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Huawei Prepares For Robot Overlords and Communication With the Dead (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on Bloomberg: Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans. Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line said his company used science fiction movies like "The Matrix" to envision future trends and new business ideas. "Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now," he said. "In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world." He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat (Editor's note: WeChat is a popular instant messaging app in China and other Asian markets) to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.For those unaware, Huawei is a major Chinese conglomerate. The company, known for its network equipment, last year got some spotlight for its Nexus 6P smartphone.
thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
your a doosh
Because the party leadership does not want any discussion of Time Travel...
Makes you wonder who is really running the place
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
(Attributed to Susan Ertz)
I imagine that immortality would become quite a bore unless there were things to do in the eternal digital afterlife. Hopefully there would be some cool VR games that would be worth playing for a century or two.
What would be great is to be able to put your consciousness into a drone-body or something where you could go off and do something useful and/or interesting, ala the Iain Banks uber-powerful and capable drone entities.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Huawei: connecting ghosts.
..but it's not very likely any of those things will happen.
Hurr, you have no imagination!
On the contrary, I have a huge imagination, it's one of the things that makes me good at what I do -- but I also have a firm grip on reality and know the difference between it and fantasy -- and this guy from Huawei is spinning fantastic-sounding stuff just to get some attention. I rate it's credibility just slightly above things you hear out of North Korea.
Fun to think about such things though. And, you never know.. but I'm not holding my breath, either; I recommend others do the same.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Will it have version control so you can talk to young grandpa about things that matter rather than old grandpa, who can't remember who you are? Will you turn them off between interactions, or leave them running all the time so they can reflect all alone? How about interaction between these AI bots? would we allow them to talk with each other so they can plot the overthrow of meatspace? How about the next serial killer? Would you download his consciousness too so we can continue their incarceration? What about backups? I guess we could make shadow copies.
Pull my finger for my public key.
Do they use some alternate math?
What kind of stupid limitation is that? If someone downloads my brain, at least give me a robot to drive around.
Huawei will never get any where near a us launch site. And what good will that cell network be after some nuclear winter?
It must be nice having one's job responsibilities be naming off science fiction movie concepts, rather than analysis and practical application of actual science.
We have not even the broadest notion of how to "download human consciousness into computers".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You're a douche.
FTFY.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services strongly discourages douching, citing the risks of irritation, bacterial vaginosis, and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). Frequent douching with water may result in an imbalance of the pH of the vagina, and thus may put women at risk for possible vaginal infections, especially yeast infections. (wikipedia.org)
how am I going to live long enough to be come a customer when this is possible in 5 or 6 hundreed years and why would I want to use their app at that point they sjould be able to feed it directly on my eyes ,
I wish they would focus on their phones. My Ascend P7-L10 has NEVER had an update. A once flagship phone is still running Android 4.4.2.
I don't need time travel. I need a reasonably up to date cell phone.
“There’s a very interesting film where Mr Wong has a task of downloading books, he also has a task of printing books and later he kills human beings. Therefore we need better safety technology."
There's this movie that imaginary terrible things happen in, and so I think therefore we need to have real life answers and safety from those imaginary things.
How is this guy in a leadership position?
"Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now,"
What kind of an idiotic statement is this? Are they telling us that it is 2010? Any normal person (if a "normal" person were to say such a stupid thing) would say "by 2035 or 2040" or "by 2036 or 2041" or "twenty or twenty five years from now". Mixing dates and durations in the same sentence for different milestones just makes you come across as confused.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Bomb blast at lunar base.
Everyone dead.
The phone rings, a voice says "No John, you are kill".
But then WHO WAS PHONE?!!
Great, I get to be immortal. So I can have my grandma call me up and grill me as to why I haven't found a nice girl for all eternity.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We have the "technology" to end hunger today. We just don't have the will. The question is, are we somehow going to improve our character by 2035? I doubt it. Probably by 2035 there will be even better technology to end hunger, yet somehow there will be more of it.
Touché!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How do I even know whether you are conscious?
I only assume you are conscious because I am.
There is no way to objectively prove anyone is consciously aware. Ever.
At least within our current physics. As far as we know, consciousness is so fundamental we may never fully understand it. It just is.
It might exist in some higher dimension outside of our universe, like gravity is assumed to be in some theories.
But who cares about that?
We only care about copying the thought processes of a person.
Not now, but when we get ridiculously high-core computing, we will be able to.
A well-made expert machine similar to Siri and the like, but with said super processors of the future, will be similar enough to a real person most people will get over it fairly quickly.
AI has come a LONG way even in the past 5 years. 30? Yeah, it will be more than capable of simulating people with a fair degree of accuracy.
The research we've been doing with machine learning and emulating how the memory works is changing adaptive AI research quite a bit.
Emotional simulation will be a bit harder to do, but in the end it is just based on a huge DB of reactions to a topic, all calculated and the end result being a complex equation that displays the emotion across a period of time, constantly feedbacking off its self and any related memories.
