Technology

I expect that uploading human minds is a very tricky problem indeed, and wouldn't expect that happening in the foreseeable future. However, I do think we may be able to create artificial intelligence on the same principles our brains operate on before that. The key part is that I expect this will happen very quickly in terms of cosmic timescales as opposed to human ones. Even if it takes a century or a millennium do to, that's a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

I found Culture series was fun, a few other examples I could recommend would be The Lifecycle of Artificial Objects by Ted Chiang, Diaspora by Greg Egan and Life Artificial by David A. Eubanks, and Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata.

“Intelligence” is not the same as consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness is and therefore cannot create it in something else. We can’t even reliably recognise it in anything else, we only know other humans have consciousness cause we ourselves have it.

It's true that intelligence and consciousness aren't the same thing. However, I disagree that we can't create it in something else without understanding it. Ultimately, consciousness arises from patterns being expressed within the firings of neurons within the brain. It's a byproduct of the the physical events occurring within our neural architecture. Therefore, if we create a neural network that mimic our brain and exhibits the same types of patterns then it stands to reason that it would also exhibit consciousness.

I think there are several paths available here. One is to simulate the brain in a virtual environment which would be an extension of the work being done by the OpenWorm project. You just build a really detailed physical simulation which is basically a question of having sufficient computing power.

Another approach is to try and understand the algorithms within the brain, to learn how these patterns form and how the brain is structured, then to implement these algorithms. This is the approach that Jeff Hawkins has been pursuing and he wrote a good book on the subject. I'm personally a fan of this approach because it posits a theory of how and why different brain regions work, then compares the functioning of the artificial implementation with its biological analogue. If both exhibit similar behaviors then we can say they both implement the same algorithm.

“AI” is a fad. Anyone who has played around with the AI models knows they aren’t actually thinking, but collating and systemising information.

The current large language model approach is indeed a far, but that's not totality of AI research that's currently happening. It's just getting a lot of attention because it looks superficially impressive.

We simply cannot make human brains out of computers.

There is zero basis for this assertion. The whole point here is that computing power is not developing in a linear fashion. We don't know what will be possible in a decade, and much less in a century. However, given the rate of progress that happened in the past half a century, it's pretty clear that huge leaps could be possible.

Also worth noting that we don't need to have an equivalent of the entire human brain. Much of the brain deals with stuff like regulating the body and maintaining homeostasis. Furthermore, turns out that even a small portion of the brain can still exhibit the properties we care about https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing magical about the human brain. It's a biological computer that evolved through natural selection. There's no reason to think that what it's doing cannot be reverse engineered and implemented on a different substrate.

The key point I'm making is that while timelines of centuries or even millennia might seem long from a human standpoint, these are blinks of an eye from cosmic point of view.

I mean maybe they would. I figure if we exist on what might as well be a geological scale from their perspective, we might not warrant too close an observation.

neat, haven't run across his stuff before

uploading our consciousness to a spaceship the size of a USB drive

Never gonna happen.

I think so as well. Incidentally, Diaspora by Greg Egan is another great book exploring this idea.

Bobiverse series has a lot of similar themes as well minus the aliens. I really do think it's going to be a race between us annihilating ourselves and moving off the biological substrate. I'm not convinced that something like mind transfer from a biological brain to an artificial one will ever be possible, but I would treat artificial intelligence that operates on similar principles to our minds to be a branch of humanity.

I do think post biological existence opens up a lot of possibilities. For one, you're no longer restricted to gravity wells. These are appealing to us because we evolved to thrive in this environment. However, an artificial platform could be designed for existence in space from ground up. You have plentiful energy from the sun, and you can mine any resources you want from the asteroids. There would be very little reason to bother going down to planets at that point. Earth could be preserved as just a living biosphere with all the technological civilization moving off of it.