Nah I think it is just a joke. 'Lets bet the future of humanity on climate change being real or not'.
Once again would prob also be a fun setup for a science fiction short story. Forbidden love blooms between the feuding techno houses of em and agi, eventually the secret is revealed, they are both clones of each other and just custom algorithms, and not agi nor em.
I mean probably? The practical effect is something like "I leave $X to be held in trust, payable to the other guy's grandkids". Which seems like it would be totally legal, just fucking weird.
Somehow “neither” isn’t even an option with these big brains, even as
neither em nor agi automation is being created and deployed and is
displacing jobs.
For what its worth, digital uploads of people being used as slave labor is older than Hansons book. *Age of Em* came out in 2016 but the first edition of *Eclipse Phase* was released in 2009, *The Quantum Thief* by Rajaniemie in 2010 and that's just modern singularity stuff. You can probably trace the lineage back to Stanislaw Lem in the 1950s or so.
Do you have any specific Lem's book in mind? I don't remember him mentioning brain uploads, though the robot novels (*Cyberiad*, *Fables for Robots*) had some mind copying and nested reality stuff.
As for lobotomized uploads used as slaves, there's also Greg Egan's *Zendegi* from 2010, which also has the "Benign Superintelligence BootStrap Project" designing theology of machine gods, and making fun of rich people throwing money at them.
In one of the Star Diary stories Ijon Tichy meets a researcher that has managed to "invent the soul": A crystal that preserves the consciousness of a person in its structure, just kept active by the heat of the environment but with no way to interact. In another there is something like a general AI researcher that managed to create an electronic "portrait" of people that perfectly mimics their behavior. He has two of them also trapped in a virtual world.
This Wikipedia page has even earlier examples that are very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction
**[Mind uploading in fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction)**
>Mind uploading, whole brain emulation, or substrate-independent minds is a use of a computer or another substrate as an emulated human brain. The term "mind transfer" also refers to a hypothetical transfer of a mind from one biological brain to another. Uploaded minds and societies of minds, often in simulated realities, are recurring themes in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s.
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On the topic of Egan though, one idea that doesn't appear with Hanson or anywhere else that I recall is that of people created not as exact duplicates of living humans through uploading but as superpositions. It appears in a few of Egans short stories where games or such create NPC populations by taking uploads and mixing and matching them to make people that are functional with real world knowledge and emotional responses but no personal memories or identity.
Often in science fiction people make copies for a few tasks with less smarts and self awareness, an alpha copy being a full copy or something, beta less so, gamma even worse etc. Sort of hierarchy of intelligence in copies.
That distinction I've first seen in Alastair Reynolds *Revelation Space* novels and not that often elsewhere (*Eclipse Phase* copies it, Baxter uses something similar without the same terminology) but it's less about intelligence than size and fidelity: An Alpha copy is a complete neuron-level copy, a beta copy is more a really good AI that is trained to imitate the behavior of that person. In EP a beta is a pruned and compressed alpha and a gamma is what Reynolds calls a beta. So it's not really a super established SF trope.
David Brin's *Kiln People* has something similar, people making short-lived golems of themselves. It's not so much a linear hierarchy of diminishing abilities, IIRC, but specialization by the task they're intended for doing.
This is awesome. And the following discussion really makes me want to get into more transhumanist fiction. Any recommendations / good places to find recs?
Cookie Monster (from 2003) is really good IMO, definitely worth a read. Here's a link.
https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-%20The%20Cookie%20Monster.htm
For transhumanist fiction Greg Egans short fiction is an excellent place for idea dense stuff. Check out what collections you can get your hands on, but there is excellent stuff for free on his website: https://gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html
Some starting recs I'd give are *TAP* and *Closer*. Of his novels *Permutation City* probably has the most interesting stuff to say there.
wikipedia has a big list of examples of [mind uploading in fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction) so you could see if any of the short summaries pique your interest (and many story titles there include links to wiki articles with longer plot summaries). I second the recommendations of Vernor Vinge's "Cookie Monster" and Greg Egan, especially *Permutation City* (which was expanded from his short story "Dust").
They're arguing about what form of digital intelligence will dominate in the futures.
Hanson in *Age of Em* argues that in a century or so humans will be able to emulate the brain in software. So basically there will be digital clones of people who will run tasks.
By contrast AGI would be artificial general intelligences that aren't the product of brain emulation.
The bet then is whether the future will be dominated by emulations or agi.
EDIT: They're also trying to inflation proof their bet via indexing it to the S&P.
I first encountered the idea of emulations used for economic productivity in the *Black Mirror* episode "White Christmas".
I hadn't heard "em-like" before and passed over it, thinking he was sneering at the robot god cult and saying regular old unintelligent automation would still reign supreme. Thanks for ruining it for me.
I’ve got 5 bucks saying that what’s going to be bigger than both is a
big stack of linear regressions that gets called “Em” in order to get VC
funding.
Interesting that these people basically consider other people not to
be real. A true artificial intelligence is essentially a person, so
they’re taking slavery here. While also making a stupid deal on behalf
of their children and their children for generations.
Bold of you to assume they think slavery is bad. (And not sure if they mean slavery here, there are situations you could dream up where the ems or agi just get paid for their labor, the interesting thing seems that the 'slavery counts or not' question doesnt even come up in the bet, what if the agi doesnt want to cure cancer, but just wants to turn people into dinosaurs).
Why isn't GPT-3 a subhuman AGI? I can't think of any text based task it can't do at all but an average human can (even if the human does it far better) except for puns. And even if it isn't, I don't see any reason why GPT-N can't be an AGI and therefore GPT-3 would be a lesser version of it. And if GPT-N is sentient and can suffer then presumably GPT-3 can, but to a lesser extent. In the same way a chicken is not a person but can still suffer, although to a (hopefully) lesser extent.
That's like not at all comparable with gpt-3.
Look, you clearly have some misconceptions on the meaning of certain terms. Please, next time you decide to resurrect a month old thread on a Saturday morning, make sure you have something interesting to contribute.
This is both a very bad idea, and makes betting weird, so good job.
Somehow “neither” isn’t even an option with these big brains, even as neither em nor agi automation is being created and deployed and is displacing jobs.
I both hate that I understand this and that it makes me wonder, once again, whether the writers of “White Christmas” were inspired by Hanson’s book.
I’ve got 5 bucks saying that what’s going to be bigger than both is a big stack of linear regressions that gets called “Em” in order to get VC funding.
Interesting that these people basically consider other people not to be real. A true artificial intelligence is essentially a person, so they’re taking slavery here. While also making a stupid deal on behalf of their children and their children for generations.