especially if we push the right techs so that lo-fi WBE and hi-fi WBE arrive at nearly the same time.
This seems to me likely to be very hard, without something like a singleton or a project with a massive lead over its competitors that can take its time and is willing to despite the strangeness and difficulty of the problem, competitive pressures, etc.
A boost to neuroimaging goes into the public tech base, accelerating all WBE projects without any special advantage to the safety-oriented. The thought with decision theory is that the combination of its direct effects, and its role in bringing talented people to work on AI safety, will be much more targeted.
If you were convinced that the growth of the AI risk research community, and a closed FAI research team, were of near-zero value, and that decision theory of the sort people have published is likely to be a major factor for building AGI, the argument would not go through. But I would still rather build fungible resources and analytic capacities in that situation than push neuroimaging forward, given my current state of knowledge.
A boost to neuroimaging goes into the public tech base, accelerating all WBE projects without any special advantage to the safety-oriented.
I don't understand why you say that. Wouldn't safety-oriented WBE projects have greater requirements for neuroimaging? As I mentioned before, pushing neuroimaging now reduces the likelihood that by the time cell modeling and computing hardware let us do brain-like simulations, neuroimaging isn't ready for hi-fi scanning so the only projects that can proceed will be lo-fi simulations.
...The thought with decision theory
At the FHI, we are currently working on a project around whole brain emulations (WBE), or uploads. One important question is if getting to whole brain emulations first would make subsequent AGI creation
If you have any opinions or ideas on this, please submit them here. No need to present an organised overall argument; we'll be doing that. What would help most is any unusual suggestion, that we might not have thought of, for how WBE would affect AGI.
EDIT: Many thanks to everyone who suggested ideas here, they've been taken under consideration.