Scientist predicts that by 2050 they'll be able to download your brain

scary if its true.

i wonder how much disc space the average gfy'r would take up?

Who knows, floppy disks will be outdated by then.

I have an old Texas Insturments calculator that would almost certianly be able to store the contents of most GFY posters brains.

Me right now. only half of a 1.44mg disk.

Well.. this is rather misleading. The article states that this is based on averages. Not on factual work.

Sure you can say that "At this rate xyz is possible" but the chances that it actually happens aren't so certain. It is still very cool. I just cant fathom how they plan on transferring data stored in the brain on to a computer. We are just now starting to try to map were certain memories are stored. And we are rapidly finding that memory storage (the areas at least) vary from person to person. For instance, we know were the memory of languages are stored.. but we can't tell you were someone who knows english, french, and spanish stores each one.

UUGGHH

This is yet another example of a NON-Science story being published by a low-grade paper as if it held some scientific news or even fact. They do this because it's a lot easier and cheaper than keeping people on salary who might actually have enough familiarity with the state of science to recognize a real scientific development (or "leap") if they came across one. Instead they'll pay some guy $100 with an online degree in Futurology (I took that from the article -- go look) to give them a handful of absurdist quotes like:


WTF does any of that have to do with HOW one might actually achieve this magic brain-to-digital transfer.

At this moment, what we understand about how the brain's storage operates is actually HANDICAPPED by our advances in computer science -- because, now, we're looking ONLY for the signatures of binary logic systems when we scrutinize the functining of our own heads, thinking our INVENTIONS equal to DISCOVERIES OF HIGHER TRUTH -- LOL -- That's a whole new way to be arrogant for us -- LOL.

Once, we enlarged ourselves (when we could not fathom the answer) by finding the Divine inside the Human. Now, we are (for not being able to fathom many answers) reducing the scope of all that we may yet see, appreciate and understand -- so that it will fit comfortably within the systems of what we already know. Sorry to rant -- but that shit pissed me off!


j-



Thanks Dr. Pearson --

Why live without passion? Computers don't have glands.

Maybe they'll wire in synthetic glands so we can have synthetic emotions.

i predict that this is total bs

read some science fiction that had this principle last week.. "altered carbon" by richard morgan.. that was hundreds of years in the future though.

How much is the bandwidth? 180 bytes/sec if I remember right?

Hallsie, the intensity of your recommendation of this book is bordering on spam -- I keep looking for the link and ref. code -- but it's not theah -- ! -- ZeBOOK --


j-

I call BS

The memory of casio watches is gonna be enough

and what would be the point of such an exercise?
if I want to know something I just ask google or yahoo or one of the other engines.

why??????????????

PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain," he said.

"Pearson said the next computing goal would be to replicate consciousness.

"Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design on a computer," he said.

"Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it's possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020."

One of the "primary reasons" for such work would be to give computers emotions, Pearson said.

"If I'm on an aeroplane I want the computer to be more terrified of crashing than I am so it does everything to stay in the air until it's supposed to be on the ground."

hahahahahaha you only posted the story so you could post that!

So glad I own yourbrain.com then.

I will turn it into an online brain backup service in case you forget something.

Geeze if they downloaded the content of the brain I wonder if they would have a way to differentiate between memories and fantasies? Would we see newscasts like this?... "Autopsy and post mortem brain download shows the senator died of a heart attack and had sex with dozens of midget trannies"

Oh great, a computer that can have a pissy day and take me out too when it decides to commit suicide

"I don't know how 3rd World War will look like, but the 4th World War will be fought with sticks and spears"

How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century

old but not a bad read.

I dont belive it but don't give a fuck, will be dead by then anyway

I think that we are becoming to advanced for our own good. Imagine what the government could do to you or if you are captured. They could simply dl your brain. Maybe we should also just clone our brain into our cloned children and just skip the step of natural conception.

And scientist was also thinking we would have a robot for each home by the 2000..

Captured? Where? How? Why?

Exactly!!!! I don't know why the hell the science geeks came out of thier caves for this.

This will happen. I won't go into too much detail, but the exponential growth of science and technology makes it almost certain that in the next few decades computers (possibly using technology radically different from that being used these days, like organic - even today there are scientists working on dna-based computing) will reach capacities far exceeding those of humans, will probably become conscious (if we can't program intelligence, increased computing power creates the possibility of high-speed evolution in simulated virtual environments) and are likely to be in direct contact with our brains (Sony recently patented direct-to-brain entertainment).


