Key highlights include:

1. WBE for Aligned AGI: While Artificial Intelligence has progressed dramatically over the last decade, 2024 may be remembered as the year that “AGI” became a feature, not a bug, of corporate R&D efforts. Calls for safety and concern have taken a backseat to competitive pursuit. Interest in creating aligned AGI may not be sufÏcient without a clearer strategy for how alignment might be achieved. Whole Brain Emulation is a concept that holds the potential to advance our understanding of human nature in such a way that enables alignment.

2. Defining WBE and Its Challenges: In 2008, in a landmark WBE Roadmap report, Anders Sandberg defined WBE as ”the possible future one‐to‐one modeling of the function of the human brain.” And yet, WBE remains a theoretical construct, as technology has only recently advanced to the point where such models are plausible. Key challenges to the successful emulation of the human brain include a lack of consensus on the best path forward, compounded by uncertainty about both the scale of funding and timelines required for each potential pathway.

3. Pathways to Aligning AGI

   • Hi-Fi Approaches: Advances in technological discovery in hardware and software are creating an emerging opportunity to create a digital representation of the human brain. With synergies between breakthroughs in brain mapping, neural networks, understanding neuronal structure and

     function, the possibility of creating a digital brain of high fidelity is becoming less theoretical.

   • Low-Fi Approaches: Low Fidelity approaches seek to build pathways towards alignment that originate from existing foundational research and development in areas of connectomics, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence. Incorporating our emerging understanding of neural dynamics, research frontiers with animal models, novel virtual neuroscience methods, or other advances, proponents of Lo-Fi pathways suggest a faster, more cost-effective strategy is best.

   • BCI-Based approaches: While today’s implanted neural devices represent an early effort at brain-computer interfaces, advances are emerging. In mid-2024, over half a dozen companies had registered their products with the FDA for pursuit of regulatory clearance, via the investigational device exemption (IDE) pathway. One of those companies, Neuralink, has openly stated their long-term focus of human enhancement, while another, Synchron, recently announced live integrations with Apple and OpenAI in one of their trial participants to use consumer technologies via BCI control. Despite this pace of innovation, BCI and other in-vivo enhancement represent an expensive, time-consuming, and high-risk pathway when viewed through a lens of AGI alignment.

   • Prosocial Approaches: Incorporating humanity’s values vis a vis emergent understanding of self-modeling, empathy, interpersonal psychology, and other pro-social attributes into AI represents another pathway to alignment. These approaches represent a lower-cost, faster approach to consider.

    

All talks and presentations from the workshop can be viewed here.