I think it should be fairly safe as it has been released for a couple of years now but just in case there are spoilers for the movie Chappie below.
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That said at the end of the movie one of the main characters is fatally injured and allows his mind to be uploaded into a robot body like that of the main character Chappie, he seems to have complete continuity of mind, memories and personality and his new body appears to be as functional as a humans in most respects.
Would you be willing to undergo the same process, would you agree in order to survive the death of your biological body or would you not agree under any circumstances?
I apologise as I am writing this in the early hours of the morning after a very long day but I hope its somewhat coherent.
So I voted hell no. There are a number of arguments that can be made to say that that abomination isn’t me; I am virtually certain that I would die in the procedure, and my robot clone will likely lose something essential in the process to boot.
I can’t remember the name of the planet, where the kid in Galaxy Express 999 wanted to go, to get a robot body. Maetel talked him out of it, I think.
But he was a kid, with all the vitality of youth. Ask some of us older farts, whose bodies are starting to crap out on us. I’d be delighted to have that kind of vigor again, even if it’s just electromechanical.
(I also want to download my mind into a positronic brain, to halt the degradation and the slow, hellish slide into senile dementia.)
(While we’re at it, I’d like my mental system improved: heightened will, the ability to focus more tightly on a task, the ability to get by with less sleep, disciplined control over creativity, etc.)
Need way more info, but not fundamentally opposed.
My concerns:
Legality- am I still fully and totally human and a full citizen of my country in every legal sense of the word? If not, or if limited, that’s a hard stop right there.
Maintenance/updates/nifty gadgets- who deals with that? Where (if anywhere) and how often (if at all) am “I” backed up in case of lightning strikes or hardware/software failures? Who ‘owns’ those backups? What about my new body - who owns my physical form and the software that is running the ‘me’ program? Are the people who built that body/software required to keep me running and updated and happy forever? Do I owe them regular payments for their upkeep? What am I legally and practically allowed to install? Can I have WATSON in my brain? Can I have jet packs or rockets in my legs? What about police scanners or radar detectors or infrared-seeing eyes? Can I be super-strong or not need to breathe?
Humanity- lots of people WILL have problems with robot-bodied people. Will I look human enough to ‘pass’ when I’m in public? What about in private? What about VERY private? How does eating and drinking (or getting drunk or stoned or blitzed) work? If I have issues with depression or OCD or anxiety or bipolar that require medication now, how will that be handled when I’m a program instead of a bio-chemical equation? What if I want to gain or lose weight (or height) or get or lose defined muscle mass (visually speaking) or change my hair or eye color or get a tattoo or piercings?
But the basic idea isn’t strange. ‘Me’ is my mind and my experience and my impressions of ‘me’ having a continued line of existence up til now. Doesn’t matter what the ‘me’ is housed in for existential reasons, but there are a crap-ton of legal and procedural and social implications.
I’d like it to be more secure than simply “been around for a couple of years”. But if by all appearances it is continuous, i.e. we are for a least several seconds inhabiting both bodies simultaneously and then slowly switch from one body to another, and will add an order of magnitude of more on average to my life, I would try it. But just me living now I have several decades of life ahead of me at the very least, and a robot that’s been in mass production for just a few years won’t cut it. Reverse the odds, with me in my 80s and the robots having been around for 40 years with fewer than half of them dying, and I’d try it.
I went other and will explain. If the robot body had an expiration date or I could easily check myself out, I would consider it. But to live past 100 or so? Heck, there are days when convincing myself I want to try for 80 seems a stretch. Making it to that age without the aches and pains is attractive; but not if it results in some form of immortality.
What is involved in one of these “uploads”? If I “uploaded” today. does the “uploading” involve the destruction somehow of my physical self (specifically, my brain)? If destruction of my physical self is involved, my answer is going to be “NO!”
Actually, I’m not sure that the process described (I haven’t seen the movie) would be what I would consider to be an upload so much as a duplication. Can someone going through the process have two or more duplicates made?
Now, to refer back to another Star Trek episode, “I, Mudd”, if the offer was for a surgical transplantation of my brain into a robot body that has an estimated life expectancy of fifty thousand years, show me the sign-up papers.
A plain old upload? No; as far as I’m concerned, I die in that case.
But a continuous process where bits of my brain get replaced chip by chip with cybernetic equivalents is fine by me. I just want some degree of continuity.
Yeah, it’s probably an irrational concern, this continuity idea, because it most likely doesn’t exist in the first place…but if I was going to go into a robot body of some kind, I’d definitely want to ship-of-theseus my way into it so that there’s no clear demarcation point where I was human at one moment and a robot at the next. I just want my cells, brain and body, to be slowly replaced by machine components over the course of several years.
It’s hard to make physical sense of the idea… but just as hard to make physical sense of the lack of it. The only thing that seems to make me me is the fact that I’ve occupied the same sack of meat all this time, and it’s been replaced only gradually. I also wouldn’t want a rejuvenation process that overwrote me with a copy from 20 years ago–that’s death, too. And yet I don’t mind that little bits of me get replaced.
Ludovic’s idea of an upload where both exist at once, and are kept in sync until the physical copy is eliminated, sounds pretty reasonable as well. Though it might be kinda weird during the transition.
It’s also pretty much the case that, unless there’s magic involved, the ‘you’ that exists now is not the same ‘you’ that existed yesterday - continuity and persistence of your identity is just a point of view that your momentary-current self happens to believe in - your consciousness of the past is ‘uploaded’ into your present-time self continuously.
