Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It

gwern

In this essay I argue the following:

Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in ever more-advanced chip fabs; cutting-edge chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable to state actors (but not non-state actors such as terrorists). Therefore: the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs.

Full essay: http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law

In this essay I argue the following:

Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in ever more-advanced chip fabs; cutting-edge chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable to state actors (but not non-state actors such as terrorists). Therefore: the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs.

Full essay: http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law

Maybe there's an intermediate possibility between WBE and de novo AI-- upload an animal brain (how about a crow? a mouse?) and set it to self-improvement. You'd still have to figure out Friendliness for it, but Friendliness might be a hard problem even for an uploaded human brain. How would you identify sufficient Friendliness when you're choosing humans to unpload? I'm assuming that human ems would self-improve, even if it's a much harder problem than improving a de novo AI.

Moore's Second Law reminds me of a good enough for sf notion I've got. Chip fabs keep getting more expensive until there's one per spiral arm.

More seriously, how stable is the Second Law likely to be? The First Law implies increasing competence at making things, and whether the First Law eventually dominates the Second or the other way around isn't obvious.

Maybe there's an intermediate possibility between WBE and de novo AI-- upload an animal brain (how about a crow? a mouse?) and set it to self-improvement.

It's possible, but I don't know of any reason we would expect an animal brain could recursively improve. As matters stand, all we know is that groups of humans can self-improve - so we don't even know if a single human is smart enough to self-improve as an upload. (Maybe human brains can fall into ruts or inevitably degenerate after enough subjective time.) This isn't too optimistic about crows or mic... (read more)

-3billswift14y

Or the lobsters in Accelerando.

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Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It

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Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It

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