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Comment by matthewfcarlson | Hacker News Reader

There was a story I read once where general AI was unobtainable but computing power continued so simulations of brains was done via processing brain slices. So every AI was just a person who had died with an intact brain that could be preserved. Self driving cars were a thing but it was someone’s grandma.

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if you can recall the author/title i’d love to look at it! i’m curious how the story deals with the disjointed sensory input in the “revived” agent. e.g. does Grandma experience sight/sound/touch/feel? if not, how does she cope with sudden full-body paralysis/numbness/loss-of-familiar-senses? did she agree to this, or know it was going to happen? and so on.

i remember one subplot to a Cory Doctorow book focused on a lab that was trying to develop a self-aware machine and the barrier there was that the machine would commit suicide as soon as it understood the broader context of its being. sort of makes me wonder that in order to achieve the sorts of AI you’re talking about, we need not just map the brain but also understand (or bruteforce) enough of it to avoid agent crises. the barrier to that could be larger than just developing a wholly new neural network (idk).

It doesn't sound quite like the story the previous poster was thinking of, but Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeu series (beginning with The Quantum Thief) has uploaded, edited, and copied human minds as a significant component of the story.

Can't be Quantum Thief, because in Hannu's -verse, AGIs (or 'dragons', IIRC) exist, are actually pretty easy to make, and much smarter than the uploads or derived human brains - so smart that they are far too dangerous for any side to use, and that's why they still run on brains.

The bobiverse covers this, but is definitely not what the op meant. There's also an arc in the Welcome to nightvale podcast that is similar (using frozen brains) but still different.

There's a few bits in Neal Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" that explore this.

And also, "Lena" by qntm -> https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Google 'MMAcevedo' for a horrifying short story take on this concept.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

In Sam Harris' podcast he mentions an ethical consideration when trying to create an AI that's conscious: an entity that's fully aware of itself yet stuck in a "box" with no way to get out. The perfect torture machine.

The whole Bobiverse series is built around this concept of one guy's brain scan and him embracing his new existence.

By the way, do you have the title of the book you mentioned?

the book was Walkaway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)

the only reason i didn't name it before is that i couldn't recall the name off-hand.

How is that different from general AI though?

General ai would be a unique mind. Simulation doesn't require engineers to understand the process, just that the process works. I can copy a mechanism without scientifically understanding what that mechanism is doing. I can follow a recipe or instructable or copy grandma's brain and have little to no understanding of what's really happening.

Then again, if you can copy a genius researcher and put a million of the minds to work on solving agi methodically, you don't need precision and understanding to start with. You just hope the million mind genius collective doesn't lie or mislead.

But the inputs to the simulation are still artificial so I don’t see why it really matters.

It absolutely matters. Emulating a human mind means copying all off its flaws, biases, and values.

An emulated mind probably won't want to nuke the Earth whereas an artificially created and constructed general intelligence may have no qualms in killing both itself and everyone else around it.

It would be General Intelligence but it's probably not Artificial General Intelligence in so much as the intelligence aspect wasn't designed and created. It also wouldn't be able to get smarter at the rate of singularity since its intelligence comes from using humans as raw material.

It's called The Age of Em by Robin Hanson. Here's the wikipedia[1] and a review by a popular blogger[2]. Interesting concept but not a realistic vision of the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/

This is more or less the premise of the Bobiverse stories.

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