SDr

The business case for uploading:

Motivation: biological mortality is problematic, but leverage point to that is presenting a business case for the alternative

• of the 6 pathways to immortality, brain uploading has the highest likelyhood to be realized within our lifetime
• wherever attention focuses, technology ever increases. "When man realizes a technology is within reach, it achieves it."
• Specifically, eg youtube foresaw the wide deployment of broadband enabling streaming video a few years ahead, and made plans on top of it
• Moore's law is unbroken:
• The processing demands for a whole-brain-emulation (assuming spiking neural network) is estimated at 1 exaflop
• In 2019, a supercomputing centre went online with medium capacity of 1.2 exaflop.
• This means, if we had the connectivity map, we could be running uploads now. (the actual extraction process is interesting, but out-of-the-scope here)
• One way to get there is to motivate businesses to pay attention to an alternate way to get cognitive power
• Compute costs are dominated by power costs -eg Google purchases HW on the basis of their MFlop/watt efficiency
• 2020: TPU: Edge TPU: 4TOPS / 2W =>x 10KWH ($1) => ~20 petaflop per hourdollar => $50 / hour for 1 exaflop

• implications: we could have, now, an upload, running for <$50 / hour
• implications: we are now living in the branch of reality, whereby uploads -if ever figured out- will be economically dominating & being more economical in all professions earning >$50/hour
• This justifies replacement of high-end workforce with uploaded equalents, whenever cost of employment is >$50/hour

One coherent narrative of the past 50 years of human civilization progress:

• We went from a materially scarce society to a materially abundant one; and
• from an informationally scarce society to an informationally abundant one.

The challenge of this decade is attention scarcity. We can’t hack this via corporate, or informational tools -in fact, many of these tools are actively out to harvest as much attention as possible.

Solutions to this include mental tooling, social contracts, and personal filters, and systems to find gems; but ultimately, power comes from within. Read on...

The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does. – Warren E. Buffett

The best way to predict the future is to create it:

• ”…Experienced entrepreneurs seem to be more likely to use “effectual reasoning,” wherein they start with a given set of means—their personal strengths and the resources they already have at hand—rather than a predetermined goal, and then allow opportunities to emerge to which they can react. In contrast, non-entrepreneurial executives tend to use causal reasoning, in which they set a goal and then seek the best ways to achieve it. For more details, see Sarasvathy (2008). …”
• ”…By allowing estimates of affordable loss to drive her decisions about which venture she starts, the effectuator reduces her dependence on predictions. To calculate expected returns, we have to estimate future sales and possible risks that constitute our cost of capital, and then raise enough money to make the venture happen. To calculate affordable loss, all we need to know is our current financial condition and a psychological estimate of our commitment in terms of the worst-case scenario. This is not only a non-predictive mode of estimation, it also is a way to nullify the role of uncertainty in early-stage funding decisions. …”

This grew up into the field of effectuation

There are no good substitues for understanding.