This is factually not true. Cryogenic freezing of humans appears to preserve human brains well enough that readily achievable technology will allow for their revival.
Philosophically, to revive a frozen human the process will involve a molecular level teardown that some might consider to be death followed by the creation of a mere copy. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, all known laws of physics and known systems in nature will allow this to work just fine. There are existing examples in nature for all of the technology needed.
Yes, but the creature doing the creating is a living being that ultimately will need a place to live and medical care. For some strange reason, other individuals offering places to live and medical care don't generally work purely out of a desire to create or provide and expect cold hard compensation...
But in the hypothetical event that you find yourself in the machine, life will go on regardless of whether you 'feel' you are the same. Think of the problems you could solve without your thinking enhanced by computer! Your thoughts would be millions of times faster than they are now.
The potential of this is incredible. If this technology is ever fully developed, it would allow you to do something much more interesting than connecting 2 portions of damaged brain. There's no reason a powerful computer cluster couldn't simulate a portion of brain tissue and "stand in" as fake neurons on the other side of the link.
If the simulation were accurate enough, it would be possible for the patient to train the simulated brain tissue to mimic the original. Recovering stroke patients do this all the time. In the human brain, somehow one portion of the brain can train another portion and can smoothly distribute information around. So in principle, the computer simulation's neurons could gradually be coded with some of the skills of the person connected.
This would put us a LOT closer to real artificial intelligence, because we would now be able to see what is actually going on in a working area of human neural tissue. Do this on enough patients, and you'd have electronic analogues of most of the brain.
And the cool part : it might be possible someday to gradually replace a person's brain entirely through a series of surgeries and installing more and more microchips followed by a recovery and training period. You might be able to capture enough of a person's memories, personalities, and skills that the computer simulation would be capable of learning new abilities like the original person and passing the turing test.
Is this guy legitimate? How the hell did someone so ignorant of networking become head of US cyber command? NOTHING stops someone from grabbing off the shelf hardware and creating a WAN that has no hardware connections with the global internet. Or, there's various virtual ways to do this that are almost as good. Companies and institutions have been doing this for decades. Hackers can only get in if the institution is dumb enough to put the mission critical hardware on a network that IS connected to the internet, or even dumber, run the mission critical control system on a windows machine. Of course, corporations do this all the time...
Another easy solution : time delay lockouts. Get the PIN wrong twice, and there's a 5 second delay. Get it wrong within 24 hours after the 5 second delay, and it's a 10 second delay. And so on and so forth, making it take many hours to break the code by guesses even if there were a small number of permutations.
Funny you mention that...I've actually played twitch FPS games on OnLive, a cloud gaming service, and they were playable. If the cloud gaming servers were organized such that nearly all subscribers could reach a server bank within 100 cable miles the latency from the cloud would be negligible.
Different formulations of plastic can have almost exactly the same density.
There is a way to make your method work, however. You need to make the pieces REALLY small...into a plasma in fact. Then you can sort out the atoms by mass and end up with pure feedstocks for each type of atom.
However, with current technology, we cannot afford the energy cost to do this, and we cannot easily turn pure elements back into complex products. But in the long run, this will be how we do it.
But a honking big swinging arm that swings back and forth bringing reactive intermediates to the active site of the enzyme is a mechanical part. If you look at how they actually work, nearly everything nature uses is a mechanical nanotechnological component.
Every internal protein part of a neuron is mechanical. EVERYTHING. The DNA, the RNA, the ribosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, every single organelle and every component of every organelle is a mechanical component that moves around all over the place while doing it's job. Nature doesn't make much that's solid state.
One other thing I did not mention : neurons are a complex biological machine that use hundreds of thousands of moving parts to do a very simple task. If a neuron is stimulated enough, it fires. All or nothing. Also, there are various fine tuning mechanisms located in the cell membrane at the synapse. We can model this behavior with a teensy fraction of the hardware that nature needs to do it. Just a few hundred transistors tops.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
An "algorithm" could also model the behavior of a few neurons working in circuit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the complexity of the brain and body are completely unrelated to the task of thinking. Much of that genome codes for molecular machine parts needed to maintain and grow the hardware. There's all kind of defense and circulatory and support systems that we won't have to worry about when designing artificial minds.
