Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever? From Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell

post by Noosphere89 (sharmake-farah) · 2022-08-19T19:32:12.434Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

This is a link post for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b33NTAuF5E

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An interesting video on mind uploading from almost 2 years ago, focusing on explaining the concept to the wider world. It's fairly simplified, as expected of a video that has to cross large inferential distances, and the Kurzgesagt channel is basically a simplified (though still mostly accurate) channel for communicating complicated topics and simplifying them.

In a sense, this would be a post that fits in right with the old LW 1.0 culture years ago with a transhumanist and mind uploading culture, before AI safety was the new goal of LW.

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comment by Godismyprior · 2022-08-19T22:01:23.201Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

before AI safety was the new goal of LW.

I'm pretty new, but I thought LW was basically established with that focus in place, wasn't it?

Replies from: habryka4
comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2022-08-19T22:47:24.599Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It was probably the primary motivation for Eliezer writing the sequences and building the site, yeah.

Replies from: sharmake-farah
comment by Noosphere89 (sharmake-farah) · 2022-08-20T00:21:27.693Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Admittedly, AI safety wasn't the one focus of LW. Back in the old days of LW 1.0, there wasn't a sole focus on AI safety as a conversational topic, the way modern LW is.

The discussion before modern deep learning that started to conquer real problems was a mix of the following:

Intelligence Explosion and the Hanson-Yudkowsky Foom debate.

Whole Brain Emulation.

Cryonics.

Transhumanism.

Friendly AI.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

And more.

Speaking of Whole Brain Emulations, that's what Kurzgesagt had made a video about 2 years ago, but unfortunately it looks like brain emulations probably won't be developed before AGIs.