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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
"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...
And we already know who's going to be featured in those ads: Haley Joel Osment.
..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.
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?
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.
"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.
Thats how math works for immortals.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
All the uploaded consciousnesses will exist in a locked in sort of state for eternity. And backups in case one goes insane it can be reloaded from the latest non insane state.
Touché!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This. It will be Hell, any way you slice it. Why? Because at the end of the day, the people taking care of your mind...possibly your 'soul'...are going to outsource it / cut corners. Rows and rows of databanks / uploaded human minds, and the corporation running it is still trying to make their stock price 'sizzle' for Wall St.; at first you may have well-paid / caring beings who want to help out / fix things, but over time...they will be replaced with those who follow a script.
Allow me to give you a scenario:
"Mrs. Watson is acting up about her left knee again on S-23453?"
"Yup"
"Ok, pull her image from last...Thursday, and modify these segments here...and she will no longer care about her left knee."
It's not actually fixing anything, but then, when you're just a brain in a box, who cares what you think? You got no power, no standing, no restitution, nothing, save what whoever out there gives you once your brain is removed.
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
I think it was just a poor way of saying in 21-25 years.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Locked in is execution of the consciousness with no inputs or outputs. There could still be something there thinking 'I exist', 'how did i get here' and 'now what?' over and over, conscious and aware (but without sensory input), with no loss of cognitive function. Forever, until someone shuts down the computer'.