First of all, I posted this at another forum but I wanted to discuss it with more people since practically no-one posts in the subforum I first posted it at. It's quite a long read, you've been warned. Also, this has nothing to do with AI, it's more about digitizing a human consciousness.
Here's my original post:
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So, I've been reading this great sci-fi author these last few months, guy called Richard Morgan. He's written some badass sci-fi literature, but his main work is the Kovacs universe. Takeshi Kovacs is a mercenary and ex-envoy soldier (Envoys are the interplanet government's elite troops that kick everyone's ass) who lives in a world where after humans found ruins of an advanced civilization on Mars managed to create big spaceships and shit and go colonize other planets.
The really great thing about the whole Kovacs realm though, is that a technology exists that can actually make you practically immortal: it's called Digitized Human Freight. What that means is that at birth, humans are implanted with a sort of a microchip (called a cortical stack) at the base of their skulls which stores memories and in effect the personality of a human.
Therefore, humans can actually die in an accident, be killed, drown etc etc etc, but as long as their stack remains intact, they can be downloaded into cloned, bio-augmented or normal bodies (eg if someone was convicted on murder they'd spend 10 years on a disk, personality shut down, while their body would be given to some other person who let's say finished their sentence). This process is called "sleeving" and a human body is called a "sleeve".
It is a three part series, with the first book named Altered Carbon. If you are a sci-fi fan, you should definitely give it a go.
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tl:fwi - In the future, technology could become available that will allow people to "upload" their personality in digital form. That could mean that a person could actually live forever. Here's the low down:
I described a bit of this technology above in the "you can skip this part" segment which is about a trilogy of sci-fi books I've read. I wikipedia'd the whole mind uploading thing and
this article came up. Here's what I got out of it (which isn't much since I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer):
There are several ways in which a human mind could be digitized in the future, and from what I gather they are dependent on the law of a Moore guy. He said in the 70s or something, that transistors and computer microchips would be made half in size and double in power every year.
His law actually holds until today and will continue to do so for at least 20 years; to continue doubling the performance of processors after that period , using silicone will probably not be possible because of the size of silicon atoms. Therefore we'd have to switch to nano tech, which is possible.
An interesting thing is, that Moore's law/prediction partially holds because chip manufacturers actively try to stick within the law's uh.. borders or something.
Interesting fact #2: if Moore's law continues to hold, in 600 years we will be able to simulate the entire universe (!) and calculate how it started etc.
What does this have to do with digitizing consciousness? If we are to be able to map a human brain, in order to upload it, we obviously need huge processive power and drive space.
There's three ways (there's more but there are the 3 I like) to do this:
One is by injecting nano robots in a person's bloodstream to map every single synapse and then digitally recreate it. This however, wouldn't "move" your personality from your body to a computer, it would simply copy it. If the copy is downloaded in another person (or a cyborg like ED what-number-it-was in Robocop) it wouldn't be you anymore.
The second technology is similar to cat scanning: Again, it needs massive calculative power and a very precise cat scan machine, that would effectively kill you; it would slice very thin slices of your brain, mapping them and then discarding them. You'd be eventually mapped and therefore uploaded, but again, it would be more of a copy than you.
The third is the best, which could even actually work:
You make enough technological advances (mine a lot of gold and chop trees and bring them to your city hall and shit) to be able to create a fully artificial brain, resembling the human one. It wouldn't be digitally created, it would have actual, physical form.
Then, while you are still conscious, parts of your brain are changed, little by little to the artificial one. Now, don't freak out: here's the catch. Over the course of one decade, there's not one cell in your body remaining from before that decade. What that means is that your are changing your "components" anyway.
So, if you keep your consciousness while your brain is being artificialized, that actually means that you remain the same person. Your sentience doesn't die even for a split second and you aren't just copied. Once that happens, it should theoretically be easy to hop between bodies, completely human, except for the brain, but this time, instead of creating a duplicate of yourself, you are the one in the other body.
There's a whole philosophy that argues that transforming your brain gradually leaves you the same person that can be found
here. It's pretty easy to grasp and a very small read so see it for yourselves if you want.
/original post
If you actually read that whole heap and want to discuss it, I'd be happy to discuss the ethics and plausibility of the whole thing. Tomorrow. Right now I have to go to sleep because I'm up since yesterday morning
