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Peter_de_Blanc comments on Hedging our Bets: The Case for Pursuing Whole Brain Emulation to Safeguard Humanity's Future - Less Wrong
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Okay, let's go on the brain-simulation path. Let's start with something simple, like a lobster or a dog... oh wait, what if it transcends and isn't human-friendly. All right, we'll stick to human brains... oh wait, what if our model of neural function is wrong and we create a sociopathic copy that isn't human-friendly. All right, we'll work on human brain regions separately, and absolutely make sure that we have them all right before we do a whole brain... oh wait, what if one of our partial brain models transcends and isn't human-friendly.
And while you, whose reason for taking this path is to create a human-friendly future, struggle to avoid these pitfalls, there will be others who aren't so cautious, and who want to conduct experiments like hotwiring together cognitive modules that are merely brain-inspired, just to see what happens, or in the expectation of something cool, or because they want a smarter vacuum cleaner.
How does a lobster simulation transcend?
Clearly people in this thread are not Charles Stross fans.
For those not getting this, the book Accelerando starts with the main character being called by something with a russian accent that claims to be a neuromorphic AI based off of lobsters grafted into some knowledge management. This AI (roughly "the lobsters") seeks a human who can help them "defect".
I recommend the book! The ideas aren't super deep in retrospect but its "near future" parts have one hilariously juxtaposed geeky allusion after another and the later parts are an interesting take on post-human politics and economics.
I assume the lobsters were chosen because of existing research in this area. For example, there are techniques for keeping bits alive in vitro, there is modeling work from the 1990's trying to reproduce known neural mechanisms in silico, and I remember (but couldn't find the link) that a team had some success around 2001(?) doing a moravec transfer to one or more cells in a lobster ganglia (minus the nanotech of course). There are lots of papers in this area. The ones I linked to were easy to find.
That sounds like a koan.
Someone uses it to explore its own fitness landscape.
Huh? Lobsters have been exploring their own fitness landscape for quite some time and haven't transcended yet. Evolution doesn't inevitably lead towards intelligence.
I was way too obscure. I meant: turn it into a Godel machine by modifying the lobster program to explore and evaluate the space of altered lobster programs.
Why do you need a lobster for that? You could start today with any old piece of open source code and any measure of "fitness" you like. People have tried to do this for awhile without much success.