I’m not specifically talking about The Singularity, where a machine can be as intelligent or smarter than a human. I want to digitize my brain, upload it into a robot that matches my persona, and live forever while keeping backups of myself just in case.
Have any studies been done on this? Something like running the storage required out on a curve matched to our current storage capacity increases? Same for speed, lowering power consumption, etc? What estimates do we have for this type of range?
I’m thinking I just might have to freeze myself for my plan to come to fruition.
However Kurzweil predicted this decade (2010-2019) would be a golden age of biotechnology. So far, I’m not seeing it. His predictions are pretty optimistic timeline-wise.
A safer estimate (pulling this out of my ass) maybe 2060-2080.
Kurzweil felt 10^16 cps is about what it takes to simulate a human brain. That will be affordable next decade. But neuroscience still needs to advance heavily before we can just transplant a person’s consciousness into a machine. We don’t even know what consciousness is yet.
Before that happens, the robots will exterminate the humans. They’ll use poisonous gases and poison our asses. It’ll have to be done, so that they can have fun. This will all have happened by the distant future, the year 2000.
A serious answer? Nobody really knows. Could be 1 year or 100 years or never.
It’s not simply the complexity of computing architecture but also the lack of understanding what consciousness is and how it works.
Kurzweil, while sort of a visionary, has an atrocious record at actual predictions. His “success” rate depends on you squinting your eyes and saying “yeah, I guess that kind of looks like what he said”.
Massively inefficient. You’re wasting energy on the food production to keep them alive, especially if there’s no sunlight to help with that. That was one of my gripes about the first Matrix movie.
It’s more efficient to burn bodies for energy. And burn the would-be crops/plants you were using to feed them. And then switch to nuclear, because cancer is only a problem for ugly bags of mostly water.
Ah, the heady old days of video games, when the post-apocalyptic hellhole was always set as the year AD 200X.
Uploading your brain to some digital backup is unrealistic—for now. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Besides, what does that get you? You back up and create a perfect copy of your conscious brain onto some artificial/digital medium, and you’ve got your clone, but you still die.
The better approach would be in nanotechnology.
Create an artificial neuron (and artificial connections that simulate what’s really going on in our brains. Do this for just one neuron. You’ll notice nothing; you’ll still be you, but 1/99,999,999,999 cyborg.
Next time, replace four neurons. Then 100. Then 1,000.
This gradual approach over years would take patience, but over enough time, it should be theoretically possible to replace almost all your brain with an artficial version of one that could be every bit as good as just uploading your brain to some black box, however you still get to remain you.
How far away is that technology? If it’s even possible, who knows?
To summarize : it will take between 20 and 30 years before it is even possible to do this in theory. The actual technology would not involve keeping your old brain, you’d have your old brain carefully frozen or fixed with chemicals and then torn to many very thin slices. Each slice would be scanned, and the information would be used to build a hardware emulator of your brain.
On the bright side, emulated you could be much, much smarter than you are now. On the other hand, would you be you? Strictly speaking, your original brain is now slices that will be tossed into a medical waste incinerator. The emulated model of you is only “based” on these slices, presumably there have been countless changes made to filter and simplify the data and make it into something that a computer can run.
As for how long do you have to live? Theoretically, you could sign up for Alcor and die tommorow and there would be a nonzero chance that enough of your brain is preserved to do this procedure in the future.
In reality, the problem is that Alcor’s procedures are not as good as they could be. Alcor, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t have the R&D budget to really refine a good method for freezing an entire brain intact. This would probably cost billions of dollars to develop and verify, and Alcor has mere millions. So they have a method that’s better than nothing, but probably mangles a significant portion of your neural tissue. Any recovery would probably require extremely advanced technology and a lot of uncertainty.
By uncertainty, I mean that any particular neural connection in the mangled areas of your brain might have several plausible possibilities. Over your whole brain, this means you’d have to guess or substitute in information from other people’s brains to eventually get to a network structure that would work at all. In short, you might wake up, but many of your memories would be vague or missing entirely, and parts of your personality would not be your own.
With all this said, a medium sized city hospital can have an annual budget in excess of 1 billion USD. I’ve seen the financials. It is probably possible to develop a reliable method to preserve patients brains such that they can be recovered in the future for about that much money.
Yet every patient a hospital treats will in the end be completely and utterly dead. They will be so much mush in an embalming room or even incinerated to ashes in a crematorium. The fact that our society allows this to happen (more than a million times a year in the United States alone) is one of the greatest irrational things I have ever learned about. I cannot imagine how primitive we will seem to a society that has the technology to reconstruct people from preserved brain tissue. (and if the roadmap is correct, we might only be a mere 30 years from being such a society)
Emulation or a simulation of yourself, while maybe theoretically possible, would still kill you as Habeed mentions after my point made in the prior post.
No, a gradual replacement at the cellular level that can interface with the organically involved is much more preferred, albeit perhaps even further off in technology over emulation.
And once you’ve slowly, gingerly transferred your you to a digital brain, all bets are off regarding indefinite immortality, copies or clones of you, etc.
IOW: you don’t want to copy the information within your brain onto some machine. You’d want to copy parts of the machine into your brain, until it was all machine. The rewiring of your sapience/self-awareness should arise naturally if the tech was sound and done gradually enough. You’d remain you.
So your ideal would be a world where no-one ever truly dies: the world population will include not only the naturally living, but living simulacrums of everybody who has existed, with all their individual life-experience, wisdom and bitterness; kindly and vicious beliefs and instincts; physical abilities and voting rights ? Rather like the ancestors’ death-casts paraded at Roman funerals, but animated ?
Property rights are gonna be a bitch.
As you remove the natural neurons, store them somewhere safe. First the 1. Then the 4, then 100 then 1000. As you store them, put them together in EXACTLY the same configuration they came from. When all is said and done, are there two of you? Why not? At one point does the original stop becoming the original and the removed parts now become the original?
You seem to have formed a definition of “you” (consciousness, I presume) that I’m not sure is shared globally.
I’m riding on the question being begged: I’m assuming it works much more organically in the direction I’ve stated than the other way around. Why? Because the brain seems to be elastic, even for sufficient situations in adulthood as well. A new (albeit, artificial) neuron replacing one out of a 100 billion, wouldn’t be noticeable, yet still function as a natural neuron might. That is, allowing itself to react and rearrange to stimuli on a level that is so infinitesimal as to leave very little doubt the person may as well be the same as he/she was after the artificial replacement had been performed.
What’s more, we can’y support organic life as much as we can artificial, mechanical/chemical processes, let alone on the nano-scale; so a good assumption seems to be the original way proposed: We’ll figure out how to mimic very tiny, nuanced and specialized nano-tech based off biology, far before we figure out how to keep a sole neuron alive, then keep separating more neurons from the entirety of the human brain, and reintegrating it into some reversed-engineered version of the same brain.
That said, the entire point of such a thing it to move the unshakable feeling (whatever philosophical repercussions) existence (illusion or not) of a you from an organic brain to a digital/artificial one that can be maintained and sustained indefinitely.
My gut tells me, you’d lose your you if you attempted this approach the other way around, and it might not even execute with success the point of the tech in the first place.
Again, this entire process does beg the question. I’m assuming the human brain, mind, and it’s I or you can be maintained through such an advanced process of cybernetics, nanotechnology, and a sound theory of conscious itself.
Those electronic people don’t have human life support needs. They can live in a lot more places than humans can (and can wait a long time to go places as well).
Also, if they are run faster than humans and/or able to rewire themselves to make themselves smarter, then it’s meat humans who are the ones who need to be worried…
