Lumifer comments on Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Cryonics is an ambulance ride through an earthquake zone to the nearest revival facility, The distance is measured in years rather than miles, and the earthquake is the chances of history. The better the preservation, the lower the technology required to revive you, and the sooner you will reach a facility that can do it.
A "powerful enough" AI isn't magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists. We currently don't know what must be preserved and what is redundant, beyond just "keep the brain, the rest of the body can probably be discarded, but we'll freeze it as well at extra cost if you want."
On a present-day level, the feted accomplishments of Deep Learning suggest to me that setting such algorithms to munch over a person's highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death. Plausible enough at least to be offered as a comfort to the bereaved. A market opportunity! Also, fuel for a debate on whether these simulations are people.
You might be able to reconstruct the person's public face, but will have major problems with his private life.
By "highly documented" I had in mind not just the ordinary documentation that prominent public figures get, but someone who has deliberately taken steps to exhaustively record as much as they can, public and private.
I remain sceptical. External observation (something on the life cam lines) still cannot distinguish an hour of thinking about the stars' main sequence from an hour of thinking about cosplay lolis. And diaries have the big problem of self-reflection... not being entirely accurate.
I take it our hypothetical system would not simply assume that diaries are accurate records; they would (so to speak) ask the question "how likely is it that any given person would write this diary entry?" which is not at all the same as the question "how well does this diary entry, taken at face value, match the actual life of this person?".
This raises the question: Is it possible to deduce the correct person without creating conscious simulations of possibly very many people, which raises ethical questions.
I think you're taking the suggestion a bit more seriously than I intended it. The commercial opportunity only needs the simulation to be good enough to tug at the heartstrings of those who knew the subject. Pictures and mementos are treasured; this would be a step beyond those, a living memorial that you could have a conversation with. It wouldn't work for LessWrongers though. They'd spend all their time trying to break it.
LOL, certainly a fair point :-)
The problem for your commercial opportunity is the uncanny valley, though. Also, people tend to me more interested in virtual girlfriends than in virtual grandpas :-/