

The State of Whole Brain Emulation in 2015 - goblin89
http://creativepark.net/1698

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jimrandomh
This is a decent overview, but I feel like I should bring up one thing it
didn't mention: safety. We're a significant distance away from being able to
emulate a whole brain, and... that's a good thing.

Imagine your brain were scanned, and you found yourself running as a computer
program. Consider the powers that would give you. You could make copies of
yourself, obviously. You could tune some parameters, to try to increase your
intelligence. You could A/B test your copies with identical memories in
identical situations, to see what effect that tuning has, and you could
incorporate enhancements that wouldn't work biologically. So there's a pretty
high chance that you'd end up with a superhuman level intelligence, or at
least John von Neumann level intelligence. Plus a large number of copies.

At the same time, the emulation might be imperfect, the modifications and
enhancements might have unanticipated side effects, there's a whole lot of
opportunities for sanity damage. That's on top of the base rate of humans
being evil or turning evil when given power, which is itself uncomfortably
high. And finally, there's one more wrinkle. Suppose brain-scanning and whole-
brain emulation technology are in the wild, and a bunch of different people
scan their brains and start running on computers. In this world, if you hack
into someone's hardware and halt their brain program, you can repurpose it to
run copies of yourself. While computer security is probably better in that
future world than it is today, I seriously doubt that it will be better by
nearly _enough_.

If you're thinking of getting into brain-emulation research, please consider
also putting some work into safety research. And in the unlikely event your
work should pass the level of treating mundane ailments, and moves into the
territory of breakthroughs, please remember that you are playing with fire.

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ericjang
Seems like nothing really exceptionally different in 2015. All the projects or
ideas the author mentioned have been around for quite some time, at least
since the early 2000's. Also, Turing completeness is not a strict requirement
for intelligence. That line of thinking has fallen out of favor in recent
years, in the same way that comparing the brain to a steam engine has. I think
we are increasingly realizing that the brain is not a magnetic pin and the
world is not a piece of tape. Intelligence could be solved via artificial
neural networks or statistical techniques, so it's not clear to me that a
continuous conscious experience requires swapping out one neuron at a time.

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mjfl
"human brains are turing complete"

Are we sure we can really support that statement?

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cervice
Would a not turing complete human brain be able to conceive turing
completeness?

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JadeNB
That sounds like saying "Would a not-Turing complete markup language be able
to record the definition of Turing completeness?" (If you argue that there's a
difference between conceiving something and recording it, then I can soup up
the markup language with a mild genetic algorithm equipped with a stop
condition that'll let it generate the definition on its own.)

