Superintelligence via whole brain emulation

Thus, it is probably important to be careful about not accelerating non-WBE neuromorphic AI while attempting to accelerate whole brain emulation. For instance, it seems plausible to me that getting better models of neurons would be useful for creating neuromorphic AIs while better brain scanning would not, and both technologies are necessary for brain uploading, so if that is true, it may make sense to work on improving brain scanning but not on improving neural models.

But what research improves brain imaging but not DL... One thing to point out about whole brain emulation vs 'de novo' AI is that it may be, in practice, nearly impossible to get WBEs without having already, much earlier, kickstarted 'de novo' AI.

If you can scan and run successfully a single whole brain, you got there by extensive brain imaging and brain scanning of much smaller chunks of many brains, and it seems like there is a lot of very transferable knowledge from the structure and activities of a human brain to artificial neural networks, which I dub "brain imitation learning". Not only do ANNs turn out to have fairly similar activation patterns as human brains in some respects (primarily visual cortex stuff), the human brain's activation patterns encode a lot of knowledge about how visual representations work which can be used to learn & generalize. (A particularly interesting example from this month is "Self-Supervised Natural Image Reconstruction and Rich Semantic Classification from Brain Activity", Gaziv et al 2020.) You might consider this a version of the pretraining paradigm or lexical hypothesis - the algorithms of general intelligence, and world knowledge, are encoded in the connectivity and activation patterns of a human brain and so training on large corpuses of such data to imitate the connectivity & activation patterns will provide an extremely powerful prior/initialization à la GPT-3 pretraining on large text datasets.

So, it is entirely possible that by the time you get to BCIs or whole-brain scanning apparatuses, these are providing high-volume data embeddings or structural/architectural constraints which help push deep learning approaches over the finish line to AGI by providing informative priors & meta-learning capabilities by conditioning on <100% data from many brains. (In fact, if you believe this won't happen, you have to explain what on earth is being done with all this extremely expensive data for decades on end, as it slowly ramps up from scanning insect-sized chunks to full monkey brains before finally an entire human brain is scanned 100% & they flip the giant red switch to make Mr John Smith, test subject #1918, wake up inside a computer. What is everyone doing before that?)

Whatever these DL systems may be, they won't be a single specific person, and they won't come with whatever safety guarantees people think an upload of Mr John Smith would come with, but they will come years or decades before.

the first uploads may be selected for high risk-tolerance

The obvious solution would be to use cryopreserved brains. Perhaps this would be necessary anyway, because of all the moral and legal problems with slicing up living person's brain to take SEM images and map the connectome. This suggests that an extremely effective EA cause would be to hand out copies of Bostrom's Superintelligence at Cryonics conventions.

It's not clear whether the cryonics community would be more or less horrified by defective spurs than the average person, though. Perhaps EAs could request to be revived early, at increased risk of information-theoretic death, if digital uploading is attempted and if self-modifying AI is a risk. Perhaps the ideal would be to have a steady stream of FAI-concerned volunteers in the front of the line, so that the first successes are likely to be cautious about such things. Ideally, we wouldn't upload anyone not concerned with FAI until we had a FAI in place, but that may not be possible if there is a coordination problem between several groups across the planet. A race to the bottom seems like a risk, if Moloch has his say.

A possible (but probably smaller) source of positive selection is that currently, people who are enthusiastic about uploading their brains correlate strongly with people who are concerned about AI safety

I ordinarily wouldn’t make such a minor nitpick, (because of this) but it might be an important distinction, so I’ll make an exception: People who worry about FAI are likely to also be enthusiastic about uploading, but I'm not sure if the average person who is enthusiastic about uploading is worried about FAI. For most people, "AI safety" means self driving cars that don't hit people.

It seems to me that embryo selection could be one way to increase the intelligence of the first generation of uploads without (initially) producing a great deal of defective minds of the sort that you mention in the article. WBE may take several decades to achieve, the embryos will take some time to grow into adult humans anyway, and it seems to me that a great deal of the defective minds in your scenario wouldn't be created because we're selecting for genes that go on to produce minds, as opposed to selecting directly for mind designs. (Please do correct me if you were only talking about selecting for genes as opposed to mind designs.)

