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.

Comments

Re:This will never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.

Why not? My brother-in-law's consciousness would probably run just fine on a Commodore 64.

"..you may be able to.."

[kheldan]

In the future, you may be able to:

• Download your brain into a computer construct
• Step into a transport booth and instantly be anywhere in the world
• Have Starships that travel many times the speed of light and take you to distant galaxies
• Never age, never be hungry, never get a disease
• Live in a world without poverty, fear, or war
• Discover Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Gods are actually real, you can meet them and sit down and have a drink and talk to them
• {insert other utter fantasy here}

..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.

Re:This will never happen

[kheldan]

Neurological science still doesn't even have the foggiest idea how the human brain does all the things that it does, let alone what causes the phenomenon we refer to as 'consciousness'. Personally, I believe most of the problem there is the lack of ability to observe the machine in operation; our instrumentality is sorely lacking. Too bad it's not like a piece of machinery, that you can stop, dismantle, examine all the pieces and see what they do, blueprint the thing, then put it all back together and see it run again; you stop a human brain, it more or less starts turning into useless mush immediately, and there's nothing to see anymore.

Of course I'm not all that certain that at this point in our social evolution as a species, that we should even be trusted with knowing all the secrets of how our brains work; I'd be afraid of the knowledge being misused.