rwallace comments on Hedging our Bets: The Case for Pursuing Whole Brain Emulation to Safeguard Humanity's Future - Less Wrong
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I agree with a lot of your points about the advantages of WBE vs friendly AI. That said, look at the margins. Quite a few people are already working on WBE. Not very many people are working on friendly AI. Taking this into consideration, I think an extra dollar is better spent on FAI research than WBE research.
Also, a world of uploads without FAI would probably not preserve human values for long. The uploads that changed themselves in such a way to grow faster (convert the most resources or make the most copies of themselves) would replace uploads that preserved human values. For example, an upload could probably make more copies of itself it if deleted its capacities for humor and empathy.
I don't think any human being is stable or sane in the way FAI would be stable and sane.
This doesn't follow. It's not clear at all that there is sufficient investment in WBE that substantial diminishing returns have kicked in at the margins.
I didn't say money spent on WBE research suffered from diminishing returns. I said that $X spent on FAI research probably has more benefit than $X spent on WBE research.
This is because the amount of money spent on WBE is much much greater than that spent on FAI. The Blue Brain Project has funding from Switzerland, Spain, and IBM among others. Just that one project probably has an order of magnitude more money than the whole FAI field. Unless you think WBE offers an order of magnitude greater benefit than FAI, you should favor spending more on FAI.
No, all that matters is that the increase in utility by increasing WBE funding is greater than an increase in utility by increasing FAI funding. If neither has hit diminishing returns then the amount of current funding is irrelevant to this calculation.