= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (153)
What's your success criterion? Do you mean a human mind that the unuploaded copy will accept as a successful upload? Or that the relatives will accept? Or that some panel of expert judges will accept? In the latter cases, will it have to be unanimous?
Some people with particularly detailed Facebook timelines can conceivably be emulated well enough to fool the very gullible without any uploading taking place at all. Very senile people would also be easy to emulate. Babies would be easier than people with complex memories. Very rational people would be easier than those with idiosyncratic patterns of reasoning. People who do work that is hard to characterize (like architecture) would be easier to emulate than those who do work we find easy to characterize (like fiction writing). And so on.
I imagine, on the one hand, a brain scan and emulation system that convinces a couple of aging relatives that granny is now in the computer. And on the other hand, a system that allows a team of expert scientists to keep working together after the demise of one of them. Where on this spectrum is what you mean?
Because I wouldn't be surprised if the former took a million times less memory and computational power than the latter.
I bet some architects are doing fairly routine work. I'm sure that some writers do work which is hard to characterize. Stephen King does gore by the yard, but every now and then he writes a story which is different from his usual, and that's the part which would be hard for an em to get right.
Considering Scott Alexander, I don't think it's adequate to contrast very rational people against people with idiosyncratic patterns of reasoning.
More generally, there are computer programs which compose music by using patterns from major composers, and result is "sounds like what Bach would write on an off day". The hard challenge is to get the next "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring".
I think we are committing some fallacy here. The same fallacy that leads to people to judge things simple once they are understood.
The real complexity of real life lies in interdependencies that are hard to capture and make precise. That doesn't mean that anything humans do can't be made precise and understood in principle. It just means that the things we understand seem simple.