What's the worth of an uploaded mind vs AI?

[Sci-2]

So I was curious about something I've seen popping in transhumanist fiction - the idea of downloading a mind into a body and having it engage in labor to pay off a debt. Off the top of my head I've seen this mentioned in the Quantum Thief as well as the Eclipse Phase RPG stuff.

 

My question is why would you bother doing this when you can just have an AI engage in these tasks? If you can upload a brain you should probably be able to craft an appropriate AI?

[sologdin]

the automated gate at my office's parking deck would have a lot more personality were it a hardened habitual parking violator?

[sologdin]

mieville did this in bas-lag, no?

[Darth Richard II]

Wolfe did something like this in Home Fires, I think.

 

Also Dollhouse, and i think ANcillary Justice has something similar.

[Richard Writhen]

I have never heard of such a thing before. Body swapping would certainly change the game, lawl :stillsick:

[felice]

If you can upload a brain you should probably be able to craft an appropriate AI?

I don't think that's a safe assumption. Surely copying an existing brain pattern would be much easier than designing an original one from scratch? And even the best non-sentient system wouldn't have a sentient's ability to respond to the unexpected.

[Sci-2]

I don't think that's a safe assumption. Surely copying an existing brain pattern would be much easier than designing an original one from scratch? And even the best non-sentient system wouldn't have a sentient's ability to respond to the unexpected.

 

Okay, for actual research projects or jobs where creativity and such is required there might be a need. But In Quantum Thief (IIRC) those minds were involved in nothing but menial labor. Eclispe Phase's indentured downloaded minds granted bodies also, IIRC, did menial labor.

 

Why bother doing this?

[Darth Richard II]

It's cheap?

[felice]

 

In Quantum Thief (IIRC) those minds were involved in nothing but menial labor.

 

I don't know if it makes sense in the context of the specific universes you mention, but I find it easy to imagine universes where it would. Does the Quantum Thief universe have subservient AIs that could do the job instead? And menial labour might not be taxing the capabilities of the human mind to its limits, but operating a human body and navigating it around meatspace isn't a trivial task. Why bother developing an AI to do the job when there are perfectly good human minds already available?

[Darth Richard II]

I miss Ian M Banks so bad right now. :(

[Errant Bard]

It doesn't seems safe nor efficient to give law-breakers new and powerful bodies in any case.

When mind-swapping is easy and cheap enough to be used for criminals, society will certainly have left behind sentimentalism about the body you wore last season so swapping bodies would not feel much of either punishment or reeducation.

The more obvious would be to upload the mind in a virtual reeducation center, where the prisoner is both effectively removed from society and really can be rehabilitated, meanwhile his body can be used by someone else. I think Richard Morgan has a great take on this, speaking of that.

So I guess for me there is no worth in forced labor like this. You don't even need AI for simple tasks, just advanced programs, that's already what is hapoening right now in the real world.

[Sci-2]

I don't know if it makes sense in the context of the specific universes you mention, but I find it easy to imagine universes where it would. Does the Quantum Thief universe have subservient AIs that could do the job instead? And menial labour might not be taxing the capabilities of the human mind to its limits, but operating a human body and navigating it around meatspace isn't a trivial task. Why bother developing an AI to do the job when there are perfectly good human minds already available?

 

First, apologies if my last post had a harsh tone, was just posting quickly.

 

Ah good call on the meat space navigation. I was thinking about this more last night, and I could see if the only way to get an AGI is through training/development of neural networks (as is the case in Eclipse Phase). The amount of either time or processor cost might be rather high, though it's always a bit unclear where any kind of scarcity exactly fits into transhumanist settings.

[Anasûrimbor]

Isn't the reason to do this because you want to punish people, and have them work off their debt?

 

Who knows if a downloaded human mind can perform as well as an AI or not. What we do know is that in most human cultural systems if someone gets in debt, you want that person specifically to pay it off. Having an AI do it defeats the purpose of personal responsibility.

[felice]

 

First, apologies if my last post had a harsh tone, was just posting quickly.

 

Nah, all good 8)

[Callan S.]

Cruelty

[Sci-2]

Isn't the reason to do this because you want to punish people, and have them work off their debt?

 

Who knows if a downloaded human mind can perform as well as an AI or not. What we do know is that in most human cultural systems if someone gets in debt, you want that person specifically to pay it off. Having an AI do it defeats the purpose of personal responsibility.

 

I think the challenge is you are also paying for the cost of having the uploaded mind, when you could theoretically delete all those uploads save for a few skilled laborers whose brains you could copy.

 

Transhumanist settings seem to assume there is something valuable about every mind, but I have trouble figuring out what this is if every brain is just code in a computer.

[unJon]

 
I think the challenge is you are also paying for the cost of having the uploaded mind, when you could theoretically delete all those uploads save for a few skilled laborers whose brains you could copy.
 
Transhumanist settings seem to assume there is something valuable about every mind, but I have trouble figuring out what this is if every brain is just code in a computer.

isn't this problem analogous to "how can an atheist value human life if it's just a collection of atoms?"

[felice]

you could theoretically delete all those uploads save for a few skilled laborers whose brains you could copy.

 
There could be laws against copying brain prints. That's certainly the case in the Richard Morgan books (or a least, you're not allowed to download the same brain print into more than one body at a time).

[Sci-2]

isn't this problem analogous to "how can an atheist value human life if it's just a collection of atoms?"

 

Not necessarily? I mean it's not about the minds being kept around, but being kept around because you can utilize them to perform certain tasks. I wasn't really talking about valuing life, but asking why a corporation or society would see much value in utilizing uploaded minds for labor. Felice made a good point about using the brains ability to navigate meat space, which I can see, but do we need so many individual minds instead of keeping a few for specific tasks and copying them when necessary?

 

I mean the answer may simply be that uploaded minds diminish in value the more you have, but it's kind of a dismal future to think of one's self as worthless though hard to see how that doesn't hold if you aren't the top of your skill sets. I mean why hire -or even enslave- the average worker when the best and brightest in the field can be copy-pasted and downloaded?

 

 There could be laws against copying brain prints. That's certainly the case in the Richard Morgan books (or a least, you're not allowed to download the same brain print into more than one body at a time).

 

True, but it seems like there's an argument that uploaded brains are valuable in an economic utility sense which is what I'm trying to understand.

 

We could keep the uploaded minds in some kind of paradise and utilize a new kind of animal-brain file for menial labor at the least -> In the same way we have beasts of burden we could just take a single laborer brain and copy it over several times while dumbing it down to the level of an animal.

 

Unless there's an argument for why we can upload a brain but are unable to edit it?

 

This might turn on something about neural networks I'm unfamiliar with but seems, at least to me, unlikely at first glance. Maybe it's like the complexity that arises in a Game of Life simulation, where even computers have trouble keeping track of complexity (if I'm remembering this correctly).

[felice]

 

Unless there's an argument for why we can upload a brain but are unable to edit it?

 

Ethics? Also, we don't need to understand a brain print in order to upload it, just provide a suitable medium for it to operate in. Ie, we only need to understand the hardware it runs on to create a virtual machine on to which an operating system can be cloned; the OS might run fine on the virtual machine, but that doesn't give us the source code, and editing software without the source code by directly messing with the binary files is... not easy, if you want to do anything other than just break it.