And finally, when you consider the changes made to the brain from the enviroment : that doesn't make the problem harder. Once you have a self organizing neural system that works like the human brain but a million times faster, you expose that system to our environment and train it up just like we do with humans. Sure, it might take a few years for such a system to reach super-intelligence, but if your fundamental design was right then this would eventually happen.
What an amazing technical accomplishment. I can't help but be amazed at the skills of the hardware engineers and software developers who made this accomplishment possible.
SONY managed to build a platform that resisted being cracked for almost FOUR YEARS. AMAZING! Despite the fact that every ps3 game comes on a blu-ray disc that lots of hardware can read, and the fact that a ps3 must have in hardware all of the decryption keys in order to play a game, the platform has withstood 4 years of determined assaults. Has any other widely used DRM scheme that doesn't depend on remote servers lasted this long?
Plus, even now, the battle probably isn't over. I bet there's a few more tricks and DRM features that Sony can switch on for newly released games. It'll be an ongoing battle until the end of the console's lifespan. Four years is a vast gulf of time. Technically, it's already time to start thinking of the next generation of consoles...the next gen could be many times quicker if it were released today with the same manufacturing cost that the ps3 cost in 2006.
Is DRM futile? Depends on who you ask, I guess. I think these results show that DRM can work effectively if sufficient effort is put into it.
Which gives me the idea for a new DRM scheme...has anyone ever made a USB hardware dongle for a software license that has an internal CPU performing complex calculations needed for the host software to work properly? If enough of the software depended on this internal CPU, how could you crack it?
Cryogenically freeze her brain. There are several thousand terrabytes of data stored in the synapses of your wife's brain. The data is stored in physical structures that would almost certainly survive the freezing process. The civilization of the future will most likely be able to take her frozen brain apart atom by atom and recover most or all of that data.
Such a civilization would also be capable of rebuilding her into a working human being, although it's a philosophical argument whether such a being would be the same as your wife.
You're right, I was just thinking of borrowing and swapping in genes related to pollen compatibility from another species of plant. Plants might be able to pull some crazy tricks but presumably a tree or something couldn't crossbreed with a standard crop. Some barriers really are insurmountable even for evolution. I wasn't aware that our gene editing technology was still so crude that a change like that was impossible.
Why didn't Monsanto or whoever the designer was make the plants unable to breed with wild crops? There are many, many ways they could have accomplished this.
Incrementally, step by step. To get money to develop the pre-requisites for something like this, you need to create a useful product. Those microfluidic chips that will allow for laboratories on a chip are one way to go. University labs are working on designing micromachines such as tiny engines and other gadgets.
I do think that once nanomachines are clearly possible, and we have the stuff to actually start thinking about building them, then the resources invested will increase enormously. Once we get close, one would think there would be Manhattan project sized efforts to get the molecular printing technology online. After all, if you can make anything, that means that you could mass produce the most advanced weapons as easily as anything else. The real reason we don't have armies of humanoid robots is because good ones would cost millions of dollars each to manufacture due to the incredible complexity required. Same reason we don't have thousands of anti-missile lasers in orbit and a defense grid of millions of flying drone aircraft patrolling our borders.
Do you have any numbers for this? I thought that it was generally agreed that a Mars mission was survivable using a lightweight spacecraft with little shielding. (maybe a 'storm cellar' shielded room for when a solar flare happens but that's it.) And we're talking a slow Mars mission, using conventional chemical rockets and a many month trip.
Now, a trip to Jupiter or Neptune...yeah it sounds like the only humans making a trip like that would have to be genetically engineered for higher radiation resistance.
Once we have real molecular manufacturing the barriers to getting anything into space basically vanish. Molecular manufacturing would be like inventing a 747 and a supertanker at the same time if we were in an age of wooden sailing ships.
Think about it. Once you build ONE general purpose, self replicating molecular 'printer', you can have it copy itself. With exponential growth, you'd soon have more capacity for making things than all of the factories on the planet. Modify the design of the molecular 'printer' and you would have a molecular 'scanner' that could cut apart any frozen and solid object and determine the exact molecular structure. With this we could copy anything (including human beings).
