5 ms·

There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also m

There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.

sxu 7y ago
What about reproduction?
- icandoit 7y ago
  We can do both. One doesn't limit the other does it?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  cp -R me/ me2/
  - bencoder 7y ago
    Yep, I would fork myself. Merging and deconflicting if you want to reunite forks could be a fun problem to solve in the future
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      Future person: "Who are you?" Future forks: "One of us." (Thanks to I, Robot for a cute scene.)
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      You might enjoy the Bobiverse trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/
icandoit 7y ago
If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine. Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off. Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2]. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard - https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of-robots/ https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arethuza 7y ago
  That sounds like the "Fast Folk" from Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FallRevolution https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FallRevolu...
- wonderwonder 7y ago
  This is a pretty serious question and something that really should be answered. Is a digital conscious alive, and if so what rights does it have? Ian Banks' Culture novels look at this a few times. Appreciate the article links, will read them after work today.
  - nradov 7y ago
    It's not at all a serious question. It's entirely speculative and there is zero hard scientific evidence that such a thing is even possible. Science fiction.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Philosophy definitely can contemplate theoretical scenarios
kaybe 7y ago
We definitely need to get our environmental problems and ressource consumption under control first.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  That sounds more like a recipe for missing the window of opportunity, that should over time fix all our environmental & resource issues once and for all thanks to the (in comparison to Earth) limitless resources of Earth.
stanferder 7y ago
I fear that the rush to integrate humans with machines will miss something essential and end up replacing true consciousnesses with philosophical zombies.
- naravara 7y ago
  Presumably there will always be some culture of holdouts who resist the upload process kind of like how the Amish resisted the industrial revolution. Of course, if the philosophical zombies end up being evangelistic transhumanist zealots, we'd be screwed.
krapp 7y ago
Conferring immortality? Are you under the impression that hardware never breaks down, or that media never rots, or that software never fails?
- close04 7y ago
  I guess if the transfer process is perfected then you don't have to worry that much about HW failure or rot. Very little of today's data actually disappears due to these causes. Imagine today's equivalent of having your data on 2-3 hard drives, in the cloud, on 3 email addresses, and in a printed copy. You will backup a brain dump every evening to a satellite backup storage and 3 data centers around the world, maybe even to a cold or hot spare body. Someone stealing or altering a copy of you, or altering you (lots of philosophical questions around who is you anymore) would be the real worry. If anyone told you today your life depends on a piece of electronic data in your possession I'm sure you wouldn't let HW failure or data rot become a problem. Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades.
  - naravara 7y ago
    > Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades. Decades might as well be seconds if we're talking about interstellar travel times.
    - close04 7y ago
      Sure. But pieces of paper might as well be nothing compared to the technology we have available once we're capable of downloading consciousness into a machine and interstellar travel. So the challenge may be bigger but also the tools at your disposal. You are projecting today's problems on tomorrow's technology. And I'm being generous here, we're actually talking about multiple generations probably. We're just as close to understanding such future technology as people (scientists) 100-150 years ago were to understanding ours. Saying "in 200 years we'd surely lose the data to HW failure and bit rot" is no different from them saying "you can't fly without flapping the wings" 150 years ago. Those future generations face challenges we can't even imagine today. Like if I whip up 5 copies of myself who is "me"? And if 4 died will it be a loss of data or just loss of redundancy? Will it actually be just one combined copy running on multiple machines (Borg style)?
adamisom 7y ago
Although I think "immorality" was a typo and you meant "immortality", it's a funny typo, because ethics are definitely relevant.
naravara 7y ago
>this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant. Not really. You're assuming this "machine storage" mechanism can preserve state forever. Even if you manage to upload consciousness losslessly and maintain all the ineffable qualities of "life" or "soul" or whatever (that we don't even really have solid philosophical definitions for), you'd still need to contend with data corruption and bit rot over cosmic time-scales.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  There are many error correction techniques suitable for this, such as for example fountain codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code You basically encode a message (say, it's 10 some data storage unit unit long) into a much bigger lot of chunks (say 1000 0000 units), which you then transmit. As long as you receive a pre-determined amount of the chunks (1000 units might be enough), regardless of order, you can reconstruct the original message. With speed of light lag, you can't really expect re-sends & will have to use some encoding working on a similar principle to this one.
lallysingh 7y ago
I can probably train a simple AI to be "close enough" to lots of people. Does that count? More seriously, if we can send software, why care about this muddy consciousness stuff?
zentiggr 7y ago
Frank Herbert's take on this had humans enslaved for a few centuries before the Butlerian Jihad got humans back in control of themselves and instituted a ten thousand year taboo on 'thinking machines'. Sci-fi is great for postulating dystopian outcomes so we can at least anticipate bad choices and guard against them.

