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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!"
Book your appointment now
Yeah, I'll go check it out on my flying car, while the robot takes care of things at home.
All subjects will be forced to spend a day with themselves before they are allowed back in the general population.
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..
Stop the brainwash
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.
;-) ). 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:
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
"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!
Well, most people I know could put their minds on floppies, and it would still leave enough space for a nice copy of FDISK........... [fmind?]
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Wow. A literal brain dump. Just don't use Eproms or you might loose your mind...
Oliver Sacks' "A Leg to Stand On" illustrates how great an effect the loss of a single limb can have on the psyche of the victim. What would be the effect of the loss of the entire body? Kurzweil makes no mention of it.
I don't know about Ray Kurzweil, but I sometimes pay attention to parts of my body that are below my ears.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Kurzweil argues that strong AI will preceed the ability to download minds, which does not seem logical. It has been reasoned (by Pinker and others) that AI will be developed by reverse-engineering the brain, and artifically replicating its processes. The evolution of strong AI is thus dependent on technology to copy, and trace the functions of the human mind.
Copying the information would require an extremely sophisticated, as well as invasive, set of technologies. Nanotech would probably need to be used to get the proper connections throughout the mind. As far as simply linking the brain, many people have discussed 'plugs' and such that would intercept external sensory/control feeds, such as the optic nerve and spinal cord, and then allow that information to be manipulated/redirected. Thus signals to move a leg could be altered so that they would move a mechanical leg, or even something else entirely. In such a way people could transplant their brains into robotic/cyborg surrogates, not even necessarily human looking. A fighter pilot, for instance, might just transport his brain into the plane. Thus the command to 'run' or 'walk' might be mapped onto engine throttling or some such. External camera's would send a feed, acting as 'eyes', etc. However, none of this makes any attempt at all to actually access stuff in reverse, from the brain. We record memories and such in the structure of the main brain, and thus something would need to go into the brain to read those. And because the 3-D structure of the brain is so critical, preserving the meta-information of how the other memories and such were encoded is also critical. Otherwise, you might end up with a record of memories and thoughts, but no way to actually connect those to form the personality.
Heh, I seem to be ending up with a long post, but the last thing to deal with, assuming sucessful duplication (including the metainformation) is "what now?" A way would have to be found to basically create an artificial neural net that would be able to recreate the exact structure of the original brain. Who knows, it might be possible to do such a thing virtually, having different sectors connected to each other and thus having a person exist in cyberspace. That, however, is pure speculation.
I actually find a lot of the stuff going on very exciting. Brains seem to last a lot longer then the body supporting them does anyway, so being able to basically have your brain in a very strong container that could be moved from body to body would probably work pretty well, and could potentially be very doable. However, total artifical replacement seems a long ways off. In some ways, what he is talking about in this article is sort of like cryrogenics today. You can get yourself frozen, but for the time being there is no way to ever undo the process.
I'm sure that when I'm copying my mortal soul to the hard drive, that's exactly when the Windows box will blue screen. :-/
I wonder how tech support is going to field that problem?
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.
Eh... you can have the ROM personality construct. I'm still waiting for the chick with the razor blades in her fingertips.
If you're interested, check out "The Ophiuchi Hotline" or any of his short story collections. Unfortunately, most of his older works are out of print, but can be found at used bookstores and half.com.
He has one hell of an imagination and I highly recommend him.
But the world ends at GMT 03:14:07, Tuesday, January 19, 2038!
Uhh, pencil me in for the 18th... just in case.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
We've been making partial brain dumps for years. They're called "Books".
I am a Karma Library.
No, I very much doubt these kinds of predictions (and it's got nothing to do with the issue of the transferrence step).
What counts as our "minds" are simply far too tied into the physical instantiation of our bodies. (Not that "mind" is too abstract, but that it's not abstract enough for separation from our bodies.) If I make a computer-based simulation of myself, will it get tired? Hungry? Thirsty? Itchy? Horny? Sick? If not, can it then get excited? Scared? Concerned? Bored? Will it have any emotional reactions at all, if all the standard physical stimuli are removed?
Even if all the "human" inputs are replaced or simulated -- you've still got an added problem of a new level of "hardware breakdowns" on whatever platform is running the simulation. Suddenly you've also got to deal with the various downtimes, pauses, glitches, etc., that will break the illusion of it being the same "mind" as in the original person.
People are simply too much a construct of their wetware to be able to remove their "minds" as a separate set of procedures.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"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.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
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?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
By 2039, you'll be able to download what's left of my mind into a potato.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Blue screen of Death took on a whole new meaning.
On hearing the program, I'm feeling cranky about two things (and I speak as someone who was interviewed by Quirks & Quarks about studies in measuring brain activity).
First, I don't think Kurzweil has said anything that Hans Moravec ("Mind Children") and Marvin Minsky didn't say a long time ago. Minsky contemplated about machines transcending us, and Moravec long ago used Moore's law to predict when computers will be as complicated (he thinks) as human brains. Kurzweil is recycling other people's ideas.
Second, Kurzweil (like other MIT hardware guys) talks about the brain with the underlying assumption that it is just a collection of processing units (neurons) connected by simple electrical contacts (dendrites and synapses). In fact, the entire body of a neuron is chock-a-block full of calcium channels and tiny pores that are regulated by hundreds of different chemicals. Every year, new processes are discovered. Some chemicals are moved into the cell by active molecular transporters. Some chemicals may move between regions of cells by gaseous diffusion. Not only will you have to scan the connections between each neuron, but you're going to have to mimic the action of all this oozy stuff in real time using silicon.
And what about hormones and polypeptides that regulate all kinds of activities at short ranges, and also throughout the body? "Thinking" and decision-making involve lots of input from centres that excrete tiny quantities of chemicals -- all of this will have to be "scanned" (whatever that means) at a molecular level. It won't do to merely list the size and position of 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion connections. You'll have to model the far greater number of wet chemical processes on every neuron.
In the 1940s some people thought everything would be "atomic" by 1990. Atomic rockets, atomic cars, atomic radios. Today, just substitute the word "computational" or "silicon" for atomic and you can blather about nonsense in the year 2040 without having a clue of what it means.
I think the brain's "wetness" is an integral part of it's operation, and this makes it a very dynamic and complicated thing. To simply see the brain as a collection of tiny silicon CPUs wired together is naive. It's a theoretical model straight from the 1960s or earlier, before we knew much about the brain at all. A real breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence will probably arrive slowly, and probably be stimulated by people who learned modern (i.e. post-20th century) physiology when they were young.
Hence, I think the term "an expert in computers and artificial intelligence" is an oxymoron at this time.