Description du poste
I'm Aurelia Song and I founded the preservation company Nectome. We do planned whole-body end-of-life preservation for future revival. That is, terminally-ill people come to us in Oregon, and we preserve them immediately after their death in the hopes that one day people in the future will welcome them back with love. We want to build a future that celebrates and restores those who are preserved today. I've argued at length in previous posts that properly done end-of-life preservation works today because we know structural preservation is sufficient and we can provably preserve sufficient structure. This post is about some of the consequences of this being true.
Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before.tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there's no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work to do AI right even if it will take slightly longer. That's why it's important, today.
How could preservation possibly be relevant to AI this year?You may think, "what's the point of preservation, even if it works? The only thing that matters is AI! If we get AI right, we will enter a utopia and cure all diseases and preservation won't matter because no one will need it. If we don't get AI right, preservation also won't matter because the AI will kill every living person and destroy every preserved person in its quest to pursue its mad goals. Either way, getting AI right is the only thing that matters and everything else, including preservation, is just a distraction."
I call this objection the short-AI-timeline objection. I think it's a good objection, rooted in the i