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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?)