Downloading The Mind

bluemug writes "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science radio show Quirks and Quarks aired a piece this weekend about Ray Kurzweil's ideas on downloading human minds to silicon. (The interview is available in MP3 or OGG.) Kurzweil figures we'll have strong AI by 2029 and be able to copy a human mind about a decade after that. Book your appointment now!"

Comments

Eternal life?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I have been thinking about this for a while now.. If you can download the mind - will we be able to upload it as well at some point in the future? I'm thinking along the lines of falling asleep in a body that's in its 70s, and then waking up in a body in its teens. It would certainly be interesting to relive my teens. A few things that could be done differently..

Re:Eternal life?

[ChrisJones]

Isn't that arguably the same thing? You probably don't have many (if any at all) of the cells you had when you were born, so you've been mostly disintegrated many times, you just didn't notice it.
If there is a continuity of conciousness, which the transporters provide, then you are really the same person, you are just made of different atoms.
As for the down/uploading brain contents thing, well, that is a bit more complex - if you can copy the contents of a brain and upload them to another, then you have fork()'d yourself. Either you kill the old body and have it's fork of your conciousness die, or you have two of yourself.
I'm not sure if the human mind could cope with the trauma of first finding itself in a new body, then seeing its old body die. It sounds simple enough, but it would take quite an adjustment!
Besides, I don't actually believe it's possible, I find it reassuring that our brains are probably too complex for us to possibly understand ;)

Either route, uploading or transporters, is a great way to build a clone army of yourself though :)

The Age of Spiritual Machines.

[russianspy]

I actually read about half of the book. I could not finish it as I was unable to read cause I was laughing too hard. I am not saying he's TOTALLY wrong. There may be a time when we will have computers that will be smarter than we are. When we will be able to download our minds into the computer. All of that is fine, his timeline is totally unrealistic.

A couple of points:
1. The estimates as to how much processing power is in an average human brain vary quite a bit. Is each neuron a bit? It can have multiple inputs - maybe it's something closer to a byte or a word? How and where is memory stored? Just haveing the raw processing power does not mean we will have the knowledge to USE it. We are seriously lacking in the knowledge departament.
2. Social implications. How many good technologies are set back, or even stopped because the people are not ready for it? Do you really think that an average person will simply accept and approve of the ability to live forever in a computer? All the religions of the world are going to have a field day with that. Don't think so? We've had genetically modified crops for a while now. They're safe and far more efficient. Why are there still countries that will not allow such crops to be used for human consumption?

In the end it reminds me of a story I've heard of a long time ago. I'm going from memory so you'll have to forgive me if I get the details wrong.

It happens during the height of Artificial Intelligence (when a lot of people thought we will have talking, seeing, thinking computers in just a few decades ;-) ). There was a conference, where one of the scientists started making wild predictions. Something like Kurzweil. Computers are supposed to be able to see (image recognition) as well as humans in 20 years, think in 30, etc. One of the other scientists has asked that guy:

"Why are you saying this? All of those problems are quite hard. It is unlikely anyone will achieve those things in that time."

The first scientist answered:

"True, but notice that every date I've given is AFTER my retirement."

What a way to generate funding, eh? This kind of things simply hurt the field in general.

And that's my gripe for this week. I feel a LOT better now, thank you!

Thought experiment

[Fweeky]

Say you have a class of nanobot which can absorb and replace the function of a single neuron.

You inject yourself with a load of them, and it starts absorbing neurons and taking their place. Eventually, your entire mind ends up running on these replacements, each of which behaves just like the organic neuron it replaced. You've been concious all the way through.

Now, assume each of these is able to communicate it's inputs to a machine on the outside which is able to simulate neurons en masse. They start to disable themselves and telling those around them to get their signal from this machine instead of them.

Eventually, you end up with a load of simulated neurons which are running on this machine, linked to the nerves through whatever method they use to communicate and a bunch of these neuronbots.

The simulated one is functionally identical to the original organic brain, except now it's got the potential to be pysically a lot more robust. Continuity was never lost, and all that was destroyed was a few neurons at a time, who's function was replaced.

