Backing Up the Human Brain

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Raymond Kurzweil is a visionary scientist with an uncanny ability to predict future technology successfully. He is also an accomplished inventor in his own right. Recently he talked of nanobots, brains and the future.

'That means they would back up every thought, every experience, everything that makes us an individual. It may sound far-fetched but in the early 1980s, people thought I was crazy for predicting the emergence of the world wide web by the middle of the 1990s; but it happened, and on the schedule I predicted.'
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That would be cool. As long as I was the only one that had access to the information.
 
Wouldn't that be the same as having an electronic person? wouldn't that storage be aware? I mean if that were possible that would be the real Artifical intelligence wouldn't it?
 
Cue people claiming the brain's information can never be read, thereby justifying the existence of DRM without realizing it :D
 
jackofalltrades said:
Wouldn't that be the same as having an electronic person? wouldn't that storage be aware? I mean if that were possible that would be the real Artifical intelligence wouldn't it?
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The copy wouldn't be aware of anything. It requires the actual algorithms the brain is composed of for that to happen. As-is, such a copy would be as useful as an image of your HDD stored on some off-line storage medium :)
 
I think it is bound to happen, I don't see why it shouldn't. Even more important would be a way to infuse all that knowledge and experience into another person. Instead of going to college you could simply download the knowledge and experience of different people who already lived a lifetime of work.
 
One step closer to growing a clone and re imprinting it with myself to achieve immortality. :D
 
While it would be awesome for remembering some stuff, this is scary tech.

You know that people will use this tech (once it exists, if it becomes reality) for their own purposes. New method of interrogation? Just inject some nanobots into the subject's arm; they go analyze the brain and report back. Etc. Thought police anyone?
 
Being able to 'back up' is totally different than being able to 'write' or 'run'. Of course once you can 'back up' it's just a matter of time presumably until somebody figures out how to 'run' it inside a computer far more advanced than we can make now or 'write' it into another body.

Does present some interesting, if perhaps dystopian, possibilities for the future like identifying commonalities among criminals, editing it out, and writing a 'non criminal' personality back to someone rather than housing them in a prison for years.
 
Sherk said:
While it would be awesome for remembering some stuff, this is scary tech.

You know that people will use this tech (once it exists, if it becomes reality) for their own purposes. New method of interrogation? Just inject some nanobots into the subject's arm; they go analyze the brain and report back. Etc. Thought police anyone?
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Wouldn't it work the other way too though? You say you didn't do something, they look at your memories and see that you really didn't do it. The only thing to watch out for is once they can 'write' things back - in which case a corrupt person could actually make you think you did it even if you didn't.
 
I thought of something like this in ninth grade which was quite a while ago. I guess I should be an ivory tower do-nothing futurist too then?
 
Madman0 said:
I thought of something like this in ninth grade which was quite a while ago. I guess I should be an ivory tower do-nothing futurist too then?
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Well the difference is this guy has actually invented things - one example from the article is he invented the first machine that read written text aloud for his friend Stevie Wonder. It isn't some random guy saying 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could....'
 
Madman0 said:
I thought of something like this in ninth grade which was quite a while ago. I guess I should be an ivory tower do-nothing futurist too then?
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By that measure Gene Roddenbery was the greatest scientific mind of all time. Imagining is great, but creating a path to accomplish it is another skill entirely.
 
Madman0 said:
I thought of something like this in ninth grade which was quite a while ago. I guess I should be an ivory tower do-nothing futurist too then?
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Read the wiki on this guy, he's a bit more than a do-nothing futurist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
in high school he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles
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- keep in mind that that was in the 1960s.
 
Sherk said:
While it would be awesome for remembering some stuff, this is scary tech.

You know that people will use this tech (once it exists, if it becomes reality) for their own purposes. New method of interrogation? Just inject some nanobots into the subject's arm; they go analyze the brain and report back. Etc. Thought police anyone?
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It's potentially scarier than that. Why would you have to inject the nanobots? You could make them in some secret lab, and have them disperse into the air and replicate from molecules of water and air and dirt and they could go all over the planet and inject themselves into everyone's brain. You could then control them, read their minds, anything. Pretty soon we're all paranoid schizophrenics babbling about our minds being read with no proof.

However I don't see that being a real concern, this line of reasoning has no real motive. Anything you can get from people, you can get in a superior way from the technology itself, and controlling people when you are as powerful as a god would not serve any purpose, nobody can hurt you anyway. At least I hope.
 
Imagine if you could torrent someones musical talent, or sports reflexes, or business know how.
 
Anyone else thinking of the Robin Williams thriller Final Cut?
 
I'm also thinking of the planet Gaia in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series where Golan Trevise and Janis Pelorat discovered a planet of humans with the ability to share their minds and store information throughout the collective. Human Borg, if you will.
 
DeFex said:
Imagine if you could torrent someones musical talent, or sports reflexes, or business know how.
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Or what if you could purchase these things legally..

And if they could do stuff like curing certain types of mental illness, that would help. Tremendously.

Unless it was so expensive that only the already wealthy could get those services.
 
I'll be 45 in 20 years...if the ability to back my brain up exists by then, then I am ALL FUCKING FOR IT!!

They can keep my brain ".ISO" for as long as they please until they come up with a way to mount/run it on some capable hardware. It would be so awesome to wake up one day, 200 years in the future, as a robot. But then again, the backup might just be a separate entity. If I die I die, and the backup will be some alternate being.

I dunno, I think I'm starting to sound crazy. Disregard.

lol
 
stop!theradio said:
I'll be 45 in 20 years...if the ability to back my brain up exists by then, then I am ALL FUCKING FOR IT!!

They can keep my brain ".ISO" for as long as they please until they come up with a way to mount/run it on some capable hardware. It would be so awesome to wake up one day, 200 years in the future, as a robot. But then again, the backup might just be a separate entity. If I die I die, and the backup will be some alternate being.

I dunno, I think I'm starting to sound crazy. Disregard.

lol
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That's not crazy. It's perfectly logical to wonder if an exact duplicate of you IS you, or are you still gone and now that's just a copy out there but it isn't really 'you'.
 
Ualdayan said:
That's not crazy. It's perfectly logical to wonder if an exact duplicate of you IS you, or are you still gone and now that's just a copy out there but it isn't really 'you'.
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Hell, it may be that the you from a second ago is not the same you as now, and the next second will be a different you still.
 
coolxboxgamer said:
Maybe a two centuries, certainly not two decades...
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exponential growth we are fast heading for the up swing leading to singularity
we have advanced more in our life times then all of the rest of human civilization
 
ryan_975 said:
Hell, it may be that the you from a second ago is not the same you as now, and the next second will be a different you still.
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you are a new 'you' every time you sleep and wake up
what makes you think you are you is the continuity of a physical body
the best way to deal with this the a gradual migration from body 1.0 to 2.0 via nanobots

thing Ghost in the Shell cyber brains but a slow over time cyberazation just like when your body replaces cells
your body fully replaces it self about once a year btw
 
Elios said:
you are a new 'you' every time you sleep and wake up
what makes you think you are you is the continuity of a physical body
the best way to deal with this the a gradual migration from body 1.0 to 2.0 via nanobots

thing Ghost in the Shell cyber brains but a slow over time cyberazation just like when your body replaces cells
your body fully replaces it self about once a year btw
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That was kinda my point. As far as your copy is concerned, it is you, always was and always will be. There's no way for it to know any different. The continuity of existence is only valid in reverse chronology. You're only aware of what you have already experienced, not what you have yet to experience. In that sense, the copy would be you, just as you a second from now will be you.
 
This exact thing happens in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. People are able to "back up" their brains in a device in the base of the neck. Bodies are called "sleeves" and you can simply download your mind into a new sleeve. It's a pretty decent sci-fi/hard-boiled detective hybrid that I would check out.

Though if we couldn't die, would we really continue to be human? I kind of think that our fragility is part of it all. That's a totally different conversation though.
 
mullet said:
To backup my mind I could just use a 16GB thumb drive.
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caddys83 said:
Middle school drop out? :p
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totally made me lol.

havent yet read the article but comments totally remind me of matrix. downloading skills to fly a heli or martial arts... and if that ever happens... illegally pirated "skills" on the streets o.o

mom: so what did you do at your first day in high school today?
billybob: i learned neurosurgery!
 
It's the plot of Caprica, as well.

Like Tesla, Kurzweil is equal parts visionary genius and freaky nutbar.
 
niconx said:
I think it is bound to happen, I don't see why it shouldn't. Even more important would be a way to infuse all that knowledge and experience into another person. Instead of going to college you could simply download the knowledge and experience of different people who already lived a lifetime of work.
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matrix? lol
 
Injecting anything into the brain is a bad idea, but nanobots... You'll either wind up with criminal insanity, death due to trauma sustained over time due to damaged nerves or clogged blood vessels, or the beginnings of a Borg collective. I wish people would learn to not tinker with things that are not well understood. Does anyone else remember people getting tongue cancer when radium-based glow-in-the-dark watches were popular? The people making the watches licked the paint brushes to keep them moist. Radiation was the "miracle" science and the answer to everything before people learned the hard way how it is dangerous. Bioengineering is heading down that same path.
 
Ualdayan said:
Being able to 'back up' is totally different than being able to 'write' or 'run'. Of course once you can 'back up' it's just a matter of time presumably until somebody figures out how to 'run' it inside a computer far more advanced than we can make now or 'write' it into another body.

Does present some interesting, if perhaps dystopian, possibilities for the future like identifying commonalities among criminals, editing it out, and writing a 'non criminal' personality back to someone rather than housing them in a prison for years.
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You're thinking way too small...

Combine all databases, develop method of interpretation. Use that machine to develop subsequent exponentially powerful iterations, ultimately creating a god machine that renders our individual consciousnesses obsolete.

:eek:
 
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