Sci Fi Machine to Upload Human Soul Into Computer
The Singularity Is Nigh: Mind Uploading by 2045?
NEW YORK — By 2045, humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers — or at least that's what some futurists believe. This notion formed the basis for the Global Future 2045 International Congress, a futuristic briefing held here June 15-16.
The conference, which is the abstraction of Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, fell somewhere between hardcore science and science fiction. It featured a various cast of speakers, from scientific luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis and Marvin Minsky, to Swamis and other spiritual leaders.
In the year 2045
Kurzweil — an inventor, futurist and now director of applied science at Google — predicts that past 2045, technology will have surpassed human being brainpower to create a kind of superintelligence — an upshot known as the singularity. Other scientists take said that robots will overtake humans past 2100. [Super-Intelligent Machines: vii Robotic Futures]
According to Moore's law, calculating power doubles approximately every two years. Several technologies are undergoing similar exponential advances, from genetic sequencing to 3D press, Kurzweil told conference attendees. He illustrated the betoken with a series of graphs showing the inexorable upward climb of various technologies.
By 2045, "based on bourgeois estimates of the amount of computation yous need to functionally simulate a human brain, nosotros'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said.
Itskov and other so-called "transhumanists" translate this impending singularity as digital immortality. Specifically, they believe that in a few decades, humans volition be able to upload their minds to a figurer, transcending the need for a biological body. The idea sounds like sci-fi, and it is — at least for now. The reality, however, is that neural technology is making significant strides toward modeling the brain and developing technologies to restore or replace some of its biological functions.
Brain prostheses
Substantial achievements have been made in the field of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs (likewise called brain-machine interfaces). The cochlear implant — in which the encephalon'due south cochlear nervus is electronically stimulated to restore a sense of audio to someone who is hard of hearing — was the commencement true BCI. Many groups are at present developing BCIs to restore motor skills, post-obit damage to the nervous organization from a stroke or spinal string injury.
José Carmena and Michel Maharbiz, electric engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are working to develop state-of-the-art motor BCIs. These devices consist of pill-size electrode arrays that record neural signals from the brain's motor areas, which are so decoded by a computer and used to control a calculator cursor or prosthetic limb (such every bit a robotic arm). Carmena and Maharbiz spoke of the challenge of making a BCI that works stably over time and does non require beingness tethered to wires.
Theodore Berger, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is taking BCIs to a new level by developing a memory prosthesis. Berger aims to replace part of the brain's hippocampus, the region that converts curt-term memories into long-term ones, with a BCI. The device records the electrical activity that encodes a unproblematic brusque-term retentivity (such as pushing a push button) and converts information technology to a digital signal. That indicate is passed into a estimator where it is mathematically transformed and and then fed back into the encephalon, where it gets sealed in equally a long-term retention. He has successfully tested the device in rats and monkeys, and is now working with homo patients. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]
Mind uploading
The conference took a surreal turn when Martine Rothblatt — a lawyer, writer and entrepreneur, and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp. — took the phase. Fifty-fifty the title of Rothblatt's talk was provocative: "The Purpose of Biotechnology is the Finish of Decease."
Rothblatt introduced the concept of "mindclones" — digital versions of humans that tin can live forever. She described how the mind clones are created from a "mindfile," a sort of online repository of our personalities, which she argued humans already accept (in the form of Facebook, for instance). This mindfile would be run on "mindware," a kind of software for consciousness. "The get-go company that develops mindware will have [as much success as] a thousand Googles," Rothblatt said.
But would such a mindclone be alive? Rothblatt thinks so. She cited one definition of life as a self-replicating code that maintains itself against disorder. Some critics have shunned what Rothblatt called "chilling Cartesian dualism," arguing that the mind must be embedded in biology. On the contrary, software and hardware are as expert equally wet ware, or biological materials, she argued.
Rothblatt went on to discuss the implications of creating mindclones. Continuity of the self is i upshot, because your persona would no longer inhabit just a biological body. Then, at that place are heed-clone civil rights, which would be the "cause célèbre" for the 21st century, Rothblatt said. Fifty-fifty mindclone procreation and reanimation after death were mentioned.
The breakthrough world
In parallel with the talk of encephalon technologies and mind-uploading, much was said about the nature of consciousness in the universe. Physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford and others disagree with the estimation of the brain every bit a mere computer. Penrose argued that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon arising from the material of the universe. Those of the "Penrose school" think uploading the brain would have to involve quantum computers — a development unlikely to happen by 2045.
But Itskov thinks otherwise. The 32-yr-old president of the Global Future 2045 Congress is dead set on living forever.
Editor's Notation : This article was updated on June 19, 2013, to correct the dates of the Global Hereafter 2045 International Congress (it was held June 15-16, not June 14-15, as previously stated.)
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