A Chilling (Not Actually Possible) Future

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Humans might someday become cyborgs and live forever. Really, that might happen.

This was my take on a recent New York Times profile about Dmitry Itskov and his quirky quest to upload human brains into machines by 2045. It seems that this Russian former media magnate and propagandist has started a project to upload a human consciousness into a robot in 30 years or so.

Now, to be fair, David Segal, the author of the story, did a good job of framing the whole endeavor as fringe and a total longshot. And let’s face it, it’s a great story with a bizarre central character. But let me spoil the ending for you right now: This will never happen. Scientists can barely agree on the definition of consciousness, let alone where it exists or how it works. Let alone, well, move it.

The human brain has about as many neurons as there are stars in the galaxy. (People often misquote this factoid switching universe for galaxy, but then we’d be talking a brain that weighed 1.5 billion tons.) It has a region for smell, one for hearing and a few heavily involved in memory … but not one for consciousness. In fact, only recently, experts have been throwing about the notion that consciousness is actually a cumulative phenomena, arising out of complexity itself like on of those pictures made from lots of other pictures that you can only see if you stand really far away.

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Itskov, pre-cyborg version

I have written about the blurring of science and fiction here before. When it comes to downloading brains, I always think of the brilliant series Dollhouse, in which pretty boys and girls upload whatever personality would most fulfill a client’s ultimate fantasy. In their free time, of course, they are uploaded with the minds of badass fighters. I love this show – it’s clever and has a great moral about the slow creep of technology. But its science is as real as magic fire and dragons in Game of Thrones.

Like the galaxy, the complexity of human brain is so vast that the human brain can’t really contemplate it. And not just the neurons themselves – the gray matter – there is also the connecting bits in between – the white matter – which we increasing see seems to play a role in brain function.

We can identify spindel neurons and guess about their role in social thinking, we can pontificate about mirror neurons and empathy, but we don’t really know how any of that fits with the brain itself; there are simply too many layers of complexity. Every time we think we have a rough idea of how the brain works it gets an order of magnitude more complicated. That kind of complexity just doesn’t travel well – either into robots or other humans. And don’t even get me started on the amount of energy you would need to power such a robot.

If consciousness is indeed a sort of meta-phenomenon that grows out of complexity, then we can no more download it than we can take a picture of the internet. Sure, if you had a really big computer (like, sci-fi big) you could collect all the data from the internet, but that wouldn’t be the internet, would it?

shutterstock_95070055I have always thought of this issue from an animal behavior perspective. There are a few small tests you can do to see if an animal is self-aware, has the ability to infer the desires or emotional states of others, or can contemplate things that aren’t in front of them. We can teach primates to sign but we still have no idea whether they are conscious.

In the article they point to the fact that we can now put devices on the surface of the brain that can read intention (though, it should be mentioned that we have been doing this for a while and can even dial a phone with an EEG and help people to walk). This is like saying I am building an army of robots because I have a new hinge that works like an elbow. