I have no idea how accurate the claims are, but some people claim we would have this ability around 2050. However lets assume they are a few decades ahead of themselves because they want it to come true ASAP, and the real date is 2080. If that is true, the odds are pretty damn low. A 40 year old will be 100 by then.
Who knows though. Maybe there will be advances in anti-aging technology that will radically extend lifespan, and/or maybe the tech will be along faster. But as a guess, I’m guessing it’ll be 2050-2080 before that technology is available.
Of course I can judge by that. My guess might be proven wrong, and isn’t based only on that information, but it can’t be just handwaved away as “well the first few steps are always exceedingly slow and expensive”.
It represents but one of the several necessary developments where we haven’t even cracked the simplest imaginable step. For several others no one is even working at them.
I don’t think it will happen for a good hundred years…and that’s extrapolating along the current tech curve, which is always wrong. Maybe in 75 years, given some really, really unexpected tech breakthroughs.
(Who would have guessed quantum spin technology in everyday hard drives?)
If it were available – and had been tested a while so I know it’s dependable – then, yes, damn straight I would do it. My body is starting to approach its expiration date, and my memory is very untrustworthy these days.
(Our culture now seems too aware of dementia, as if that, not garnered wisdom, is the natural state of the old.)
You folks saying 0 don’t understand exponential growth. Unless there is something in biological circuitry that can’t be replicated in silicon or silicon-carbon hybrid at some point AI will be designing its and our replacements. When AI reaches a certain point it will be shocking to many how quick it will move.
According to people like Kurzweil, the exponential trends in processing power existed before Moore’s law and will exist after.
He claims some other form of computing will just experience exponential trends after the current technology stops growing. Possibly 3-dimensional computing, maybe optical computing, who knows.
As far as the OP, I don’t think the problem is that uploading your mind is technologically unfeasible, it just isn’t something that is being researched. I think Elon Musk’s greatest skill is that he dumps financial capital into hiring the human capital to achieve great things. Electric cars, rockets, the hyperloop, etc. These technologies existed in potential form before Musk, but Musk used his wealth to hire intelligent and talented people to figure out how to make them into a reality. The same can arguably be said for things like mind uploading. I don’t see how we can have a civilization in 1,000 years from now, assuming we survive, that doesn’t know how to do this.
A russian billionaire agreed to put money into the idea, but who knows if his timeline is realistic. As others have said, we don’t even understand what consciousness is yet.
At the very least, by 2045 we will be closer to understanding how to do this even if we can’t achieve it by then. That shouldn’t be controversial because we will know far far more about neuroscience and computing in 2045 than we do now. However I have no idea when we will truly know how to achieve things like this.
Zero, unless it’s available and I have money a la Musk or Gates. I figure once it becomes available those that want it and can afford it will leave the rest of us behind.
That’s “cute”, but neither this nor the reference to Moore’s Law (which rather than being a general principle of technological development people often believe it to be is a very specific empirical prediction about power law application to manufacturing capability of microprocessors) addesses the unknown but previously observed fundamental advances in basic sciences leading to unexpected technological developments. Althogh science fictioneers often gloss over basic fundamental physical limitations to service their story (e.g. superluminal travel or thermodynamics), they most often underestimate advances in basic technology in marked fashion, such as completely missing basic innovations like the Internet or the social implications of smartphones.
As an example, the diode and later field effect transistor allowed the theoretical machines of Babbage and Newman to become not only a practical reality but a device usable for commercial applications; the later development of integrated circuits and VLSI architectures have created an environment in which vast computing power is so readily available that is it most frequently applied to common entertainments in the form of games and computer generated imagery without a thought of wonderment by users who are as often frustrated with the minor flaws as the fact that the smartphone in their hand performs more calculations per second than they could do in a lifetime of concentrated effort. It is hubris of the most conservative kind to assume that future developments in computing will be only modest linear expansions of current silicon mocroprocessor technology, or that we will never understand the fundamentals of neuroarchitecture better than we do now. It is unlikely that fundamental developments in synthetic intellignce and neuroscience, even if they were discovered today, would allow us to “transfer consciousness” to a simulacrum of cognition within twenty, thirty, or forty years, but predicting what may come in the next century and a half, much less millenia, is a fool’s errand.
Except it is not only the body below the neck that ages; the brain itself develops dysfunction with age; from memory loss to degraded neural plasticity to acute retardation of basic verbal and motor function, the brain has its own limitations in terms of operating lifespan, some of which we’re still just discovering. And figuring out how to circumvent that degradation may be as or more challenging that mimicking human cognition in a synthetic ‘brain’.
Also, the notion of mechancally or chemically ‘3D printing’ as a sort of Star Trek-esque universal replication is unlikely to ever be a reality frm the standpoint of basic mechanics; how could you ever ‘print’ (e.g. construct) an organ such as a kidney or lung without continuously supplying oxygenated blood, and how could you provide it blood during construction without it constantly hemorrhaging? It is more likely that such constructors will be organic in nature, growing an organ within them, which is a technology we’re actually on the cusp of demonstrating (growing human organs within human-swine 'chimeras) to a proof-of-concept level.
In short, I wouldn’t bet against achieving any general capability in the long term, provided it isn’t in complete contravention to physics and chemistry as we know it (and even then, I wouldn’t completely bet against revolutionary advances), but I also wouldn’t count on them coming in a human lifetime, nor are they likely to come in the form readibly imaginable today or without unexpected implications. “Uploading to an AI” simulacrum may well come with radical transformation to how we live and relate socially and intellectually to others. If you cease to exist as a corporeal intellect uniquely tied to a physical body do you really have alliegence to your biological offspring, or are you more aligned with other intelligence patterns that more closely mirror your own? Does physical ‘age’ matter as much as diversity or similarity of experiences? What is a ‘relationship’ to an intelligence that can experience the extent of a human lifetime in the span of microseconds? Do intellectual honors and degrees matter when you have complete access to the breadth of human knowledge without limitations of ‘learning’ and fragile organic memory recall? The very notion of ‘uploading’ consciousness to a networked system of intellect transforms the entire experience of cognition to the point we can barely imagine the impact.
…said one loriciferan to another about the previously pristine methane-rich atmosphere being inexobiantly contaminated with oxygen produced by filthy blue-green cyanobacteria.
