Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

A year in a day is not very impressive, but 365 years (of research) in a year is. Depending on how many people can be placed in these boxes at any given time, this may amount to three centuries worth of progress (at least in software and mathematics).

The consequences if it could be tuned for smaller time chunks would be interesting-- for example, people who'd like to have a time pocket for work and/or sleep, freeing up their out-in-the-world time for family, friends, or hobbies that can't be done in a time box.

I really liked William Sleator's YA novel Singularity, which is about teenage identical twins who find a time anomaly with a similar speedup factor.

One important aspect of uploads is that they can (presumably) be easily copied - this is enough for them to have a huge economic impact even if they only run at normal human speed. If you have one upload that is willing and able to do a job, suddenly you have as many as you need, and can displace all human workers in that job (at least once the hardware gets cheap enough).

But I’m not sure how many real-world problems there are of high economic value which can soak up a year of serial processing.

Think of any real-world problem that takes one day on modern hardware. When computers were 365 times slower (that is, 12 - 13 years ago), it would have taken one year to solve such problems.

Don't you think there is any real-world problem that would benefit from 365x faster hardware, even if you can interact with it only once a day?

(Even if individual tasks take less than one year to complete, you can pool several of them and run them serially on the 365x computer)

The reason I expect uploads to have a big impact is not particularly accelerated time - it's the ability to copy, observe and modify the uploads.

If I was an upload with access to my own source code (or access to my data and the source of the software on which I'm running, etc.), I might want to try to run modified versions of myself to see what changes, to see if I can have better short-term memory, or if I can "outsource" any maths calculation to more optimized software, or have introspective access to my emotional reactions or the reasons I believe things, or have better/different senses (directly perceive and modify code and data?), or decrease my learning time, etc.

Greg Egan just posted an article about his new books, which seem to deal with a somewhat similar setup: The Orthogonal Universe (spoilers for the basic worldbuilding of Egan's Orthogonal trilogy)

Could we use it for regular martial arts training? The DBZ article for the HTC mentions no non-emergency use, and a little thought leads us to conclude that, probably not: inside the HTC, time passes as normal, which means that you don’t save any time. All the HTC is doing is rearranging relative time between groups. If you step in, you still age a full year before stepping out, and you will now die a year early by the realtime calendar. So what’s the point?

Plenty of people would benefit from an opportunity to adjust their life's timeline a bit relative to the rest of the world. To stick with the training premise, you might take a year to recover from an injury and get back up to form in time for the Olympics.

Reminds me a little of Anathem - it's like a really fast Math.

Some specific comments about uploads : a. First, a more reasonable estimate of the speedup is on the order of 10^6 to 10^8. This depends on a few factors : if we assume 5ghz switching speeds and we use dedicated discrete circuits for every single simulated neuron, that would in theory be a speed of 25 million times versus human switching speeds on the order of 200 Hz. Some neurons are faster than this, however, and you need enough discrete timesteps to account for small differences in arrival times that are a major factor in signaling. The upper end of the range is likely possible if you use much faster nano-scale components, and again, dedicated hardware circuits for every component. These kinds of speeds are also only practical if the neuroscience understanding is good enough that fine cellular details need not be simulated, merely neural network nodes with a large number of parameters.

If general purpose CPUs inside a supercomputer are used instead, achieving sim speeds close to realtime is expected to be very difficult to accomplish.

b. Working from the assumption that the speed advantage is 10^6, predicting superhuman capabilities from the uploads seems reasonable. A single uploaded entity wouldn't get just 12 PhDs - they could get every PhD. Presumably, they'd enroll in every PhD program in the world simultaneously, and send some kind of robotic avatar to class. By rapidly switching between many robot avatars, queuing up commands for each one, they could presumably do many slow tasks at once.

c. These kinds of speedups allow levels of micromanagement that do not exist today. For example, suppose that the uploaded entity has a factory that produces some kind of assembly robot. As the factory runs, the entity observes every last motion by the machines in the factory and can adjust settings and motions for optimal performance. So, now the assembly robots are coming off the production line and going to work. The entity might notice a design flaw in the first batch and make dozens of changes to correct the flaw, so 5 minutes later version 1.1 of the bot is the one coming off the line. But 1.1 has other drawbacks, so 5 minutes after that, it's version 1.2.

Or even more detailed : the entity understands the current task to such a fine grained detail that EVERY robot coming off of the assembly line is slightly customized so that it uses available resources to the most efficient degree possible.

I do acknowledge the author's basic point. An entity that can think 1 million times faster would not be able to advance technology at 1 million times current speed. R&D cannot be done purely in simulations : physical experiments must be performed, physical prototypes must be built and tested against the real world. However, the speedups would still be large enough than a world with high speed uploaded entities would soon look very different from a world without them.

The Hyperbolic Time Chamber only allows two people at a time, except for that one time the plot demanded three people be in there, and the non-canon filler scene where four people were in there.

Cool essay otherwise, gwern.

yo dawg we heard you like hyperbolic time chambers

Deadlines? Imagine you have an important exam/audition in two days, but haven't had the time to study/rehearse properly. Then, tomorrow you look yourself in the chamber with your books/instrument and leave it when you're totally awesome. OTOH, since (IIRC) you are only allowed into the chamber twice in your life (and even if this weren't the case, you don't want to be 35 subjective years old 25 calendar years after the date on our birth certificate), you only do that for things you really care about.

If humans don't age, it would be a great way to get some research done.

Downvoted; too reliant on personal anecdote (if we can call such speculation that).