we take the author’s high-end estimate rather than best guess, it is about 10 million times as much computation (10^22 FLOP/s), which would presumably cost $1 trillion today—probably too high to be worth it, but computing is still getting cheaper. It’s possible that replicating the input-output behavior alone wouldn’t be enough detail to attain “consciousness,” though I’d guess it would be, and either way it would be sufficient for the productivity and social science consequences. ↩
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5. According to the PhilPapers Surveys, 56.5% of philosophers endorse physicalism, vs. 27.1% who endorse non-physicalism and 16.4% “other.” I expect the vast majority of philosophers who endorse physicalism to agree that a sufficiently detailed simulation of a human would be conscious. (My understanding is that biological naturalism is a fringe/unpopular position, and that physicalism + rejecting biological naturalism would imply believing that sufficiently detailed simulations of humans would be conscious.) I also expect that some philosophers who don’t endorse physicalism would still believe that such simulations would be conscious (David Chalmers is an example—see The Conscious Mind). These expectations are just based on my impressions of the field.
6. From an email from a physicist friend: “I think a lot of people have the intuition that real neural activity, produced by real chemical reactions from real neurotransmitters, and real electrical activity that you can feel with your hand, somehow has some property that mere computer code can’t have. But one of the overwhelming messages of modern physics has been that everything that exists—particles, fields, atoms, etc, is best thought of in terms of information, and may simply *be* information. The universe may perhaps be best described as a mathematical abstraction. Chemical reactions don’t come from some essential property of atoms but instead from subtle interactions between their valence electron shells. Electrons and protons aren’t well-defined particles, but abstract clouds of probability mass. Even the concept of “particles” is misleading; what seems to actually exist is quantum fields which are the solutions of abstract mathematical equations, and some of whose states are labeled by humans as “1 particle” or “2 particles”. To be a bit metaphorical, we are like tiny ripples on vast abstract mathematical waves, ripples whose patterns and dynamics happen to execute the information processing corresponding to what we call sentience. If you ask me our existence and the substrate we live on is already much weirder and more ephemeral than anything we might upload humans onto.”
12. I could also imagine a future in which the two key properties I list in the next paragraph - (a) moral value and human rights (b) human-level-or-above capabilities—were totally separated. That is, there could be a world full of (a) AIs with human-level-or-above capabilities, but no consciousness or moral value; (b) digital entities with moral value and conscious experience, but very few skills compared to AIs and even compared to today’s people. Most of what I say in this piece about a world of “digital people” would apply to such a world; in this case you could sort of think of a “digital people” as “teams” of AIs and morally-valuable-but-low-skill entities.
1. The agents (“bad guys”) are more like digital people. In fact, one extensively copies himself.
2. These are all taken from this video, except for the last one.
3. Football video games have already expanded to simulate offseason tradings, signings and setting ticket prices.
4. It’s also possible there could be conscious “digital people” who did not resemble today’s humans, but I won’t go into that here—I’ll just focus on the concrete example of “digital people” that are virtual versions of humans.
7. I actually expect it would start off very expensive, but become cheaper very quickly due to a productivity explosion, discussed below.
8. For an illustration of this, see this report: How much computational power does it take to match the human brain? (Particularly the Uncertainty in neuroscience section.) Even estimating how many meaningful operations the human brain performs is, today, very difficult and fraught—let alone characterizing what those operations are.
9. This statement is based on my understanding of conventional wisdom plus the fact that recorded video and audio often seems quite realistic, implying that the camera/microphone didn’t fail to record much important information about its source.
10. This is assuming technology continues to advance, the species doesn’t go extinct, etc.
11. This report concludes that a computer costing ~$10,000 today has enough computational power (10^14 FLOP/s, a measure of computational power) to be within 1⁄10 of the author’s best guess at what it would take to replicate the input-output behavior of a human brain (10^15 FLOP/s). If we take the author’s high-end estimate rather than best guess, it is about 10 million times as much computation (10^22 FLOP/s), which would presumably cost $1 trillion today—probably too high to be worth it, but computing is still getting cheaper. It’s possible that replicating the input-output behavior alone wouldn’t be enough detail to attain “consciousness,” though I’d guess it would be, and either way it would be sufficient for the productivity and social science consequences. ↩