2HousePlague: Human consciousness is the result of a physical process. There is no reason that such a process couldn't be virtually simulated, resulting in, essentially, the same thing. The transfer might, for example, be done by executing an advanced brainscan and inputting those into a simulation in real-time.
(ofcourse, what that would mean is that there would just be another you, and the original you would still die - but the copy would believe he was actually you, and feel he was, too)

imagine robocop submitting gals

Are you talking about patents 6,729,337 and 6,536,440? They are listed as a "Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex." The plan fires pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain to trigger certain senses.

Not exactly brain to brain entertainment. Not to mention according to Sony they still haven't even started developing this. But still interesting.

If you are talking about another patent.. please do share. I am interested.

That computers will continue to improve is obvious. But, where you get into trouble (yellow text) is in supposing that the direction and magnitude of that improvement (however fantastic and imponderable from here it may be) will ever approach consciousness.

But, even if we allow for the possibility of computers that truly deserve to be called "conscious" by us, how can we presume that the mechanisms of that artificial consciousness will be anything like our own?

The fact that we may create artificial "consciousness" does not REQUIRE:


1 - That we have acheived a breakthrough understanding of human consciousness

NOR


2- That our success in creating artificial intelligence in any way owes to what we know about human intelligence.


Yes, I agree it could be simulated. In far-fetched theory (and I'm not exactly a Luddite, mind you!) anything is possible.

I'm just saying the download of a conscious human brain (forget about the nature of the receiving medium) -- the download alone, is NOT A CLOSE REALITY SIMPLY BECAUSE WE HAVE AN IDEA ABOUT THE AMOUNT OF DATA. The difference is as wide as semaphore and fiber optics.



j-

Okay, say the entire contents on my brain could be downloaded into a computer? Then what? When I die, I'm dead. Can't exactly upload my brain to another person so I could keep running.

if i could be a robot with a human brain i'd be a happy man, well thats after my body has aged beyond like 80 years.

AlienQ's brain located

my brain DLd to a computrer = the scariest fucking thing seen on a computer screen since the Bea Arthur sex tape...

that would be pretty messed

Dude you crack me up

I have a 1.44 megs floppy disk ready for AlienQ brain , should be able to put a few games on the same disk to . plenty of space.

Not brain to brain, machine to brain. And yes, direct to brain entertainment is what this patent essentially implies, at least in the long term.

They haven't started developing this, and this specific technique probably will never get developed, but it makes it clear that time and money is being put into the issue, and that advances are being made and possible solutions being found.

I think the development toward consciousness is an inevitable one (which I will explain in a moment), and I think the magnitude will be far greater than that of unenhanced human intelligence. The last part isn't really interesting - it's a numbers game and one with only a single possible outcome.

Consciousness, however, is a more interesting matter. Indeed, it does seem unlikely that machine consciousness will be just like human consciousness. It will, most likely, take many different forms - none of which predictable - since we're not limited to a single "species" or design. But consciousness will be developed, for one simple reason: that it is possible.
In humans, consciousness results from a complex physical process, and there is no reason why effects following from a specific physical process couldn't be resembled by effects following from another physical process. Pterodactyls flew, birds fly, bats fly, air balloons fly and airplanes fly. Intelligence is an infinitely more complicated thing, ofcourse, but with computers we are rapidly working towards creating it, and it seems not at all unlikely that in time, we will also (deliberately or not) create consciousness.

I agree with you that we will not achieve a breakthrough understanding of human consciousness, but that's because such a breakthrough is impossible. Consciousness as an experience falls outside the range of science, it is something altogether different. Just like love, beauty, fear, etc, we can explain how it works, but that doesn't explain how it feels simply because that's an entirely different language and type of understanding. Knowing how something feels is something that can only be understood by feeling it, and a scientific explanation rightfully doesn't concern itself with experiencing the feeling.
So even if we create consciousness, and discover exactly what makes it possible (something I actually doubt - it seems more likely that there are many forms of consciousness, each brought about by a different set of conditions, and without an "essence" of consciousness there is no way to say what exactly makes consciousness possible), we will still be unable to translate our scientific knowledge to knowledge of consciousness as we experience it.

I disagree with you on the idea of AI not owing anything to our understanding of human intelligence though. ALready theories about the development of the human brain are being put into practice creating computer circuits (eg neural networks).

We do have an idea about the amount of data, simply because we have an idea about the size of the physical process. That doesn't really matter though. Fifty years ago, pretty much all technology developed in the past 10 years seems far-fetched, and technology is developing at a much greater pace today than it was then. Don't underestimate science

You guys just need to read "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and it will all come clear.

Kurzweil makes some interesting points, but he goes a bit too far in certain aspects.

In certain aspects, of course, but given the "prediction is always hit and miss" factor, as a whole it's an excellent read.

that's very scary...but kinda cool at the same time.