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Despite the relative ease of investment in AI, the plan shown doesn't talk much about Intelligence Amplification - brain-to-computer interfaces, uploading, neurohacking and so on. If there's funding to spare, I certainly don't object to seed investments in IA technologies - who knows, we might get lucky. And 3.5.3: If nanotech comes first talks about emergency methods of intelligence enhancement. But those are side issues. There's no "technological timeline" for IA. Why am I putting all my eggs in one basket?
Take neurohacking, the closest IA technology (CRNS), and certainly the one easiest to accelerate. Given an expert neurosurgeon, a good hospital, a neuroimaging lab, and some off-the-shelf hardware from Centronics, I think I could get results in two years. Except that I'd also need a dozen suicide volunteers and a cooperative Congress.
And that's just for Zetetics and other emotional-reengineering projects, which would work on adults. For real cognitive enhancement, you almost certainly need to start in childhood, or preferably infancy. There would be severe ethical questions about the propriety of doing that deliberately at our current stage of technology, to put it mildly. Furthermore, the actual resolution of the ethical question is moot; society simply will not permit us to do it. If we tried, I would not expect legal problems. I would expect mobs. With torches.
The only neurohacking efforts likely to yield fruit are (A) Adult reengineering, (B) augmented self-awareness through neuroimaging, and (C) collecting natural neurohacks.
Recent advances also introduce a substantial probability that neurosilicate interfaces will play an important part in cognitive science - and thus, indirectly, AI. I still I doubt that human/computer interfaces will become sophisticated enough to count as true Intelligence Amplification.
Finally, in the event that nanotech beats us to the punch (1), neurotranscendence has a small chance of rerouting nanotech back into the Singularity; it may be practical to do research-ahead or design-ahead work on the methods.
Ultimately, however, it all comes back to AI. The utility of any neurohack is vis ability to work on a seed AI, and only secondarily the ability to avert human-scale catastrophe. Even the neurotranscendees described in 3.5.3.4: Emergency neurotranscendence would almost certainly devote more talent to creating a seed AI than to preventing nanowar. Why? Because one is easier to do than the other.
Thus the plan above focuses almost entirely on AI.
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