Whole brain emulation – the rise of “the ems”:
Let’s say this all comes true – where does it lead us?
This half of the wheel contains a lot of ifs, but assuming we do crack AI, a big IF question must be: once created, what if AI doesn’t see us as useful? Pure logic might well do away with us flawed beings of lesser intellect. It might treat us like we treat animals, for example. Serious thought needs to be given to consequences of whether or not AI should be unleashed. Even forms we have now are displaying some rather worrying traits: colluding, inventing secret ways to communicate and using inciting rhetoric.
A 2008 Technical Report #2008-3 by Anders Sandberg explains: “Whole Brain Emulation is a proposed technique which involves transferring the information contained within a brain onto a computing substrate. The brain can then be simulated, creating a machine intelligence. The concept is often discussed in context of scanning the brain of a person, known as mind uploading.” ( https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)
Feasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
• Anders Sandberg
• Published in PT-AI 2011
• DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-31674-6_19
Whole brain emulation (WBE) is the possible future one-to-one modeling of the function of the entire (human) brain. The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain. This would achieve software-based intelligence by copying biological intelligence (without necessarily understanding it).
Also reference:
Designing Systems in the Digital Immortality Era
• Maurizio Caon
• Published in Conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2018
• DOI:10.1145/3197391.3205442
Society is undergoing a relentless digital transformation process. This process is creating a digital copy of every entity present in the physical world and these digital goods will be inherited through centuries establishing a direct link between distant generations. Advances in artificial intelligence make the promise for future whole brain emulation enabling the possibility of uploading the human mind on a digital system. This would enable the possibility of interacting with immortal digital beings.