This will also include every other state the body is in, including where its arms are, which is why we'd need to simulate their bodies as well as their minds, a body defines a humans thought-process, without the body, the mind will be more predictable and less erratic. This is a bad thing for an AI.
Mind you, even humans can even get stuck in such a rut when they do nothing for years and become a gibbering vegetable.
It seems with recent research that physical motion is tied to our consciousness on a very fundamental level, without that activity, the brain slowly fails.
Doing the math behind it all, however, is the stupidly complex part. It's getting there. Sooner or later.
AI is not so much a complex problem in the traditional sense, it is just the massively parallel design and recursion that is a pain in 50 asses. Recursion can make even the simplest of things complex, but now we have huge thread-counts on top.
And we don't even understand the synchronization of the brain, we literally only just found the damn thing the other year purely by accident. (which is now being researched for future anaesthetics, this thing seems to have an almost binary level of control over consciousness, activating it was basically toggling a persons consciousness very predictably and without side-effects!)
When we finally understand how that synchronization happens, we will get somewhere with understanding the brain far better. It will open a whole new area of research, create far safer anaesthetics as well.
It is an exciting time in neurology. If you have kids, get them in to that industry, it is going places. It will be the new hotness. AI as well. Or both.
It will take graphene or similar generation of computing to give us that capability, current tech is immensely slow compared. (including super-computers and Cloud computing)
We are only just beginning to roll-out 3D computing designs in recent years, 3D memory being one of the most progressed tech, especially just there with Samsungs new 256GB SD card.
That density is even higher than SSDs. They could make an SD RAID inside of an SSD for archival reasons. I'd buy the shit out of that.
Mind you, they could also just use the same tech on SSDs and go well beyond their previous densities by miles.
Precisely how many individual neurons must I replace with identically-functioning vat-grown neurons before someone is "no longer the same person."
Once you have answered that, please tell me precisely how many neurons I must replace with an identically-functioning electronic device before someone is "no longer the same person."
Thanks.
Firstly, that a digital computer contained within this universe can accurately replicate the behaviour of a brain in real time, let alone the behaviour of the brain coupled with its body.
Secondly, even if one comes up with a passable approximation, I remain to be convinced that my conscious experience will be transferred into the digital version so that the 'digital me' will not be a simulated prediction of who I am. The 'experts' tend to handwave around the difficult parts of matters like this, saying that it's just a matter of having enough instructions per second without any justification that there is an 'enough ips' or that such an 'enough ips' is physically feasible. (For where I am coming from with the latter bit, the horrors of Ramsey Theory come to mind.)
John_Chalisque
Actually, there is some debate in the field as to whether consciousness actually exists at all - it may be simply a perceptual illusion created as a side effect of our brain doing purely mechanistic information processing.
Not that I'd buy that personally, it seems even more unlikely (and irrelevant) than free will being an illusion, but it's good to keep in mind that at this point there's essentially *nothing* certain about the mechanisms by which the mind operates. Certainly there's no evidence whatsoever that consciousness is inherently dependent on the physical substrate of the brain - and really there's only two arguments I can think of that would even lead to that conclusion:
1) That consciousness is actually a manifestation of quantum mechanical effects that are inherently impossible to accurately simulate. (Which probably presupposes that quantum wave function collapse isn't truly random, but is instead controlled by hidden variables whose existence have eluded our best attempts to reveal)
2) That consciousness originates outside the body entirely (aka a soul), and the brain somehow acts as a sort of "antenna" to connect it to the physical world.
Barring one (or both) of those being true, the mind must somehow emerge from (theoretically) deterministic effects, either as an independent thing, or through the interaction between the brain and the outside world. Either way it should be possible, at least theoretically, to simulate a brain with sufficient fidelity to create an artificial mind. Though it might require simulating it at the atomic level to do so, which will remain infeasible for the foreseeable future.
As for the nature of that simulation - well, personally I think current neural networks won't cut it, at least not for a human style brain - real neuron behavior is far more sophisticated than the "fuzzy logic gates" used in neural networks - with each individual neuron firing based not only on the current inputs, but also past inputs and internal processing that, last I heard, is not yet well understood. And that's before we even get to the fact that the human brain contains dozens of different kinds of neurons. If we can eventually accurately simulate the behavior of individual neurons though, then it seems inevitable that we will eventually be able to accurately simulate the interaction of hundreds of millions of them. At which point, barring 1) or 2) above, and assuming we can connect it to the world (or a simulated one) in a manner consistent with a human body, then it seems reasonable to expect we could construct a human-like mind, including consciousness.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Because all you are is a bunch of chemical reactions and mechanical synaptic firing, occurring in a miraculously organized soup of random intelligence, that can be decoded and "downloaded" to a computer.
When you treat the human being as a machine, you end up with a dead world.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
I just want to say, the slashdot editor/submitter actually did a pretty good job on the summary.
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