A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur while using it, and basic constraints like Amdahl's law limit the scientific uses. A comparison with the position of an Artificial Intelligence such as an emulated human brain seems fair, except most of the time dilation disadvantages do not apply or can be ameliorated and hence any speedups could be quite effectively exploited. I suggest that skeptics of the idea that speedups give advantages are implicitly working off the crippled time dilation tool and not making allowance for the disanalogies.
Master version on gwern.net
Can you say more about why not?
Not that you're obligated to; preferences are preferences. But this particular preference is sufficiently alien to me that I'd like to understand it better.
I like my personal identity and creating several causally interacting copies of me would feel like diluting it. I could anticipate a future in which there would be several instances of me with different life experiences since the moment of splitting. All of those experiences would be 'mine' in a way, yet 'I' wouldn't own most of them.
This would be less of a problem if there was a way to merge back into a single person after doing whatever needed doing but that's not a given. Copying is straightforward in an uploading scenario while merging requires progres... (read more)