It's worth noting that embryo selection seems to me a much less extreme version of intelligence amplification than what you have suggested, and even with embryo selection it seems that we run into some old questions about how IQ and rationality are related. As argued elsewhere, it may be that finding ways to amplify intelligence without understanding this relation between intelligence and rationality could actually increase risk, as opposed to mitigating it.

As a side note, something I've always wondered about is how unusually long periods of subjective time and potential relative social isolation would affect the mental health of uploads of modern humans.

Have you read The Age of Em? Robin Hanson thinks that mind uploading is likely to happen before de novo AI, but also the reasons why that's the case mean that we won't get much in the way of modifications to ems until the end of the Em era.

(That is, if you can just use 'evolutionary algorithms' to muck around with uploads and make some of them better at thinking, it's likely you understand intelligence well enough to build a de novo AI to begin with.)

it seems plausible to me that getting better models of neurons would be useful for creating neuromorphic AIs while better brain scanning would not, and both technologies are necessary for brain uploading

is the idea that you cannot scan a brain if you don't know what needs to be scanned, and so that's why you need a model of neurons before you can upload? that you think "scanning everything" and waiting to figure out how it works before emulating the scanned mind is impracal? 

I wrote a summary of Hansons's The Age of Em, in which I focus on the bits of information that may be policy-relevant for effective altruists. For instance, I summarize what Hanson says about em values and also have a section about AI safety.

If the artificial intelligence from emulation is accomplished through tweaking an emulation and/or piling on computational resources, why couldn't it be accomplished before we start emulating humans?

Other primates, for example. Particularly in the case of the destructive-read and ethics-of-algorithmic-tweaks, animal testing will surely precede human testing. To the extent a human brain is just a primate brain with more computing power, another primate with better memory and clock speed should serve almost as effectively.

What about other mammals with culture and communication, like a whales or dolphins?

Something not a mammal at all, like Great Tits?

I consider modified uploads much more likely to result in outcomes worse than extinction. I don't even know what you could be imagining when you talk about intermediate outcomes, unless you think a 'slight' change in goals would produce a slight change in outcomes.

My go-to example of a sub-optimal outcome better than death is (Spoilers!) from Friendship is Optimal - the AI manipulates everyone into becoming virtual ponies and staying under her control, but otherwise maximizes human values. This is only possible because the programmer made an AI to run a MMORPG, and added the goal of maximizing human values within the game. You would essentially never get this result with your evolutionary algorithm; it seems overwhelmingly more likely to give you a mind that still wants to be around humans and retains certain forms of sadism or the desire for power, but lacks compassion.

Not quite related, but can I pet peeve a bit here?

Whenever I hear the "we didn't invent an airplane by copying a bird so we won't invent AI by copying a brain" line I always want to be like "actually we farmed part of the plane's duties out to the brain of the human who pilots it. AI's will be similar. They will have human operators, to which we will farm out a lot of the decision making. AlphaGo doesn't choose who it plays, some nerd does."

Like, why would AI be fully autonymous right off the back? Surely we can let it use an operator for a sanity check while we get the low hanging fruits out of the way.

I think that superAI via uploading in inherent safe solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_safety It also could go wrong in many ways, but it is not its default mode.

Even if it kill all humans, it will be one human which will survive.

Even if his values will evolve it will be natural evolution of human values.

As most human beings don't like to be alone, he would create new friends that is human simulations. So even worst cases are not as bad as paper clip maximiser.

It is also feasible plan which consist of many clear steps, one of them is choosing and educating right person for uploading. He should be educated in ethics, math, rationality, brain biology etc. I think he is reading LW and this comment))

This idea could be upgraded to be even more safe. One way is to upload a group of several people which will be able to control each other and also produce mutual collective intelligence.

Another idea is broke Super AI into center and circumference. In the centre we put uploaded mind of very rational human, which make important decisions and keep values, and in periphery we put many Tool AIs, which do a lot of dirty work.