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Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should focus on finding a way to ... clone our brain inside of mechanical box. I know plenty of ethical considerations there, but a human with all the life skills of a human would be a perfect AI and not need the normal learning that focus ML brings w/ it. Imagine if they just clone a driving instructor's brain, and placed copies of that inside the cars...

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Interfacing a brain sounds quite complicated. Instead, the mechanical box could just be a human body since we have over 1000s of years interfacing that with various vehicle controls.

We could probably harvest these fully functional units in less economically productive parts of the world, like Africa.

Even if we did this, we still don't know how to interface with the brain. Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology is still very bad. We can barely do anything.

I recall that using EEG, you can extract at most 4 degrees of freedom/conscious-control, beyond that we can't do anything. We also kinda suck at monitering any "human intent" using EEG because there's no clear biological signal for that either.

Most of the successes seem to be done with some direct-to-brain interface, but those aren't magical either, and no one wants to do that.

I unfortunately missed a bright grad student's talk on the state of BCI. I didn't get to hear what he had to say, but the only slide in his talk was the image of a garbage dumpster on fire.

Imagine being given immortality but you have to work a day job as a car and you don't get time off ever.

I know..but you could have time off... I mean you're not driving 24/7...maybe when not needed for transport you live in VR space.

You could also be turned off and reset. Why waste the power? Who will know? Is it even a crime to kill a simulated person?

Yes. If you buy into the belief that we're living in a simulation. It's a crime if we murder, therefore it's a crime to murder a simulated person.

This is not technically feasible for the foreseeable future and ethically fraught, but a fun thought experiment.

Probably not possible. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition

Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror

Hey, SOMA is a game you would enjoy!

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