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

I wasn't sure that this was worth acting on, but I see that another person seems to be taking it the wrong way, so I guess you are right. I've done the following:

Substantially edited the summary here and there to make the logic clearer and mention upfront that terrorism won't work
Changed the title of the essay
Deleted the body here so people will have to read the full up-to-date version and not whatever old version is here
Reworked the intro sections to give more background and a hopefully more logical flow

Oh thank goodness you did something about this! I guess you didn't read every comment on your thread, or you just didn't take rwallace seriously at first, but rwallace actually decided to quit LessWrong because of your essay. You can tell for sure because that's the last thing they said here and they haven't posted anything since March: http://lesswrong.com/user/rwallace/

Maybe somebody should let them know... since they don't come to the site anymore, that would be hard, but if you know who the person's friends are, you could ask if they'll pass the mes... (read more)

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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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