For space travel, it costs a lot of money to make a rocket because it has so many parts that human labor is required to assemble and quality check. One you can print out atomically precise parts for the cost of raw materials and energy (both of which will become much cheaper because you can print out mining equipment and nuclear reactors just as easily as anything else) the cost of making spaceships would plummet to nothing.
I think the biggest costs of widespread molecular nanotech that would prevent us all getting into space right away would be the necessary regulation and policing. The bureaucracy required and all the safety checks would probably cost more than anything else.
The latest research is that it's bad to turn the oxygen back on rapidly, or at all in the case of a cryonics procedure. If oxygen to the brain was interrupted in the first place, you should not do something that restores oxygen levels rapidly, because this will give the neurons the necessary metabolic energy to commit apoptosis.
I'm not trying to sell anything. If you lack the ability to understand how it works, and/or you're a sheep that follows whatever the establishment says is true about our reality, then it's your loss.
It is possible. Before you replace the patient's blood with cryoprotectants, you cool the tissues down to a hypothermic state to reduce their oxygen demand. Under controlled conditions,
Here's the conditions of an ideal cryonics case
1. Patient's heart stops, legally making them dead
2. A heart-lung machine is hooked up in a few minutes or is there on standby
3. The patient's blood is oxygenated and cooled so that the patient will not need oxygen for about an hour to remain alive
4. Patient is given drugs to keep their heart stopped so that they remain legally dead
5. Patient's blood is replaced with cryoprotectants
6. Patient's head is brought below freezing and the tissues vitrify into a solid state that preserves all synaptic detail
We know this works because we've brought people back when they'be been at step 4. All we're doing now is taking their living, cooled body and freezing it. We know that the details encoding their memories and personality are almost certainly preserved if it's done this way.
Step 8, the rebuild, should be able to repair almost any damage if the underlying information is intact. A machine would remove every single individual atom from the person's brain, process the data through a molecular computer, and print the individual atoms down to create a rebuilt version of the person's brain. Nature can already do this, as this was how the brain was made the first time.
Slashdot Mirror
This is factually not true. Cryogenic freezing of humans appears to preserve human brains well enough that readily achievable technology will allow for their revival.
Philosophically, to revive a frozen human the process will involve a molecular level teardown that some might consider to be death followed by the creation of a mere copy. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, all known laws of physics and known systems in nature will allow this to work just fine. There are existing examples in nature for all of the technology needed.
I'm saying that you can't create shit if you don't receive any compensation for your work at all.
Yes, but the creature doing the creating is a living being that ultimately will need a place to live and medical care. For some strange reason, other individuals offering places to live and medical care don't generally work purely out of a desire to create or provide and expect cold hard compensation...
But in the hypothetical event that you find yourself in the machine, life will go on regardless of whether you 'feel' you are the same. Think of the problems you could solve without your thinking enhanced by computer! Your thoughts would be millions of times faster than they are now.
The potential of this is incredible. If this technology is ever fully developed, it would allow you to do something much more interesting than connecting 2 portions of damaged brain. There's no reason a powerful computer cluster couldn't simulate a portion of brain tissue and "stand in" as fake neurons on the other side of the link.
If the simulation were accurate enough, it would be possible for the patient to train the simulated brain tissue to mimic the original. Recovering stroke patients do this all the time. In the human brain, somehow one portion of the brain can train another portion and can smoothly distribute information around. So in principle, the computer simulation's neurons could gradually be coded with some of the skills of the person connected.
This would put us a LOT closer to real artificial intelligence, because we would now be able to see what is actually going on in a working area of human neural tissue. Do this on enough patients, and you'd have electronic analogues of most of the brain.
And the cool part : it might be possible someday to gradually replace a person's brain entirely through a series of surgeries and installing more and more microchips followed by a recovery and training period. You might be able to capture enough of a person's memories, personalities, and skills that the computer simulation would be capable of learning new abilities like the original person and passing the turing test.
Is this guy legitimate? How the hell did someone so ignorant of networking become head of US cyber command? NOTHING stops someone from grabbing off the shelf hardware and creating a WAN that has no hardware connections with the global internet. Or, there's various virtual ways to do this that are almost as good. Companies and institutions have been doing this for decades. Hackers can only get in if the institution is dumb enough to put the mission critical hardware on a network that IS connected to the internet, or even dumber, run the mission critical control system on a windows machine. Of course, corporations do this all the time...
