Ellery Newton 21 Dec

Hi Carboncopies,

It is my understanding, “The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt non-profit.”

However, “The non-profit model puts a constant pressure.. to raise money...It’s hard, it takes time time away from.. programming, and.. keep doing it over and over and over again it becomes demoralizing.”

If “every attempt to get something going directed toward R&D on mind uploading (whole brain emulation) that lasts more than 1-2 years has been unsuccessful.“

Then, the reason for my post:

What are your general thoughts on transitioning from the 5 hours of advocacy per week to 60-80 hours of full time development to scale up and refine the “tools to record data from the brain at the resolution and scale that would give insights” to hope to achieve Substrate-Independent Minds?

107 billion have deceased before us. “If everyone thinks the future is great and hence no one does anything, the future won’t be any different than today!”

Note: We must exploit profit opportunities. Otherwise, this project may be a rabbit hole (financially).

Kind regards,
Ellery

Comments

Randal Koene To be clear, there are additional reasons why Carboncopies is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, for example, because we don't have a for-profit agenda, are not owned by corporate interests or government interests, it's pretty easy to talk with us and we have a fairly easy time maintaining a healthy network of positive relationships with researchers. You'll find that many researchers have had bruising experiences with for-profit ventures and that can create hurdles. I won't name names, but this has happened to some very prominent researchers at the forefront of R&D that is important to WBE.

There are more reasons, but these two alone are in my opinion sufficient to always keep an unaffiliated non-profit organization for whole brain emulation alive.

Randal Koene Ellery Newton, I appreciate your critical thinking, but I'd like to make a suggestion. Instead of focusing on what you believe is *not* the right or best approach, how about turning the conversation instead to what you think IS the right/better approach?

It's my impression that you are trying to say that a for-profit approach may be better than a non-profit organization to drive R&D towards whole brain emulation forwards. (Note: work in university labs is also on the non-profit side of that equation.) If so, you do clearly have a point. Whenever a new technology gets to a stage where near term valuable products become clear their further development does tend to happen much faster in a for-profit environment. (Look at machine learning now, for example.) This is of course the hope behind companies such as Kernel and Neurlink as well.

If you have ideas for viable products that a company can be built around which simultaneously advance whole brain emulation R&D, then that is a conversation (in private or public) that I think is very useful and valuable. Having gone down that road before, one good think I could do to help you is to critically evaluate the idea (much as an experienced VC in the domain ought to) and to give constructive review and feedback.