Typo has been fixed.
I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with Voldemort's approach. To identify and destroy those horcruxes, the protagonists surely did spend significant amount of time, at great personal expenses. To me it has already successfully achieved the intended effect.
In cryptography, Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS) is the same idea - this algorithm splits an encryption key into multiple shares, which then can be guarded by different trustees. The encryption key, hence the secret information, can only be unlocked when most or all trustees are compromised or agree to release their shares. This is certainly extremely useful for many problems, and it also foreshadowed a new cryptography subfield called Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). I... (read more)
Thanks for the info. Your comment is the reason why I'm on LessWrong.
The lack of progress here may be a quite good thing.
Did I miss some subtle cultural changes at LW?
I know the founding principles of LW are rationalism and AI safety from the start. But in my mind, LW always has all types of adjacent topics and conversations, with many different perspectives. Or at least this was my impression of the 2010s LW threads on the Singularity and transhumanism. Did these discussions become more and more emphasized on AI safety and derisking over time?
I'm not a regular reader of LW, any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
Optogenetics was exactly the method proposed by David, I just updated the article and included a full quote.
I originally thought my post was already a mere summary of the previous LW posts by jefftk, excessive quotation could make it too unoriginal, interested readers could simply read more by following the links. But I just realized giving sufficient context is important when you're restarting a forgotten discussion.
David believed one can develop optogenetic techniques to do this. Just added David's full quote to the post.
With optogenetic techniques, we are just at the point where it's not an outrageous proposal to reach for the capability to read and write to anywhere in a living C. elegans nervous system, using a high-throughput automated system. It has some pretty handy properties, like being transparent, essentially clonal, and easily transformed. It also has less handy properties, like being a cylindrical lens, being three-dimensional at all, and having minimal symmetry in its nervous system. However, I am optimistic that all these problems can be overcome by suitably clever optical and computational tricks.
Quote jefftk.
To see why this isn't enough, consider that nematodes are capable of learning. [...] For example, nematodes can learn that a certain temperature indicates food, and then seek out that temperature. They don't do this by growing new neurons or connections, they have to be updating their connection weights. All the existing worm simulations treat weights as fixed, which means they can't learn. They also don't read weights off of any individual worm, which means we can't talk about any specific worm as being uploaded.
... (read more)If this doesn't count as uploading a worm, however, what would? Consider an experiment where someone trains one group of worms to respond to stimulus one way
Did David build an automated device to collect data from living cells? If not, was the reason it wasn't done because of some sudden unexpected huge difficulty that 100+ people and multi-million dollar budget couldn't solve, or was it because...those people weren't there and neither was the funding?
Good points, I did more digging and found some relevant information I initially missed, see "Update". He didn't, and funding was indeed a major factor.
Since the early 21st century, some transhumanist proponents and futuristic researchers claim that Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is not merely science fiction - although still hypothetical, it's said to be a potentially viable technology in the near future. Such beliefs attracted significant fanfare in tech communities such as LessWrong.
In 2011 at LessWrong, jefftk did a literature review on the emulation of a worm, C. elegans, as an indicator of WBE research progress.
... (read 1465 more words →)Because the human brain is so large, and we are so far from having the technical capacity to scan or emulate it, it's difficult to evaluate progress. Some other organisms, however, have much smaller brains: the nematode C. elegans has only
One review criticized my post for being inadequate at world modeling - readers who wish to learn more about predictions are better served by other books and posts (but also praised me for being willing to update its content after new information arrived). I don't disagree, but I felt it was necessary to clarify my background of writing it.
First and foremost, this post was meant specifically as (1) a review of the research progress on Whole Brain Emulation of C. elegans, and (2) a request for more information from the community. I became aware of this research project since 10 years ago on Wikipedia, and like everyone else, I thought it would... (read more)