Another easy solution : time delay lockouts. Get the PIN wrong twice, and there's a 5 second delay. Get it wrong within 24 hours after the 5 second delay, and it's a 10 second delay. And so on and so forth, making it take many hours to break the code by guesses even if there were a small number of permutations.
Funny you mention that...I've actually played twitch FPS games on OnLive, a cloud gaming service, and they were playable. If the cloud gaming servers were organized such that nearly all subscribers could reach a server bank within 100 cable miles the latency from the cloud would be negligible.
Different formulations of plastic can have almost exactly the same density.
There is a way to make your method work, however. You need to make the pieces REALLY small...into a plasma in fact. Then you can sort out the atoms by mass and end up with pure feedstocks for each type of atom.
However, with current technology, we cannot afford the energy cost to do this, and we cannot easily turn pure elements back into complex products. But in the long run, this will be how we do it.
I just checked my gmail...account open since November 2004...
I remember waiting for months to get an invite.
But a honking big swinging arm that swings back and forth bringing reactive intermediates to the active site of the enzyme is a mechanical part. If you look at how they actually work, nearly everything nature uses is a mechanical nanotechnological component.
Every internal protein part of a neuron is mechanical. EVERYTHING. The DNA, the RNA, the ribosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, every single organelle and every component of every organelle is a mechanical component that moves around all over the place while doing it's job. Nature doesn't make much that's solid state.
One other thing I did not mention : neurons are a complex biological machine that use hundreds of thousands of moving parts to do a very simple task. If a neuron is stimulated enough, it fires. All or nothing. Also, there are various fine tuning mechanisms located in the cell membrane at the synapse. We can model this behavior with a teensy fraction of the hardware that nature needs to do it. Just a few hundred transistors tops.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
An "algorithm" could also model the behavior of a few neurons working in circuit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the complexity of the brain and body are completely unrelated to the task of thinking. Much of that genome codes for molecular machine parts needed to maintain and grow the hardware. There's all kind of defense and circulatory and support systems that we won't have to worry about when designing artificial minds.
And finally, when you consider the changes made to the brain from the enviroment : that doesn't make the problem harder. Once you have a self organizing neural system that works like the human brain but a million times faster, you expose that system to our environment and train it up just like we do with humans. Sure, it might take a few years for such a system to reach super-intelligence, but if your fundamental design was right then this would eventually happen.
What an amazing technical accomplishment. I can't help but be amazed at the skills of the hardware engineers and software developers who made this accomplishment possible.
SONY managed to build a platform that resisted being cracked for almost FOUR YEARS. AMAZING! Despite the fact that every ps3 game comes on a blu-ray disc that lots of hardware can read, and the fact that a ps3 must have in hardware all of the decryption keys in order to play a game, the platform has withstood 4 years of determined assaults. Has any other widely used DRM scheme that doesn't depend on remote servers lasted this long?
Plus, even now, the battle probably isn't over. I bet there's a few more tricks and DRM features that Sony can switch on for newly released games. It'll be an ongoing battle until the end of the console's lifespan. Four years is a vast gulf of time. Technically, it's already time to start thinking of the next generation of consoles...the next gen could be many times quicker if it were released today with the same manufacturing cost that the ps3 cost in 2006.
Is DRM futile? Depends on who you ask, I guess. I think these results show that DRM can work effectively if sufficient effort is put into it.
Which gives me the idea for a new DRM scheme...has anyone ever made a USB hardware dongle for a software license that has an internal CPU performing complex calculations needed for the host software to work properly? If enough of the software depended on this internal CPU, how could you crack it?
Cryogenically freeze her brain. There are several thousand terrabytes of data stored in the synapses of your wife's brain. The data is stored in physical structures that would almost certainly survive the freezing process. The civilization of the future will most likely be able to take her frozen brain apart atom by atom and recover most or all of that data.
Such a civilization would also be capable of rebuilding her into a working human being, although it's a philosophical argument whether such a being would be the same as your wife.
