[MURG] x prize write up

[Joseph J. Strout]

At 5:30 PM -0400 10/11/04, Eric Zilli wrote:

>This is definitely a good goal to aim for, but I don't think it's what
>the X Prize people are looking for. They want major breakthroughs,
>headlines: "Private Citizens Build Working Spaceship," "Scientists
>Perfect Matter Teleportation."

True, but an unattainable goal won't generate headlines either. 
"Scientists Still Can't Travel Faster Than Light," "Absolute Zero 
Still As Cold As It Gets," etc.  :)

Proposing full mind uploading at this point is going to either have 
no effect, or a negative one (e.g., give birth to the meme that mind 
uploading proponents are kooks).

>This is actually similar to what I suggested just the other day as a
>means of testing an upload, but I mentioned rats instead of worms.

By the time we can do this with rats, we'll be probably only 5-10 
years away from doing it with humans.  But that's probably 50-75 
years in the future.  We need to start much, much smaller (by orders 
of magnitude).

>But you have offered an answer to a question I posed in the write up.
>You don't believe mind uploading will be possible in the next 20
>years? Why not? I'm not claiming it will be, I'm just not sure either
>way.

Because when you look at everything that's necessary to make it 
happen, and assuming even optimistic advancements in technology, it's 
just not going to happen.  If we're lucky, we'll have partial uploads 
of insects at that point.  But we may well not be that lucky.  I was 
first reading up on neuroscience, AI, etc. in 1984 (20 years ago) and 
let's be honest: things haven't changed all that much in that time.

Now of course, that's only partially true: in some ways things have 
changed tremendously.  Neuroscience is a booming field, and we know 
way more about how the brain works than we did then.  But are we all 
that much closer to uploading?  No.  Another 20 years may well go by 
with about the same amount of progress.

A concerted, well-funded effort could certainly make good progress in 
20 years -- have full uploads of fruit flies, perhaps -- but I don't 
believe that any such large well-funded effort is possible. 
Uploading research is going to be mainly a side-effect of research 
funded for other purposes for quite a while.

>Are you taking into account the exponential growth of
>technology/knowledge?

Yes.

>  What about the accelerated innovation offering prizes of this sort causes?

That can help, in some cases -- but it's not a panacea.  It works 
best when it's pushing the final development of something that is due 
(or overdue) to be developed already.  I don't think that applies 
here.  But it's better to try than to not try, which is why I 
submitted the 1 mm^3 suggestion.

Best,
- Joe

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