In general human cognitive enhancement could help AGI alignment if it were at scale before AGI, but the cognitive enhancements on offer seem like we probably won’t get very much out of them before AGI, and they absolutely don’t suffice to ‘keep up’ with AGI for more than a few weeks or months (as AI R&D efforts rapidly improve AI while human brains remain similar, rendering human-AI cyborg basically AI systems). So benefit from those channels, especially for something like BCI, has to add value mainly by making better initial decisions, like successfully aligning early AGI, rather than staying competitive. On the other hand, advanced AGI can quickly develop technologies like whole brain emulation (likely more potent than BCI by far).
BCI as a direct tool for alignment I don’t think makes much sense. Giving advanced AGI read-write access to human brains doesn’t seem like the thing to do with an AI that you don’t trust. On the other hand, an AGI that is trying to help you will have a great understanding of what you’re trying to communicate through speech. Bottlenecks look to me more like they lie in human thinking speeds, not communication bandwidth.
BCI might provide important mind-reading or motivational changes (e.g. US and PRC leaders being able to verify they were respectively telling the truth about an AGI treaty), but big cognitive enhancement through that route seems tricky in developed adult brains: much of the variation in human cognitive abilities goes through early brain development (e.g. genes expressed then).
Genetic engineering sorts of things would take decades to have an effect, so are only relevant for bets on long timelines for AI.
Human brain emulation is an alternative path to AGI, but suffers from the problem that understanding pieces of the brain (e.g. the algorithms of cortical columns) could enable neuroscience-inspired AGI before emulation of specific human minds. That one seems relatively promising as a thing to try to do with early AGI, and can go further than the others (as emulations could be gradually enhanced further into enormous superintelligent human-derived minds, and at least sped up and copied with more computing hardware).
In general human cognitive enhancement could help AGI alignment if it were at scale before AGI, but the cognitive enhancements on offer seem like we probably won’t get very much out of them before AGI, and they absolutely don’t suffice to ‘keep up’ with AGI for more than a few weeks or months (as AI R&D efforts rapidly improve AI while human brains remain similar, rendering human-AI cyborg basically AI systems). So benefit from those channels, especially for something like BCI, has to add value mainly by making better initial decisions, like successfully aligning early AGI, rather than staying competitive. On the other hand, advanced AGI can quickly develop technologies like whole brain emulation (likely more potent than BCI by far).
BCI as a direct tool for alignment I don’t think makes much sense. Giving advanced AGI read-write access to human brains doesn’t seem like the thing to do with an AI that you don’t trust. On the other hand, an AGI that is trying to help you will have a great understanding of what you’re trying to communicate through speech. Bottlenecks look to me more like they lie in human thinking speeds, not communication bandwidth.
BCI might provide important mind-reading or motivational changes (e.g. US and PRC leaders being able to verify they were respectively telling the truth about an AGI treaty), but big cognitive enhancement through that route seems tricky in developed adult brains: much of the variation in human cognitive abilities goes through early brain development (e.g. genes expressed then).
Genetic engineering sorts of things would take decades to have an effect, so are only relevant for bets on long timelines for AI.
Human brain emulation is an alternative path to AGI, but suffers from the problem that understanding pieces of the brain (e.g. the algorithms of cortical columns) could enable neuroscience-inspired AGI before emulation of specific human minds. That one seems relatively promising as a thing to try to do with early AGI, and can go further than the others (as emulations could be gradually enhanced further into enormous superintelligent human-derived minds, and at least sped up and copied with more computing hardware).