You're right, I was just thinking of borrowing and swapping in genes related to pollen compatibility from another species of plant. Plants might be able to pull some crazy tricks but presumably a tree or something couldn't crossbreed with a standard crop. Some barriers really are insurmountable even for evolution. I wasn't aware that our gene editing technology was still so crude that a change like that was impossible.
Why didn't Monsanto or whoever the designer was make the plants unable to breed with wild crops? There are many, many ways they could have accomplished this.
Incrementally, step by step. To get money to develop the pre-requisites for something like this, you need to create a useful product. Those microfluidic chips that will allow for laboratories on a chip are one way to go. University labs are working on designing micromachines such as tiny engines and other gadgets.
I do think that once nanomachines are clearly possible, and we have the stuff to actually start thinking about building them, then the resources invested will increase enormously. Once we get close, one would think there would be Manhattan project sized efforts to get the molecular printing technology online. After all, if you can make anything, that means that you could mass produce the most advanced weapons as easily as anything else. The real reason we don't have armies of humanoid robots is because good ones would cost millions of dollars each to manufacture due to the incredible complexity required. Same reason we don't have thousands of anti-missile lasers in orbit and a defense grid of millions of flying drone aircraft patrolling our borders.
Do you have any numbers for this? I thought that it was generally agreed that a Mars mission was survivable using a lightweight spacecraft with little shielding. (maybe a 'storm cellar' shielded room for when a solar flare happens but that's it.) And we're talking a slow Mars mission, using conventional chemical rockets and a many month trip.
Now, a trip to Jupiter or Neptune...yeah it sounds like the only humans making a trip like that would have to be genetically engineered for higher radiation resistance.
Once we have real molecular manufacturing the barriers to getting anything into space basically vanish. Molecular manufacturing would be like inventing a 747 and a supertanker at the same time if we were in an age of wooden sailing ships.
Think about it. Once you build ONE general purpose, self replicating molecular 'printer', you can have it copy itself. With exponential growth, you'd soon have more capacity for making things than all of the factories on the planet. Modify the design of the molecular 'printer' and you would have a molecular 'scanner' that could cut apart any frozen and solid object and determine the exact molecular structure. With this we could copy anything (including human beings).
For space travel, it costs a lot of money to make a rocket because it has so many parts that human labor is required to assemble and quality check. One you can print out atomically precise parts for the cost of raw materials and energy (both of which will become much cheaper because you can print out mining equipment and nuclear reactors just as easily as anything else) the cost of making spaceships would plummet to nothing.
I think the biggest costs of widespread molecular nanotech that would prevent us all getting into space right away would be the necessary regulation and policing. The bureaucracy required and all the safety checks would probably cost more than anything else.
The latest research is that it's bad to turn the oxygen back on rapidly, or at all in the case of a cryonics procedure. If oxygen to the brain was interrupted in the first place, you should not do something that restores oxygen levels rapidly, because this will give the neurons the necessary metabolic energy to commit apoptosis.
And the ironic part is that the Swedish government is world renowned for being a model of efficiency...
I'm not trying to sell anything. If you lack the ability to understand how it works, and/or you're a sheep that follows whatever the establishment says is true about our reality, then it's your loss.
It is possible. Before you replace the patient's blood with cryoprotectants, you cool the tissues down to a hypothermic state to reduce their oxygen demand. Under controlled conditions,
Here's the conditions of an ideal cryonics case
1. Patient's heart stops, legally making them dead
2. A heart-lung machine is hooked up in a few minutes or is there on standby
3. The patient's blood is oxygenated and cooled so that the patient will not need oxygen for about an hour to remain alive
4. Patient is given drugs to keep their heart stopped so that they remain legally dead
5. Patient's blood is replaced with cryoprotectants
6. Patient's head is brought below freezing and the tissues vitrify into a solid state that preserves all synaptic detail
We know this works because we've brought people back when they'be been at step 4. All we're doing now is taking their living, cooled body and freezing it. We know that the details encoding their memories and personality are almost certainly preserved if it's done this way.
Step 8, the rebuild, should be able to repair almost any damage if the underlying information is intact. A machine would remove every single individual atom from the person's brain, process the data through a molecular computer, and print the individual atoms down to create a rebuilt version of the person's brain. Nature can already do this, as this was how the brain was made the first time.