While I agree with the consensus that it’s probably not possible ever (and if so, a very long ways off), I’m curious what made you reach this conclusion. Seems like if it actually were possible, it would be delightful.
I’m guessing that it’s not so much being enamoured by the idea of living forever: instead it’s the idea of DYING that freaks us all out.
Sure if you are talking about per unit volume, perhaps. What’s the speed we’ll get with quantum computing?
But aside from that a building of processors running in parallel can scale practically indefinitely.
You think that biological has some intrinsic capability that silicon can’t replicate with regards to processing?
Unreliable technology.
I am late 50s and have on occasion Xeroxed my butt. Does that count?
It may be ‘delightful’ from the standpoint of not having to worry about death, aging, disease, starvation, and the other aspects of fixed corporeal living, but it also would represent a transition of human existence in ways we are barely equipped to even imagine. Setting aside the philosophical and theological considerations of the “uniqueness of consciousness”, “meaning of life”, “existence of the soul”, “abandonment of the afterlife”, et cetera (that the athiests of us are perfectly willing to dispense with in theory but might have a few hesitations in practice), there are some of the practical realities of such a situation, such as:[ul]
[li]Given that it would be presumably trivial to produce one hundred copies of you consciousness as easily as one, and which ‘fork’ would be the legal and functional ‘you’?[/li][li]It would also be easy to take your consiousness and place it into a ‘virtual slavery’ by sandboxing it or or torture it with false sensations.[/li][li]Would the sharing or merging of human knowledge at a fundamental level e.g. being able to share inner thoughts or dreams directly result in a blurring or even elimination of individuality?[/li][li]Lacking the endocrine system, would we still be capable of having or adequately simulating authentic emotional responses?[/li][li]No longer being faced with either the fear of mortality (other than by threat of erasure or otherwise being deactivated) and not having the impetus for biological reproduction and disseminating ones genome, what would be the driving factors in human innovation and creative achievement?[/li][li]What would conflict look like in a virtual reality? Could someone literally damage, molest, invade, or destory parts of your virtual personality directly, and how,could you defend against such intrusions?[/ul][/li]
That is just a short and very incomplete list of possible concerns that we cannot even fully begin to address until we understand the parameters of such a radical transformation. We’d certainly have to write entirely new laws, mores, and societal norms. Would we even have genders? Sexual relations? Cojoined reproduction of new intellects? Property of some unique intellectual fashion? Some virtual equivalent of wealth or employment, and the socioeconomic hierarchies those present? We just don’t know; such a transformation represents, in the words of the Bard, “the undiscovered country”; a realization of a human-created “foreverlife” that may be as much purgatory or hell as heaven for some.
First of all, parallelism in computing doesn’t scale without limit; many types of problems have limits to how fine of graduations they can be usefully divided into, and there are always practical and even fundamental limits in terms of communication bandwidth and reintegration of calculations, hence why we don’t have machines which can simulate large complex systems like the Earth’s climate in real time to anything like an arbitrary degree of granularity.
Second, the mammalian brain is incredibly complex not only in its division of functions but the interconnections between functions and the ability to adapt in unexpected ways we’re being constantly surprised about. One substantial way is the effect that the digestive system–presented in anatomy classes as some kind of discrete and entirely distinct system which has the ‘simple’ function of providing nutrients to the rest of the body–has direct influences on the cognitive functions including being responisble for many cognitive dysfunctions. Although evidence that the brain is driven by some kind of underlying quantum mechanical function is sorely lacking (with apologies to Sir Roger Penrose) the degree of complex interactivity my require quantum computing or some other novel form of computing architecture to adequately represent.
Third, 'biological [structures] [do have] some capability that silicon can’t replicate with regard to processing"; the brain is a literal living machine, constantly changing and developing in structure, with skills and memories integrated directly into the interconnections that it forms in operation. It is really nothing like a semiconductor architecture driven by ‘software’ commanding the brain according to a core instruction set. And that is one of the fundamental problems with transferring consciousness from brain to host; we have no idea how to create or simulate that kind of condition. Efforts to do so in a virtualized environment “in software” have not produced anything really like general cognition in machines (although genetic algorithms have produced new capabilities in novel problem solving and optimization, which is at least analogous to how we learn in our protein brains), and that trick of sparking some element of unique self-awareness and identity remains elusive even as machine heuristics have become exponentially better with the pseudo-Bayesian ‘Big Data’ approach to problem solving. Computers have become very good at producing patterns from massive interconnected data, but it still takes human intellect and creativity–whatever that is–to identify the patterns and frame the essential questions, much less to put the resulting conclusions into a larger integrated framework of the world. And until we can develop computing ‘machines’ that can produce an acceptible facimile of intelligence by itself, we really have no way to map someone’s comsciousness onto it even if we had some way to globally access the brain for the requisite information (which we don’t). It’s very easy to speak in generic terms about ‘scanning’ the brain and ‘uploading’ consciousness, but when it comes to the details we don’t even know what these terms even mean, much less how to realize them.