There're a lot of reasons why Kurzweil is wrong

[Nutrimentia]

"Downloading" a brain is a lot more complicated than copying a harddrive. Even if we figure out how the brain works, and then figure out how this contributes to a mind (neither of which we are close to understanding at all), downloading a brain is just a duplication of you. You yourself wouldn't notice anything, but your copy's memories would depart from your at the point of the brain scan from which the copy is instigated.

Ugh, there are so many loose ends its hard to pick one to pull on. Someone mentioned before, but your body is more than just a bunch of neurons floating in fluid. Your mind, your person, your sanity rely on constant bodily feedback. Your mind isn't just the brain, its the entire nervous system, head to toe. (check out Antonio Damasio's books Decartes's Error and The Feeling of What Happens for a thrilling discussion of this).

George Dyson's book Darwin Among the Machines doesn't address the stupendously anthropocentric idea of human intelligence on silicon but does explore some possibilities behind the emergence of intelligent (not necessarily conscious) systems on their own.

I read Dyson's book after stumbling across it browsing at a bookstore, only to learn that he lived about 2 miles from me! I went down to his boat shop and introduced myself and have had a few chats with him. He talked about Kurzweil a little bit and he actually gave me a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines. At the time I was a naive fanboy (as opposed to the seasoned fanboy I am now) and asked him if he could write something in the book (I had him sign the Darwin book earlier). He declined, asking me with the ever present Dyson eyesmile, "What am I supposed to say? Sorry this book isn't as good as mine?" It was very humble humor, don't read it wrong.

I read Spiritual Machines and enjoyed it, if for no other reason that it provided a fun exercise in saying "that's a nice idea, but it won't work for these reason..." It addresses a lot of concerns and the whole identity dissolution theme was rather interesting to play along with. Still, I don't think that his future is a likely one.

Bah, I'm just rambling. Short end to a long story: Kurzweil's ideas are fun to read and worth the time spent if you have time to kill, but are highly unlikely. Copying humans into computers is a much bigger problem than just raw clock speed, which is what he boils it down to.

Here's a link to a page about Kurzweilian Singularity. Its worth checking out if you haven't read any of this stuff before.

This seems slightly backwards

[shimmin]

Kurzweil figures we'll have strong AI by 2029 and be able to copy a human mind about a decade after that.

It seems to me that the ability to copy a human mind is almost prerequisite to strong AI. Sure, the "great AI winter" is at least partially due to the crash government funding the field enjoyed in the late 80's / early 90's drying up as suddenly as it emerged, but AI has always been a field prone to too-early predictions. It seems that with each new metaphor we invent for describing the human brain, we also convince ourselves that our minds really are as simple as our metaphors suggest. But Turing thought that human-level mimicry would be possible by 1990 (while at the same time vastly underestimating the quality of hardware that would be available in 1990).

There's a real possibility that we just aren't smart enough to figure out how we work, and so the only route to strong AI is to make monkey-see, monkey-do copies. And while procreation is a time-honored method of doing that, the structure of the brain suggests that serialized output was not high on God's list of priorities, and the biological format rather resists studies. So, I often think that we might have to be able to emulate the brain in silico or some other more easily-studied medium before we have a chance of understanding what makes that brain tick.

Why not?

[Goonie]

But I hardly think you'll be able to understand the underlying processes going on in the brain, particularly how the brain evolves new pathways etc.

If you're claiming that we don't know that much about how the brain works, I'd agree with you. If you're claiming that it's going to be tough to figure out how it all works, I'd probably agree with you there as well.

However, if you're claiming that science can never understand the brain, I'd have to strongly disagree with you. As an atheist, I don't think there's anything so special about the brain. There's no soul there, put there by some random deity. There's no magic. It's just a lump of protein mixed with water, in essence. Sure, it's a marvellously complex lump of protein. but it's still a lump of protein. We've made a heck of a lot of progress understanding the behaviour of lots of other types of stuff using science. What makes this particular lump of protein any different?

Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why, at some stage in the possibly distant future, that the workings of the brain won't be entirely comprehensible to humans?