how useful is analysis given “ems behave just like fast copyable humans” assumption probably won’t be valid for long?
Yeah, I don’t see how that assumption could last long.
Make me an upload, and suddenly you’ve got a bunch of copies learning a bunch of different things, and another bunch of copies experimenting and learning on how to create diff patches to do stable knowledge merging from multiple studying branch copies. Wouldn’t be long before the trunk mind becomes a supergenius polyexpert if not an outright general superintelligence, if it works.
That’s just one random way things could go weird out of many others anyone could think of.
I think Hanson comes at this from the angle of “let’s apply what’s in our standard academic toolbox to this problem”. I think there might be people who find this approach convincing who would skim over more speculative-sounding stuff, so I think that approach might be worth pursuing.
I really don’t disagree with your analysis but I wonder which current academic discipline comes closest to being able to frame this kind of idea?
Yeah, I don’t see how that assumption could last long.
Make me an upload, and suddenly you’ve got a bunch of copies learning a bunch of different things, and another bunch of copies experimenting and learning on how to create diff patches to do stable knowledge merging from multiple studying branch copies. Wouldn’t be long before the trunk mind becomes a supergenius polyexpert if not an outright general superintelligence, if it works.
That’s just one random way things could go weird out of many others anyone could think of.
I think Hanson comes at this from the angle of “let’s apply what’s in our standard academic toolbox to this problem”. I think there might be people who find this approach convincing who would skim over more speculative-sounding stuff, so I think that approach might be worth pursuing.
I really don’t disagree with your analysis but I wonder which current academic discipline comes closest to being able to frame this kind of idea?