There are a lot of things we simply don't know about the brain, and even less so about consciousness and intelligence in the human sense. In many ways, I don't think we even have the right words to talk about this. Last I checked scientists were not sure that neurons were the right level at which to understand how our brains think. That is, neurons have microtubule substructures several orders of magnitude smaller than the neurons themselves that may (or may not) have something significant to do with the encoding and processing of information in the brain. Thus it's conceivable that a whole-brain emulation at the level of individual neurons might be insufficient to produce human-type intelligence and consciousness. If so, we'd need quite a few more generations of Moore's law before we could expect to finish a whole brain emulation than we're currently estimating.

Furthermore the smaller structures would be more susceptible to quantum effects. Then again, maybe not. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have developed this as Orchestrated objective reduction theory. This theory has been hotly disputed; but so far I don't think it's been conclusively proven or disproven. However, it is experimentally testable and falsifiable. I suspect it's too early to claim definitively either that quantum effects either are or are not required for human type intelligence and consciousness; but more research will likely help us answer this question one way or the other.

I will say this: there is a lot of bad physics and philosophy out there that has been misled by bad popular descriptions of quantum mechanics and how the conscious observer collapses the wave function, and thus came to the conclusion that consciousness is intimately tied up with quantum mechanics. I feel safe ruling that much out. However it still seems possible that our consciousness and intelligence is routinely or occasionally susceptible to quantum randomness, depending on the scale at which it operates.

Even if Penrose's ideas about how human intelligence arises from quantum effects is all true, that still does not prove that all intelligence requires quantum randomness. If you want to answer that question, then the first thing you need to do is define what you mean by "intelligence". That's trickier than it sounds at first, but I think it can be usefully done. In fact, there are multiple possible definitions of intelligence useful for different purposes. For instance one is the ability to formulate plans that enable one to achieve a goal. Consciousness is a much thornier nut to crack. I don't know that anyone has a good handle on that yet.

Penrose would claim not to understand how 'collapse' occurs.

These people's objections are not entirely unfounded. It's true that there is little evidence the brain exploits QM effects (which is not to say that it is completely certain it does not). However, if you try to pencil in real numbers for the hardware requirements for a whole brain emulation, they are quite absurd. Assumptions differ, but it is possible that to build a computational system with sufficient nodes to emulate all 100 trillion synapses would cost hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars if you had to use today's hardware to do it.

The point is : you can simplify people's arguments to "I'm not worried about the imminent existence of AI because we cannot build the hardware to run one". The fact that a detail about their argument is wrong doesn't change the conclusion.

Watson is pretty clearly narrow AI, in the sense that if you called it General AI, you'd be wrong. There are simple cognitive tasks (like making a plan to solve a novel problem, modelling a new system, or even just playing Parcheesi) that it just can't do, at least, not without a human writing a bunch of new code to add a module that that does that new thing. It's not powerful in the way that a true GAI would be.

That said, Watson is a good deal less narrow than, say, for example, Deep Blue. Watson has a great deal of analytic depth in a reasonably broad domain (structured knowledge extraction from unformatted English) , which is a major leap forward. You might say that Watson is a rough analog to a language center connected to a memory system sitting in a box. It's not a GAI by itself, but it could be a substantial component of one down the line.

I don't think that the likelihood of our descendants simulating us at all is particularly high; my predicted number of ancestor simulations should such a thing turn out to be possible is zero, which is one reason I've never found it a particularly compelling anthropic argument in the first place.

But, if people living in universes capable of running simulations tend to do run simulations, then it's probable that most people will be living in simulations, regardless of whether anyone ever chooses to run an ancestor simulation.

Socialist: 326, 27.5%

I wish the next census to taboo "socialism". In my experience people use this word to describe three rather different things.

a) An imaginary post-scarcity utopia where money is not necessary, work is voluntary, and all people are educated to love each other.

b) Sweden -- either the real one, or its idealized imaginary version.

c) The political and economical system led by Communist parties in the 20th century.

And I hope the majority of those people meant something like (a) and (b), because honestly, I can't imagine how (c) could be related to rationality or truth-seeking or altruism or ethics.

It would be trivial for an SI to run a grainy simulation that was only computed out in greater detail when high-level variables of interest depended on it. Most sophisticated human simulations already try to work like this, e.g. particle filters for robotics or the Metropolis transport algorithm for ray-tracing works like this. No superintelligence would even be required, but in this case it is quite probable on priors as well, and if you were inside a superintelligent version you would never, ever notice the difference.

It's clear that we're not living in a set of physical laws designed for cheapest computation of intelligent beings, i.e., we are inside an apparent physics (real or simulated) that was chosen on other grounds than making intelligent beings cheap to simulate (if physics is real, then this follows immediately). But we could still, quite easily, be cheap simulations within a fixed choice of physics. E.g., the simulators grew up in a quantum relativistic universe, and now they're much more cheaply simulating other beings within an apparently quantum relativistic universe, using sophisticated approximations that change the level of detail when high-level variables depend on it (so you see the right results in particle accelerators) and use cached statistical outcomes for proteins folding instead of recomputing the underlying quantum potential energy surface every time, or even for whole cells when the cells are mostly behaving as a statistical aggregate, etc. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a mildly-more-sophisticated version of what sophisticated simulation algorithms try to do right now - expend computational power where it's most informative.

I don't see anything contradictory about it. There's no reason that a simulation that's not of the simulators' past need only contain people incidentally. We can be a simulation without being a simulation created by our descendants.

Personally, if I had the capacity to simulate universes, simulating my ancestors would probably be somewhere down around the twentieth spot on my priorities list, but most of the things I'd be interested in simulating would contain people.

I don't think I would regard simulating the universe as we observe it as ethically acceptable though, and if I were in a position to do so, I would at the very least lodge a protest against anyone who tried.

A fourth answer is that the entire world/universe isn't being simulated; only a small subset of it is. I believe that more arguments about simulations assume that more simulators wouldn't simulate the entire current population.

Ok, before you were talking about "grainier" simulations, I thought you meant computational shortcuts. But now you are talking about taking out laws of physics which you think are unimportant. Which is clever, but it is not so obvious that it would work.

It is not so easy to remove "quantum weirdness" because quantum is normal and lots of things depend on it. Like atoms not losing their energy to electromagnetic radiation. You want to patch that by making atoms indivisible and forget about the subatomic particles? Well, there goes chemistry, and electricity. Maybe you patch those also, but then we end up with a grab bag of brute facts about physics, unlike the world we experience, where if you know a bit about quantum mechanics, the periodic table of the elements actually makes sense. Transistors also depend on quantum, and if you patch that, and the engineering of the transistors depends on people understanding quantum mechanics. So now you need to patch things on the level of making sure inventors invent the same level of technology, and we are back to simulator-backed conspiracies.