WBE safety could benefit from an existing body of knowledge about human behavior and capabilities, and the spaghetti code of the brain could plausibly impose a higher barrier to rapid self-improvement. And institutions exploiting the cheap copyability of brain emulations could greatly help in stabilizing benevolent motivations.
WBE is a tiny region of the space of AI designs that we can imagine as plausible possibilities, and we have less uncertainty about it than about “whatever non-WBE AI technology comes first.” Some architectures might be easier to make safe, and others harder, but if you are highly uncertain about non-WBE AI’s properties then you need wide confidence intervals.
WBE also has the nice property that it is relatively all-or-nothing. With de novo AI, designers will be tempted to trade off design safety for speed, but for WBE a design that works at all will be relatively close to the desired motivations (there will still be tradeoffs with emulation brain damage, but the effect seems less severe than for de novo AI). Attempts to reduce WBE risk might just involve preparing analysis and institutions to manage WBE upon development, where AI safety would require control of the development process to avoid intrinsically unsafe designs.
WBE safety could benefit from an existing body of knowledge about human behavior and capabilities, and the spaghetti code of the brain could plausibly impose a higher barrier to rapid self-improvement. And institutions exploiting the cheap copyability of brain emulations could greatly help in stabilizing benevolent motivations.
WBE is a tiny region of the space of AI designs that we can imagine as plausible possibilities, and we have less uncertainty about it than about “whatever non-WBE AI technology comes first.” Some architectures might be easier to make safe, and others harder, but if you are highly uncertain about non-WBE AI’s properties then you need wide confidence intervals.
WBE also has the nice property that it is relatively all-or-nothing. With de novo AI, designers will be tempted to trade off design safety for speed, but for WBE a design that works at all will be relatively close to the desired motivations (there will still be tradeoffs with emulation brain damage, but the effect seems less severe than for de novo AI). Attempts to reduce WBE risk might just involve preparing analysis and institutions to manage WBE upon development, where AI safety would require control of the development process to avoid intrinsically unsafe designs.
This is a good summary.