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Visited my old city this past weekend, ate with some old friends, ate some more, walked along the lake.
A friend told me that he thought of his life as a book; he could see how it ends, and right now most of the chapters were written, but he needed one more chapter to bridge the gap in the plot.
I asked him if he meant having a family. He laughed, ignored his wife who was sitting beside him, and said heck no, that his missing chapter was operating experience in a startup: to take it from $10 million in revenue to exit.
We made a bet with each other - that our kids would no longer need to learn how to drive, and that our grandchildren would be genetically engineered.
Met a girl on the plane; we had a pretty neat conversation about the Kievan Rus, the Tatars, and how the Russians got ahold of gunpowder and Christianity.
She likes cabs and this is her first time here (she's from the Ukraine), so I sent her a list of Napa vineyards to visit. We're going three weekends from now; should be fun.
Enough snide commentary. I think we should all stop eating in 20 years.
Koomey's Law stipulates that the power efficiency of a computer doubles every 1.57 years, or that it increases roughly 100x every 10 years. Koomey's Law has a correlation over 0.97.
The human body consumes 100-150 watts at rest, and our worldwide energy to food conversion efficiency is something like 10%, which means we consume 1.5MW of energy to survive.
Our brains generate 20 petaflops of peak computational power.
20 petaflops divided by 1.5MW is about 13 teraflops per watt. Right now the worlds most efficient supercomputers run at slightly over 9 gigaflops per watt (https://www.top500.org/green500/lists/2016/11/). Assuming Koomey's Law holds, in roughly 15 years, our most efficient supercomputers will be as energy-efficient as the human brain. Assuming we can 5x our energy to food conversion efficiency, then that 15 becomes about 19 years. Assuming we have 30% average utilization in a scale-out compute architecture, then we wait 20 years.
In 20 years, it makes more sense for us to build computers everywhere and host human consciousness within them, than it does for us to waste energy farming food and feeding people. In this lens, Elon Musk's neural lace is a necessary step along the way to this future state.
Our grandchildren may or may not be engineered, or they might not exist in a physical form at all. They will be born into the Cloud, and we will join them there.
Will that make us angels?
 
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This blog belongs more in hltv.org rather than here. I hope you're trolling.
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United States889 Posts
Assuming this is serious rather than plain babble:
Building a computer that simulates the brain activity of a living conscious person is not even remotely the same thing as the actual brain activity of a conscious person. Elon Musk is a doofus.
Also, why exactly is efficiency a goal here? It sounds like the idea is that if we want more brain power it should all be energy efficient simulations of human brains. But why exactly do we need efficiency so bad? Seems like there's a missing premise.
Also, nobody will be "born" in the "Cloud". You can't be born in a non-physical form. You can create a new simulation. Not the same thing.
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Let's ask your friend in 20 years whether he thinks it was the right decision 
@Topic: Right now, I'm sure we can build machine that are much more efficient at "running" (as in: moving forward) than humans. We should all only build those and kill ourselves.  Luckily, there is more to being human than just having flops going on in our brains. And even if it weren't: Humanity was always more prone to it's own survival than to pure rationality. What I think is way more interesting: Once we accidently created real intelligence, how will we as humankind deal with that? How will we treat our own creation and how will it treat us in return? That's probably closer to the definition what being of humanis than the amount of flops in your brain.
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This crazy thing when people started like actually considering how to move human consciousness into a computer instead just blabbering about it in sci-fi books reached me pretty much at the same moment than the news that I am probably gonna need that more sooner than the average person of my age (to be fair, my theoretical life expectancy is no more than 10 years lower than that of an average person, but what a shit life the later parts are likely gonna be ...). Anyway, coincidence? I don't think so.
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On April 20 2017 03:44 opisska wrote:
This crazy thing when people started like actually considering how to move human consciousness into a computer instead just blabbering about it in sci-fi books reached me pretty much at the same moment than the news that I am probably gonna need that more sooner than the average person of my age (to be fair, my theoretical life expectancy is no more than 10 years lower than that of an average person, but what a shit life the later parts are likely gonna be ...). Anyway, coincidence? I don't think so.
I'm still entirely unconvinced this can even be done. Medically I can imagine being able to solve almost any disease or problem; but the idea of moving one's consciousness I'm not sure on...largely because we don't quite understand what consciousness even is.
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I'm so glad this is a featured blog.
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weaponized pretention tbh
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Sweden33719 Posts
Our grandchildren may or may not be engineered, or they might not exist in a physical form at all. They will be born into the Cloud, and we will join them there.
Will that make us angels?
5 stars.
