I think that preventing suffering is more important than causing happiness, and I try my best to prevent the suffering of all things that I consider moral subjects. To this extent, I'm vegan, donate my money to effective charities, and so forth.
At the time of writing, I'm thinking a lot about emulating qualia. I've been grappling with whole brain emulations for the past few months and LLMs seem like they might have a decent claim to moral subjecthood too.
the following is fiction
Toda Corporation, an Israeli startup that is the current world leader in whole brain emulations, recently had the weights of their first human upload leaked.
Oren Mizrachi is the eccentric son of Israeli billionaire Eli Mizrachi. Eli made his fortune by founding and selling WorldEye, AI Geodata company to Palantir, which was later turned to the bedrock of the modern defense industry. Oren was always rebellious, living in counterculture and punk communities, and there were always arguments at the dinner table.
In 2028, Oren was at Burning Man, and this time was on 3 grams of shrooms. During his trip, the founder of Toda approached him and wanted to upload his brain. Thinking that this was a masterful act of rebellion, he signed up, and the first set of weights was sitting on a RAID server in Tel Aviv by the end of the year.
They have a lead of a few years over the rest of the field, and it shows. The human is placed in a ridiculously high definition virtual environment, with the simulation controller having the ability to target every input channel of the human's brain. In the past, they walked the road towards emulations, first uploading worms, then mice, then monkeys, and now humans, all in stealth. Only a few investors in Tel Aviv and San Francisco knew about the project, and no one had the full story.
The simulated humans are also really efficient, on a compute basis. They require some interesting memory engineering, as each human has 90