3 ms·

This essay seem reasonably well-informed, but completely unwilling to tread even close to, let alone outside, the possibilities of our current technology/framew

This essay seem reasonably well-informed, but completely unwilling to tread even close to, let alone outside, the possibilities of our current technology/framework of thought. It seems to me a complete presumption that it will forever be impossible to recreate a consciousness given a recorded set of behavior. (Philosopher David Chalmers talks about this a bit: http://bit.ly/duFPOG http://bit.ly/duFPOG) A relatively-recent example of how unexpected use can be made of pre-existing data - look at how search engines worked in 1997. The state of the art didn't know what signals were most important to look at, so they paid attention to things like keyword density. Then Google came along and illuminated a way more important signal, blowing away the state of the art for search engine ranking. Who's to say there is no analog for any kind of 'consciousness recording' that we have right now? Is it entirely implausible that a recording of my thoughts today won't provide significantly more information 50 years from now than it does today? The problem seems akin to compressed sensing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing), posted in a few articles on HN about a month ago.

jacquesm 17y ago
I think that to record a given intelligence is a harder problem than to create an AI, and imho an AI is still very far away, in spite of some very interesting work in that field working in the direction of developing one. Not only would you have to perform a 'near perfect' programming of such an intelligence, you'd also have to record it, so that is two big problems to solve. The '50 years from now' has been around just about forever, make that 50 years. But in reality, in spite of all our amazing computer power we are not much closer to being able to do this than we were 20 years ago, and I don't expect it to be much different 20 years from now. The article is addressed to those alive today, and it is possible that 100, 200 or 1,000 years in to the future the situation will be dramatically different. It's hard to imagine that it would not. But barring a 'singularity' or the development of something really technologically advanced (say large scale quantum computing) I have a hard time seeing how it could be sooner than that. So that's where the premise comes from, not that it is a complete impossibility, just that it probably is an impossibility in the lifetime of those alive today.
- stellar678 17y ago
  Well, it seems reasonable to postulate about the future since we're talking about living forever. The potential impacts include whatever might be happening before you die. And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. I guess stepping back from the details, the questions is: why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. It's very interesting, that's why it makes for great science fiction. Science fiction can be an awesome inspiration for real science and plenty of things in real life today were science fiction not that long ago. But the link between knowing that our brains store and process information and storing a copy of that state and bringing it back to life again in some other substrate (another brain or a digital simulation of one) is a very large distance away from our current capabilities. > why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility? That's not my intention. The thing that bothers me is that it seems as though a fairly large number of people are living under the impression that these things are 'just around the corner'. I'm all for trying to achieve some or all of this, but I think we should be realistic about our expectations. The 'anti aging' market is the modern equivalent of snake oil and there are plenty of salesmen and more than a few of the gullible. And 'uploading/storing/downloading' is another order of magnitude more complicated than simple preservation of what we have.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Not only would you have to perform a 'near perfect' programming of such an intelligence, No you don't. You need to perform a near perfect simulation of the physics of a brain. It's not nearly as difficult as intelligence, since you only need a low level understanding of what is going on. We are considerably closer to this than we were in the past. We can already simulate nerve clusters and some parts of vision processing.

jacquesm 17y ago

I think that to record a given intelligence is a harder problem than to create an AI, and imho an AI is still very far away, in spite of some very interesting work in that field working in the direction of developing one. Not only would you have to perform a 'near perfect' programming of such an intelligence, you'd also have to record it, so that is two big problems to solve. The '50 years from now' has been around just about forever, make that 50 years. But in reality, in spite of all our amazing computer power we are not much closer to being able to do this than we were 20 years ago, and I don't expect it to be much different 20 years from now. The article is addressed to those alive today, and it is possible that 100, 200 or 1,000 years in to the future the situation will be dramatically different. It's hard to imagine that it would not. But barring a 'singularity' or the development of something really technologically advanced (say large scale quantum computing) I have a hard time seeing how it could be sooner than that. So that's where the premise comes from, not that it is a complete impossibility, just that it probably is an impossibility in the lifetime of those alive today.

stellar678 17y ago
Well, it seems reasonable to postulate about the future since we're talking about living forever. The potential impacts include whatever might be happening before you die. And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. I guess stepping back from the details, the questions is: why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. It's very interesting, that's why it makes for great science fiction. Science fiction can be an awesome inspiration for real science and plenty of things in real life today were science fiction not that long ago. But the link between knowing that our brains store and process information and storing a copy of that state and bringing it back to life again in some other substrate (another brain or a digital simulation of one) is a very large distance away from our current capabilities. > why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility? That's not my intention. The thing that bothers me is that it seems as though a fairly large number of people are living under the impression that these things are 'just around the corner'. I'm all for trying to achieve some or all of this, but I think we should be realistic about our expectations. The 'anti aging' market is the modern equivalent of snake oil and there are plenty of salesmen and more than a few of the gullible. And 'uploading/storing/downloading' is another order of magnitude more complicated than simple preservation of what we have.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
Not only would you have to perform a 'near perfect' programming of such an intelligence, No you don't. You need to perform a near perfect simulation of the physics of a brain. It's not nearly as difficult as intelligence, since you only need a low level understanding of what is going on. We are considerably closer to this than we were in the past. We can already simulate nerve clusters and some parts of vision processing.