Hey, as long as my robocock still works, right?
Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?
A Russian mogul wants to make sure the answer is yes, and soon.
By Clay
Dillow
When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced
around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man
who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but
rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on
with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as
to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.
At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress
held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he
plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot
controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into
a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method
for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks
he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a
robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate
goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic
host--within 30 years time.
Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological
challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied
up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far
out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already
being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted
into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that
it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a
further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something
author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their
lifetimes.
Which is terrifying and amazing and disconcerting all at
the same time.
We’ve
already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality.But is it
even within the realm of possibility? Phase one--creating a robot controlled by
a human brain--is already well within reach. In fact, DARPA is already working
on it via a program called “Avatar” (which, incidentally, is also the name of
Itskov’s project) through which the Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine
interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines
remotely with their minds.
And of course there are all the ongoing medical
prosthesis projects (DARPA is involved in a few of these as well) that have
shown that the human nervous system can interface with prosthetic enhancements,
manipulating them via thought. Itskov draws a clear arc from what we have now to
the consciousness-containing holograms that he envisions. All we have to do is
attack the technological obstacles in between, one at a time, until we get
there.
If only it were that easy. But Itskov also makes a valid
point. In the past decade alone we’ve witnessed brain-machine interfaces emerge
from the realm of nascent, futuristic ideas to mechanisms firmly rooted
in reality. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, but better
technology (and an abundance of funding in this field spurred by the horrific
neurological and extremity injuries inflicted on American soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan) is expanding the envelope of possibility every year.
What Itskov is really saying--though in a very ambitious
way--is that we’ve already started down the road toward shedding our
corporeality via prostheses that interface with our nervous centers. If you can
interface a brain with a hand, and then a brain with an entire arm, why not a
brain with two arms? With two legs? With everything else? The question now is
figuring out where the limitations lay--just how far down that road we can
go.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why uploading human consciousness to some kind of computer won’t work, not least of which being the fact that every attempt we’ve made at creating a computer that functions just like the brain has come up far short. And creating a hologram that also contains that consciousness? We’re not seeing it--not in thirty years, not in this century. Still, progress is being made in neural networks, microchips modeled on living brains, and entire computers set up to mimic the brain’s functionality. We’ve built synthetic analogs for all kinds of organs. The brain is the most complex of all, but following a certain line of reasoning--the line Itskov seems to be following--it’s only a matter of time and determination before we deliver a neurological analog as well.
All that is to say that Itskov’s vision, while
overly-ambitious (and we like overly ambitious here), is not as completely far
out as it sounds--at least not the earlier phases. People that are today firmly
connected to their living bodies, consciousness all bound up in their craniums,
may within their lifetimes be presented with a choice. Call it selective
corporeality. In the future, questions about mechanical immortality--do we
really want to live beyond our bodies as “conscious” machines? Is a robot or
computer driven by a living brain a person, with all the rights and privileges
inherent therein? Can i get jets implanted in my robo-hands and robo-feet so
that I can fly like Iron Man?--could become, to some degree, actual questions
that we have to consider, this time non-hypothetically.
It’s more than my non-mechanically enhanced
consciousness can even start to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment