alt Hacker NewsWhat is the capital market incentive for symbiosis? You are going to spend a crazy amount of time, money and effort to try to mix human behavior and cells to work with digital substrates.
Or you can simply make a machine that does the same thing fully artificially but everything is cheaper because you dont have the constraint of having to fit a bunch of biological features.
It's like my colleagues who were talking about uploading their minds to the cloud in the future, like what would be the benefit of this every happening? What information can you provide as a human that the full aggregate of knowledge does not already have? Why should memory and disk space be wasted on this
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Well, the bee doesn't need to integrate its cells with the flowers, but they've gotten along just fine for a very long time.
By symbiosis I simply mean mutually beneficial coexistence.
We've barely achieved that with each other, but my point here is that we should strive to achieve that with the machines.
We're still treating it as if someone has to win and someone has to lose. Someone has to come out "on top."
If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one.
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To answer your question, the incentive is so that we can continue to exist.
If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point... I've heard the global economy described as a misaligned super-organism even before AI. AI mostly just makes it go faster in roughly the same directions it was already going.
When a search space has irreducible complexity, ensemble search methods can improve performance. It's possible culture, emotions, religion, etc are part of an ensemble.
Simulating the "human search method" in silico doesn't need to include specific personalities, but they do provide a bootstrap, just as we've bootstrapped current AI with human language.
For symbiosis, there may be an advantage to the physical adaptability of biology.
In general, it's currently unclear if biology is emulating what we're creating in computers, if computers are emulating what we achieve biologically, or if both approaches are imperfect emulations of a different ideal search method.
Sometimes discovery happens accidentally. I think investing in the intersection of the digital and biological worlds is a good general direction even if unfruitful intuitively from an early economical standpoint. I think biological systems have immense insights still to give that we should continue to explore!
Innovation doesn't need to have any other reason than because its cool. Think of bipedal robots, everyone went mad at the thought of building something so inefficient
I always find that idea of uploading a mind so detached from reality. It's as irrational as thinking that physically reprogramming one twin's brain to be the same as the other's would make them the same conscious person.