At some point in the future we may be able to scan someone's brain at very high resolution and "run" them on a computer. [1] When I first heard this as a teenager I thought it was interesting but not hugely important. Running people faster or slower and keeping backups came immediately to mind, and Wikipedia adds space travel, but those three by themselves don't seem like they change that much. Thinking speed doesn't seem to be major limiting factor in coming up with good ideas, we generally only restore from backups in cases of rare failure, and while space travel would dramatically affect the ability of humans to spread [2] it doesn't sound like it changes the conditions of life.
This actually undersells emulation by quite a lot. For example "backups" let you repeatedly run the same copy of a person on different information. You can find identify a person when they're at their intellectual or creative best, and give them an hour to think about a new situation. Add in potentially increased simulation speed and parallelism, and you could run lots of these ones looking into all sorts of candidate approaches to problems.
With emulations you can get around the mental overhead of keeping all your assumptions about a direction of thought in your mind at once. I might not know if X is true, and spend a while thinking about what should happen if it's true and another while about what if it's not, but it's hard for me to get past the problem that I'm still uncertain about X. With an emulation that you can reset to a saved state however, you could have multiple runs where you give some emulations a strong assurance that X is true and some a strong assurance that X is false
You can also run randomized controlled trials where the experimental group and the control group are the same person. This should hugely bring down experimental cost and noise, allowing us to make major and rapid progress in discovering what works in education, motivation, and productivity.
(Backups stop being about error recovery and fundamentally change the way an emulation is useful.)
These ideas aren't new here [3] but I don't see them often in discussions of the impact of emulating people. I also suspect there are many more creative ways of using emulation; what else could you do with it?
[1] I think this is a long way off but don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be possible.
[2] Which has a big effect on estimates of the number of future people.
[3] I think most of these ideas fo back to Carl Schulman's 2010 Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms.
I also posted this on my blog
I would think it's far higher then that. Probably H/D>100, and it might be far higher then that. I tend to think that maintaining some continuity of identity would be very important to uploaded minds (because, honestly, isn't that the whole point of uploading your mind instead of just emulating a random human-like mind?). I also tend to think that there are vast categorizes of experiences that you would not put yourself through just so you could be the kind of person who had been through that experience; if there are mind-states that can only be reached by, say, "losing a child and then overcoming that horrible experience after years of grieving through developing a kind of inner strength", the I can't imagine any mind would intentionally do that to themselves just to explore more sections of mind-space.
Or, think about it in terms of beliefs. Say that mind A is an atheist. Do you think that the person who has mind A would ever intentionally turn themselves into a theist or into a spiritualist just in order to experience those emotions, and to get to places in mind-space that can only be reached from there? Judging from the whole of human experience, by just preventing yourself from going that route, you're probably eliminating at least half of all mind-states that a normal human can reach; many of those mind-states being states that can apparently produce incredibly interesting culture, music, literature, art, ect. Not to mention all the possible mind-states that can only be reached by being a former theist who has lost his faith. And that's just one example; there are probably dozens or hundreds of beliefs, values, and worldviews that any mind has that it would never want to change, because they are simply too fundamental to that mind's basic identity. Even with basic things; Eliezer once mentioned, when talking about FAI theory. "My name is Eliezer Yudkowsky. Perhaps it would be easier if my name was something shorter and easier to remember, but I don't want to change my name. And I don't want to change into a person who would want to change my name." (That's not an exact quote, but it was something along those lines.) I would be surprised if any decent of your mind would ever get to even 1% of all possible human mind-space.
Not only that, if mind A has a certain set of values and beliefs, and then you make a million copies of mind A and they all interact with each other all the time, I would think that would tend to discourage any of them from changing or questioning those values or beliefs. Usually the main way people change their minds is when they encounter someone with fundamentally different beliefs who seems to be intelligent and worth listening to; on the other hand, if you surround yourself with only people who believe the same thing you do, you are very unlikely to ever change that belief; if anything, social pressure would likely lock it into place. Therefore, I would say that a mind that primarily interacts with other copes of itself would be far more likely to become static and unchanging then that same mind in an environment where it is interacting with other minds with different beliefs.
Mm. That's interesting. While I can't imagine actually arranging for my child to die in order to explore that experience, I can easily imagine going through that experience (e.g., with some kind of simulated person) if I thought I had a reasonable chance of learning something worthwhile in the process, if I were living in a post-scarcity kind of environment.
I can similarly easily imagine myself temporarily adopting various forms of theism, athe... (read more)