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When we can upload our brains to the cloud, and you can do something with them like interacting or running the brain, then we'll all be effectively immortal. Th
by rnk 4y ago
When we can upload our brains to the cloud, and you can do something with them like interacting or running the brain, then we'll all be effectively immortal. That's a pretty big deal. See the book altered carbon.
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoThey wouldn't be us. We will still die when our bodies fail. But maybe there will be some AI tricking our friends and family into thinking we're still there.
- mlyle 4y agoWhat if it's an incremental upload? E.g. we start with some prosthetics and slowly migrate organic function to digital? Is this the Ship of Theseus, or is it a slow but nonobvious death?
- speed_spread 4y agoIf you keep the original bioware fully operational, it's more like an incremental fork running on an emulator. You can start having conversations with your approximated self.
- sumtechguy 4y agoThe Ship of Theseus is a weird one too. If you take a car apart and replace it piece by piece and replace the whole car you kind of have the same car. But what if you kept all the old pieces and put them back together? Which one is the original car? It is a interesting thought sub experiment that plays on the 'Ship of Theseus'. You could end up with the same issue here. If I make a perfect copy of myself, who is the 'real' me? There is an obvious 'older' me but the other one is just as capable as I am.
- shaky-carrousel 4y agoIf you have a stroke, and survive, you won't be you anymore.
- minsc_and_boo 4y agoYeah by the same logic we die every night when we sleep.
- rnk 4y agoYou are making a claim that is theological, religious, and scientific. Yes, our form of life on earth ends when our bodies die today. But what is the essence of us, no one really knows. Various people claim it's locked into your body, or you have some kind of soul that depends on your body. Or your brain is just running a program and the information and mechanism dies when your body dies. I lean toward the last category, but no one knows. The body is constantly changing. We already know about physical and chemical abnormalities in the way your body works affects your "person" and we can sometimes address them with surgery or drugs. The physical body's limits impact the observed brain. If uploading is possible, if there are some examples of working cases, if I don't hurt anyone why not try it?
- EamonnMR 4y agoImmortal as long as someone's paying to run the instance.
- rvba 4y agoI bet soon after the first few people are made immortal this way, one of them will hack the banks, or the stock market, or countless other organizations.
- minsc_and_boo 4y agoAnd then you'd have the first court case and prison sentence for a non-human consciousness. Which is just one step closer to the simulated hell for uploaded consciousnesses that get naughty, from Surface Detail by Ian Banks.
- rnk 4y agoThe show upload on amazon prime is basically this world. If you don't have as much money your instance can pause. You pay more money and have access to nicer things in the afterlife.
- minsc_and_boo 4y agoYou'll have tiered processing, just like today. You can slum it out with limited simulation capabilities, or if you have a job you can afford the premium processor hours.
- webmaven 4y agoSee the Amazon Prime series "Upload" (two seasons so far). Rather funny, BTW, compared to most works around a similar premise.