Will the ems save us from the robots?

Stuart_Armstrong

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

more or less likely to happen,
more or less likely to be survivable.

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.

more or less likely to happen,
more or less likely to be survivable.

EDIT: Many thanks to everyone who suggested ideas here, they've been taken under consideration.

Once we have ems, it's certain that enough computer power would be available for AGI.

My speculation is that the sort of people who would be first in line to be uploaded would also tend to be the sort of people who, given enough computer power and time, might be able to brute-force some sort of AGI. So, if somehow we start making ems before we get FAI, my guess is that AGI will be forthcoming quite shortly, and it will be unfriendly.

But I have a hard time seeing how we can actually get that much computer power without some fool having already made some sort of UFAI.

(All this is under the assumption that ems will not be terribly efficient at first because we'll be running them without actually understanding them-- thus simulating perhaps 10x-100x+ more stuff than we actually need to.)

So, I say more likely to #1, and less likely to #2.