1. The technologies will not arrive in peractio. In peraction arguments are almost always wrong when it comes to technology, and always wrong when it comes to complex technology. These technologies will, and already are, coming bit by bit, met by ever larger and more distributed demand.

2. See response number one.

3. See response number one. Your shark outcome is, from both a scientific and economic outlook, vastly less likely than a distributed emergence. Of course, you could be right – I’m all for responsible and well-rounded fear-mongering – but I’d rather be an optimist looking at the statistically more likely future than a pessimist shouting that the sky is falling.

You and Hugo de Garis are likely in for some pleasant surprises in the long term. Hang in there.

Ta.
@AeaeaActual

Yes it’s true that with a gradual augmentation you are still you all the way up to the 100% mark.

That’s fundamentally different, however than going straight from 0% augmentation to a copy of you in some other substrate.

Here’s why: as you gradually augment, you are effectively a hybrid orgaqnism. There’s only one organism, part of the processing is done in the meat brain the rest in the synthetic part. Adding further synthetic parts allows greater processing but each time creates a new SINGLE organism that is an upgrade of the previous one. It’s analogous to adding a new graphics card to your old PC.

Conversely, you are sitting in a chair and you are non-destructively scanned and a copy of you wakes up in a synthetic substrate. Yes it’s a COPY of you but it’s not you.

The only way to get around that would be by scanning your brain, uploading the copy and at the same time putting some kind of wifi link and a backfeed mechanism in so that as the synthetic version of you thinks, what it thinks is fed back to you, so that you are in effect a hybrid.

Just doing an upload, isn’t you however, it’s a synthetic twin or clone.

An analogy of this might be backing up all the data on your PC onto a virtual image and booting that image up on a virtual machine on a Mac. Yes it’s an identical copy of the original data but it’s NOT the original PC. If both machines were *NETWORKED* however….

So to conclude, don’t delude yourselves into thinking that you’ll get immortality by uploading. You’ll still be dead if you do it that way. The only way to get a valid continuation is by gradual augmentation and upgrading and I personally look forward to that. A straight upload is a poor substitute to upgrading and I personally wouldn’t pay for one to be done.

Yes, it is in fact inevitable.

And let’s dismiss the alternative conspiracy theorist notion that it will all be shrouded in corporate culture, corruption and capitalism, too. To imagine these scenarios is to accept the same flawed thinking that imagines that the technologies will appear overnight. We are quickly migrating away from the ominous social aspects that fuel both fears, and that transition will become increasingly rapid. The “democratization” of these technologies will happen as swiftly as the technologies themselves appear, as is the case with almost all new technologies.

I was watching an interview with Kurzweil where he describes gradually adding technologies to the brain, such that, say, 25% of the brain was now technologically augmented. Are you still you? Yes. Then it moves to 50%. Still you? Yes. 75%. Still you? Yes. At some point if you switch to 100% (i.e., “uploaded”) you would still be you without ever really knowing when the transition occurred. This is why the idea of man blending with machine is so profound.

Yes, it’s inevitable, folks, and it’s a good thing.

How are you doing? I hope you are making some progress at your lab.

I don’t understand at all what Seth means by the assumption that 1 spike equals 1 operation. Surely, spike trains are not that simple as Bialek’s work shows. However, there have been excellent attempts to characterize the computation performed by a single neuron, and deciphering the neural code. Which is nowhere near as simple as representing each spike by an operation, since individual spikes are not independent. We have known this since 80′s. However, I think it is obvious that Dr. Weisberg has no clue about the basics of computational neuroscience therefore I couldn’t read past the first paragraph!!! I don’t think it’s an article to be taken seriously.

(second) the second problem is that the party making the demand may be so dead set on getting what she or he has in mind (not dying by and large) that this person will take anything. In essence The research may be done outside legal oversight. It may be done in relative privacy. It may be done by immoral or ruthless parties. I could name a few non-democratic countries. I could name a category of very rich, much unaccountable, ostentatiously rich people. The same people who have already been selected to not care much about ‘lesser humans’, but who have been groomed by a culture of corporate Darwinism.

(three) A human neurology is something that operates naturally in extremely narrow and arguably fragile constraints. The tiniest change in human brains induces pathology, in either collapse of thinking or at best insanity. One doesn’t even need to resort to actual damage to resort to making a brain experience failure states – just a tiny bit of stress will reduce a brain to extreme states of despair or antisocial tendencies. Taking the human neurological architecture and then being able to successfully port this to a substrate that works far exceeds anything any lab of scientists can model, anticipate the results of, extrapolate or envision, especially if the person paying for the project exerts power over them. If the procedure involves making a transitional copy (the client is dying and the moment of death is engineered to coincide with transference) then the scientists will at some point me relinquishing control of the new substrate to a emerging mind that has created all conditions to exert power over itself. If they implemented sufficiently robust diagnosing devices to keep the synthetic cortex from collapsing, or going effectively inssane, then the vector will be aimed straight towards recursive self-improvement.

In other words, the moment some super-rich client somewhere this century gets it in his or head to compel a team of neuro-scientists and AI-scientists to transition her or his brain in such a substrate, they will almost certainly be bootstrapping the emergence of an artillect.

And in essence an artillect groomed by years of corporate culture, competition, hostile take-overs, capitalism, globalism, finances, speculation and corruption.

It’ll be like putting a shark in charge.