sxu 7y ago

What about reproduction?

icandoit 7y ago
We can do both. One doesn't limit the other does it?
ceejayoz 7y ago
cp -R me/ me2/
- bencoder 7y ago
  Yep, I would fork myself. Merging and deconflicting if you want to reunite forks could be a fun problem to solve in the future
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    Future person: "Who are you?" Future forks: "One of us." (Thanks to I, Robot for a cute scene.)
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    You might enjoy the Bobiverse trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/

icandoit 7y ago

If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine. Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off. Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2]. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard - https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of-robots/ https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arethuza 7y ago
That sounds like the "Fast Folk" from Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FallRevolution https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FallRevolu...
wonderwonder 7y ago
This is a pretty serious question and something that really should be answered. Is a digital conscious alive, and if so what rights does it have? Ian Banks' Culture novels look at this a few times. Appreciate the article links, will read them after work today.
- nradov 7y ago
  It's not at all a serious question. It's entirely speculative and there is zero hard scientific evidence that such a thing is even possible. Science fiction.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Philosophy definitely can contemplate theoretical scenarios

kaybe 7y ago

We definitely need to get our environmental problems and ressource consumption under control first.

m4rtink 7y ago
That sounds more like a recipe for missing the window of opportunity, that should over time fix all our environmental & resource issues once and for all thanks to the (in comparison to Earth) limitless resources of Earth.

stanferder 7y ago

I fear that the rush to integrate humans with machines will miss something essential and end up replacing true consciousnesses with philosophical zombies.

naravara 7y ago
Presumably there will always be some culture of holdouts who resist the upload process kind of like how the Amish resisted the industrial revolution. Of course, if the philosophical zombies end up being evangelistic transhumanist zealots, we'd be screwed.

krapp 7y ago

Conferring immortality? Are you under the impression that hardware never breaks down, or that media never rots, or that software never fails?

close04 7y ago
I guess if the transfer process is perfected then you don't have to worry that much about HW failure or rot. Very little of today's data actually disappears due to these causes. Imagine today's equivalent of having your data on 2-3 hard drives, in the cloud, on 3 email addresses, and in a printed copy. You will backup a brain dump every evening to a satellite backup storage and 3 data centers around the world, maybe even to a cold or hot spare body. Someone stealing or altering a copy of you, or altering you (lots of philosophical questions around who is you anymore) would be the real worry. If anyone told you today your life depends on a piece of electronic data in your possession I'm sure you wouldn't let HW failure or data rot become a problem. Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades.
- naravara 7y ago
  > Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades. Decades might as well be seconds if we're talking about interstellar travel times.
  - close04 7y ago
    Sure. But pieces of paper might as well be nothing compared to the technology we have available once we're capable of downloading consciousness into a machine and interstellar travel. So the challenge may be bigger but also the tools at your disposal. You are projecting today's problems on tomorrow's technology. And I'm being generous here, we're actually talking about multiple generations probably. We're just as close to understanding such future technology as people (scientists) 100-150 years ago were to understanding ours. Saying "in 200 years we'd surely lose the data to HW failure and bit rot" is no different from them saying "you can't fly without flapping the wings" 150 years ago. Those future generations face challenges we can't even imagine today. Like if I whip up 5 copies of myself who is "me"? And if 4 died will it be a loss of data or just loss of redundancy? Will it actually be just one combined copy running on multiple machines (Borg style)?

adamisom 7y ago

Although I think "immorality" was a typo and you meant "immortality", it's a funny typo, because ethics are definitely relevant.

naravara 7y ago

>this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant. Not really. You're assuming this "machine storage" mechanism can preserve state forever. Even if you manage to upload consciousness losslessly and maintain all the ineffable qualities of "life" or "soul" or whatever (that we don't even really have solid philosophical definitions for), you'd still need to contend with data corruption and bit rot over cosmic time-scales.

m4rtink 7y ago
There are many error correction techniques suitable for this, such as for example fountain codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code You basically encode a message (say, it's 10 some data storage unit unit long) into a much bigger lot of chunks (say 1000 0000 units), which you then transmit. As long as you receive a pre-determined amount of the chunks (1000 units might be enough), regardless of order, you can reconstruct the original message. With speed of light lag, you can't really expect re-sends & will have to use some encoding working on a similar principle to this one.

lallysingh 7y ago

I can probably train a simple AI to be "close enough" to lots of people. Does that count? More seriously, if we can send software, why care about this muddy consciousness stuff?

zentiggr 7y ago

Frank Herbert's take on this had humans enslaved for a few centuries before the Butlerian Jihad got humans back in control of themselves and instituted a ten thousand year taboo on 'thinking machines'. Sci-fi is great for postulating dystopian outcomes so we can at least anticipate bad choices and guard against them.