No technology is as unreliable as the people who use or command it. The fatal flaw in nearly every failure is in the user or designer. And we are very flawed indeed, which is sometimes as much virtue as vice when it comes to innovation. We should be rightfully wary not of “unreliable technology” but,of the perfect automation that robs us of our essential failures that may bring new insignts.
Stranger
I can’t speak for GuanoLad (Superhero team GuanoLad and his side-kick Atomic Alex!) but I’ve read Surface Tension by Iain M Banks and several books by Richard Morgan which feature mind uploading to virtual environments. Lets just say that in the real physical world no matter how bad things get you can only die once, thats not the case if you are running on a simulation. Everyone imagines that they will be simulated in a paradise, or at least something close to everyday life with the bad parts removed, thats a pretty big assumption.
So yes, I’ll politely decline if it ever becomes a possibility, and for the subject of this thread I would say its extremely unlikely to happen, but technological surprises have happened before.
That was my immediate thought - I leapt to Science Fiction ideas of how it could go wrong, hence “unreliable technology”. Something could so easily go haywire and with no physical form how can any of us do anything about it? Living humans would now be our Gods, the ones making life-and-death decisions about us, manipulating code to make us their puppets. Free will would literally now not even be a question, it would simply be eliminated.
And anyway, who really wants to be a brain-in-a-jar for eternity? Not me.
Agree with Stranger. Not gonna happen soon, but never say never about the farther future.
Randall Munroe’s What if? book (though not his website) includes a question about the total processing power of humans versus their computers and their respective curves over time.
He addresses the deep differences in the nature of what “computation” means in the two contexts. Here’s two sentences that for me were relevant to the OP:
That’s a ratio of 5 trillion to 1. That is the “impedance mismatch” of the hardware tech we’re working across today.
Plus of course the deeper challenge of understanding how the wetware operates so we can make software do functionally the same thing. Which can be reasonably assumed to add a few more orders of magnitude of confusion and inefficiency. Not to mention decades or centuries of R&D spending to get there.
Zero
Science isn’t remotely close to acquiring information from the brain and digitizing it. Then they’d still have to make all the memories and information accessible to an AI.
AI is already learning from it’s User. Alexia for example tries to learn the voice and interests of the owner. But that’s very rudimentary compared to fully emulating a personality. That still wouldn’t include memories or the real essence of a person.
Maybe in a 100 years they’ll be closer.
The thing is, it isn’t a problem where if we could just throw more resources at the situation we could plug away and get the job done. It’s a case where the fundamental scientific foundation isn’t even in place yet.
We don’t understand enough about the mammalian brain to even begin to answer the question, not even with handwaves.
In 50 years will we have the answers? Maybe we’ll have interlocking breakthroughs in neurology and cognitive science and AI and some new type of computing such that simulating an individual human consciousness will be possible. Or, more likely, people in 2067 will look back and shake their heads at our naive assumptions about what would be possible, and we’ll look like the guys in 1950 confidently predicting vacation trips to Venus by 2000.
There is the fact that human and other mammalian brains are composed of ordinary matter arranged in ordinary ways. As far as we can tell there is no magic pixie dust sprinkled in there. So building some sort of hardware and software that works like a human brain is physically possible, since we have billions of examples of the proof of concept running around. On the other hand, we’re not anywhere close to understanding those human brains, or rat brains, or flatworm brains.
It certainly is not the case that if only we wait 10 years for computers to get faster, cheaper, and smaller that we’d finally be able to buy the hardware for all this. It’s not the case that if Elon Musk could throw a billion dollars at the first proof of concept, 10 years later they’d be selling upload kits in WalMart. We don’t even know what questions to ask.
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” Isaac Asimov.
I don’t know about you but my brain doesn’t feature a USB port.
Yet.
The issue seems to be that an "upload of consciousness " would be merely a copy or simulation of one’s mind, not the real, original one. How one’s original, genuine consciousness could be transferred to some other medium 8s, to me anyway, unimaginable.
OMG it’s the Star Trek Transporter conundrum.
Yes, OF COURSE it’s a copy. We know that. But the copy doesn’t know that!
Kind of kills the dream of immortality through these means. You die, a copy lives on. What good has that done for YOU?
Increased investment will speed up the understanding of the fundamentals necessary to make this technology work. Putting large sums of money could hire a lot of human capital to speed up answering how to achieve something like this. Right now other than a few eccentric billionaires I don’t think there is much motive to research something like this. However multiple private industry groups, charities and governments are doing large scale neuroscience projects. Maybe that will result in some major leads on what it would take to do this.
I have no idea what the timeline is, but I don’t think this is a major research priority right now so progress will not be extremely fast. The human talent necessary to speed up the development of technologies like this exists, it just isn’t being used. However it is a safe bet that in 10 years we will have a better handle on how to do it than today, and in 20 years we will know more than we will in 10 years. However I have no idea when they will actually figure it out.
Its worse than that Jim, this topic has been done so many times before and I don’t think either side has ever managed to convince one person on the other that they are correct.
I’m on the ‘it isn’t really you so what’s the point’ side of the argument for what its worth. 
Your digital copy can decide how you like your toast and coffee like in black mirror.