coming back to this I’m realizing I didn’t answer, no, I don’t think merely uploading the alignment team would really help that much, the problem is that universalizing coprotection between arbitrary blocks of matter in a way that doesn’t have adversarial examples is really really incredibly hard and being on a digital computer doesn’t really make you faster at figuring it out. you could try to self modify but if you don’t have some solution to verifiable inter matter safety, then you need to stay worried that you might be about to diverge. and I would expect almost any approach to uploads to introduce issues that are not detectable without a lot of work. if we are being serious about uploads as a proposal in the next two years it would involve suddenly doing a lot of very advanced neuroscience to try to accurately model physical neurons. that’s actually not obviously off the table to me but it doesn’t seem like an approach worth pushing.
coming back to this I’m realizing I didn’t answer, no, I don’t think merely uploading the alignment team would really help that much, the problem is that universalizing coprotection between arbitrary blocks of matter in a way that doesn’t have adversarial examples is really really incredibly hard and being on a digital computer doesn’t really make you faster at figuring it out. you could try to self modify but if you don’t have some solution to verifiable inter matter safety, then you need to stay worried that you might be about to diverge. and I would expect almost any approach to uploads to introduce issues that are not detectable without a lot of work. if we are being serious about uploads as a proposal in the next two years it would involve suddenly doing a lot of very advanced neuroscience to try to accurately model physical neurons. that’s actually not obviously off the table to me but it doesn’t seem like an approach worth pushing.