On 9/11/06, Michael Anissimov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Technologically, AI is far far easier than uploading. So, AI will come first, and we will have to build AI that is reliably nice to us, or suffer the consequences.
(...)
I am not so sure that AI is easier than uploading. Surely upload needs gathering of massive amounts of information difficult to obtain (brain circuitry and its patterns of activity) and its reimplementation in some fine hardware. However, that is a brute force process, and Moore Law-type curves of improvement are likely to improve those brute force processes in such a way that uploading gets possible in a not so distant future. And this brute force approach is possible because we basically only need to know how the lowest level components of the brain (neurons) work, without needing to know how the mind as a whole works. In order to produce strong AI, though, we need to understand the mind from low to high levels, or understand the processes that make high levels emerge from low ones. That seems a much tortuous scientific path, one that cannot be achieved by conventional and comparatively predictable curves of engineering improvement. I remember a scifi novel, "The Stone Cannal", where at some point a group of characters needs a lot of sentient robots for a given task. AI had not been developed yet, but uploads were possible. So they use a lot of stored uploads of people that no one wanted to revive and use them to animate the robots. (Those upload robots are "enslaved" by irresistible pleasure rewards given in virtual reality environments. ;-) P.S.: currently when I press the reply button I reply to the sender instead of replying to the list, and I had to restart writing this message because of that. Would someone please change the list setting so that we reply to the list instead of the sender? ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
