I’ve been working on replicating the tech in the documentary series, “Dollhouse.” Last night it finally came to me - you need to invert the waveform before applying the Elliot transformation. Obvious, really. In hindsight.
At any rate, I’ve got a working model that can copy people’s brains, edit their personalities, and download them into different bodies. While it obviously has potential for doing horrible things, what are some ethically sound applications? I’m just after enough money, and if I can make it ethically I won’t have to sell it to a secretive extra-governmental organization. Won’t that be nice?
In particular -[ul]
[li]Minds can be copied off anyone. This cannot be done surreptitiously - the subject knows that something is being done to them, but not necessarily what.[/li][li]A copied mind can be backed up and transferred.[/li][li]Minds can be edited or created from a melange of existing minds. We don’t have fine-grained control, so we can’t create an ubermensch. At least not deliberately.[/li][li]One or more minds can be downloaded to a body. If the original personality is not copied, this process destroys it.[/li][/ul]
Weight loss is one possibility. From the client’s perspective, they wake up a month later 40 pounds lighter. If our editing is good enough, psychiatry would be revolutionized. The series is a little inconsistent there - it looked like they had much better control later in the season than in the kidnap episode. On the other hand, the kidnap episode is explicit about the limits. Beyond that though… There’s just not a surplus of healthy bodies with no users. Looks like shadowy conspiracies get a new toy.
Soldiers and high-risk surgery patients get a backup copy to say goodbye to friends and family in the unfortunate event of their death. Where do we get the bodies? Guantanamo Bay!
I mean, what happens if I try to download the mind of an average (or even above average, intellectually) person into a developmentally disabled or physically injured brain? Or vice versa, for that matter—what if I take the mind of someone who’d suffered a traumatic Hemispherectomy and put it in a healthy brain?
How about a chimp, or other kind of animal brain for that matter? (Unless you skipped directly to human testing…you sly dog.)
Does the upload process work shortly after (or during) death?
I haven’t watched the show, and am just going from the description here. A few thoughts come to mind :
It ought to be possible with these techniques to copy a mind into storage and leave an untenanted body behind. This would let you put a mind in storage while you performed exceedingly painful medical procedures on it, and restore the person to his or her body only after the worst is over.
“Mind Banks”; if you have technology like this, it’s highly likely you will have the ability in the future to run minds in artificial brains in the not-too-distant future. And even if you don’t, at some point we should be able to simply grow mindless bodies; a saved copy of your mind could be loaded into one, even if it takes a hundred years to develop the technology.
Or a related issue that came up in a sci fi story with similar technology. There was a debate about using the technology to give healthy bodies to the disabled, but transferring their minds to the bodies of serial killers and such. In the story a crime boss gets hold of the technology and transfers his mind to the brain of an upstanding citizen. By the end of the story, he turns himself in.
It turned out that a sociopathic mind in a normal brain turned normal; for the first time in his life the crime boss felt empathy and guilt over his actions. "So, let’s suppose we carry out your plan and start putting normal minds in the brains of monsters. What happens to those normal minds ?!" was more or less the ending.
The Dollhouse suffers from Spider-Man syndrome. This comes about when you realize, hey, a 15 year old kid just invented a compound Dow chemical would pay gajillions for. Webbing which has a much higher tensile strength than steel, breaks down organically, and can be stored in tiny canisters under high pressure, and then streamed into pretty much any shape imaginable. And that’s without mentioning it’s adhesive properties. Three square millimeters can bond tight enough to support a cable car full of passengers. It’s just crazy. All Peter has to do is file a patent on the formula and he and Aunt May buy their own islands. All the other gizmos he invents in the comic book, such as a car which can climb walls, automatic cameras which can track rapid fights over city blocks at a time, spider-tracers which emit trace signals with virtually no power requirements, etc. Any one of these inventions would make him ridiculously wealthy.
If The Dollhouse opened its tech to the real world, think of what it could do. There would be hundreds of billions made just in smoking cessation and drug rehab alone. Imprinting people with medical knowledge and memories of top surgeons. Imprinting people with additional language skills. I can’t think of anyone on the planet who wouldn’t want their services for something. That doesn’t touch the people who actually need their services, such as the mentally ill and brain damaged. This technology seems like it would be able to cure Alzheimers, and that’s worth billions on its own. The larger implications are that they understand enough about the human mind to be able to model it on a computer. That has HUGE ramifications for AI and computer-mind interaces. The ability for a computer to understand the human mind and react accordingly, even under the guidance of a genius like Tofer(who we can replicate at will) would be a breakthrough beyond anything we’ve ever achieved.
Plus the government would safeguard the technology for the Dollhouse and it could be patented and licensed. If there’s something in this world they couldn’t achieve faster, easier, and more surely by being public than they could by being underground, I can’t imagine what it would be.
Since your only source of bodies would be brain-dead people that have been “donated” by their next-of-kin, I can’t see too many ethical uses for this technology. You are effectively killing the body donor to make an imprint.
From the evidence of the show? Yes. They’re capable of making people who are essentially mentally ill, c.f. the sociopathic girlfriend Whiskey, and later Echo, were imprinted with in the season finale. The OP asked about ethical uses of the tech though. Giving someone a ICD-10 disorder, even one which sounds like it would be fun, is probably not ethical.
The ability to copy from a person could be used ethically, as a means to study the brain and advance our attempts to develop artificial intelligence.
Under no circumstances would I trust anyone with the ability to copy to a person. Given how easy it would be make it look like you obtained consent, any use of the technology would have to be assumed to be misuse, and carry a penalty that prevented them from doing so ever again.
You could achieve immortality via cloning. Let’s assume cloning a human is a breeze compared to the brain technology. Even if you couldn’t, you could store away memories for later retrieval by Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients. Or even download human thought into computers, if the body thing is too squicky for you. Of course eventually The Machines would attack The Bios, since that’s the way Science Fiction works.
True. I’m reminded of a little scene from some old Spider Man cartoon; Peter meets a bunch of alternate universe Spider Men, including one in spider themed power armor who says “What ? You AREN’T a multimillionaire ?!”.
I’m curious as to how many people would be desirable. You, as a continuous consciousness, would cease to exist any time that your host body died. But from the new body’s perspective, it would perceive a continuous consciousness from the moment you were copied. It would be you, in terms of your personality and experiences, but not you in terms of a single continuous entity. In a way you’d be dying over and over again. The idea skeeves me out, personally.
I guess you’d raise new bodies, cloned from your old cells, with related health and aesthetic improvements, of course. Every so often you’d back up your current personality. Whenever you tired of the old body, you’d download your current personality into the new host. I guess an ideal host age would be about in the teens, but that could be a selectable option. Your mind would be the cumulative age of all your lives. “Youth is wasted on the young” would no longer be true. If there were an accident you could download into a backup, or even choose to go offline for a while until a new host is grown.
Sure, there might be a few ethical considerations here… but a small price to pay for immortality, dontcha think? Just sign on the dotted line here, and we’ll mind your soul, er, self for you.