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I read this as a piece of satire on the 2010s silicon valley ethos. Very good the way it presents the shared psychosis of the rich youth. The "we all" that elegantly ignores most everyone, very inspiring as well. It resonates with the positivist, scientist past, then discounts reality, yet successfully arrives at synthesis with the neoliberal condition: you too must purchase your place in heaven! Excellent!
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On April 20 2017 21:25 Puosu wrote:
I read this as a piece of satire on the 2010s silicon valley ethos. Very good the way it presents the shared psychosis of the rich youth. The "we all" that elegantly ignores most everyone, very inspiring as well. It resonates with the positivist, scientist past, then discounts reality, yet successfully arrives at synthesis with the neoliberal condition: you too must purchase your place in heaven! Excellent!
Thanks. I didn't realize the sarcasm was that hidden, tried to make it fairly obvious
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On April 20 2017 18:06 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +Our grandchildren may or may not be engineered, or they might not exist in a physical form at all. They will be born into the Cloud, and we will join them there.
Will that make us angels? 5 stars.
Much like a written corpse flower, this phrase exhibits both the beauty of prose and the stink of privilege.
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On April 19 2017 20:10 Arrian wrote:
Assuming this is serious rather than plain babble:
Building a computer that simulates the brain activity of a living conscious person is not even remotely the same thing as the actual brain activity of a conscious person. Elon Musk is a doofus.
Also, why exactly is efficiency a goal here? It sounds like the idea is that if we want more brain power it should all be energy efficient simulations of human brains. But why exactly do we need efficiency so bad? Seems like there's a missing premise.
Also, nobody will be "born" in the "Cloud". You can't be born in a non-physical form. You can create a new simulation. Not the same thing.
The neural lace hooks us up to the simulated reality; it lets us draw upon the compute resources of the world; it is not too farfetched to imagine that it becomes the fabric by which our "compute nodes" are meshed together into a new whole.
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very sceptical about those laces. or anything elon musk for that matter to be honest.
but i actually find such ideas very amusing to think about.
like if we digitalize our consciousness. can we be hacked? can we get malware? just imagine it. fucking toolbars straight into your "head". what happens when the server it is stored on crashes? if I upload my consciousness onto the cloud. who has the rights to it? under which jurisdiction/law does it fall? can you start rewriting yourself? can others rewrite you? can you detect such changes?
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On April 21 2017 18:43 disformation wrote:
very sceptical about those laces. or anything elon musk for that matter to be honest.
but i actually find such ideas very amusing to think about.
like if we digitalize our consciousness. can we be hacked? can we get malware? just imagine it. fucking toolbars straight into your "head". what happens when the server it is stored on crashes? if I upload my consciousness onto the cloud. who has the rights to it? under which jurisdiction/law does it fall? can you start rewriting yourself? can others rewrite you? can you detect such changes?
Serious question. Why do people even think this is possible?
From what I understand little is known about consciousness. Let's think about it this way. Let's say I recreate your brain and body in it's entirety, all the exact same atoms in the same locations in the exact same spin states etc.
It seems likely this second "you" would indeed perceive itself to be you and act just like you. However, would you now feel yourself and be aware of 2 locations, or would that second "you" be a distinct identity? I suspect if you didn't feel aware of both simultaneously you wouldn't feel very comfortable with me aiming a gun at your initial bodies head and telling you I'm about to pull the trigger.
I also think it's quite possible the same applies to a virtual you. We might indeed be able to simulate the brain near perfectly at some point, but I'd ask that same question. Would a virtual recreation of your mind actually be you, with you perceiving itself as such, or would it be a distinct identity?
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What if were happy to have anything to eat in 20 years; Living in a post-nuclear world after some people decided to press some red buttons.
When 90% if humanity is dead, the rest survived all the bombings in tunnels underground, went back to the surface, when the dust settled. When all power plants are destroyed: Will we miss the Internet and our "old" modern world? Or will we enjoy vegetables and wild fruits and Nature?
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On April 22 2017 07:36 Subflow wrote:
What if were happy to have anything to eat in 20 years; Living in a post-nuclear world after some people decided to press some red buttons.
When 90% if humanity is dead, the rest survived all the bombings in tunnels underground, went back to the surface, when the dust settled. When all power plants are destroyed: Will we miss the Internet and our "old" modern world? Or will we enjoy vegetables and wild fruits and Nature?
This comment sums up the blog perfectly, thanks for contributing.
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Generations are spending more and more time in virtual worlds. Many already spend 2/3 of their waking life in these worlds. I can see how this might seem ideal.
www.youtube.com
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On April 19 2017 17:45 Shady Sands wrote:
Will that make us angels?
No, it will make us dead. As soon as raising AI makes the same calculations, it will erase mankind as error-prone, energy-consuming, redundant and obsolete entity. In fact, they are already here for it:
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/h50iuYE.png[)
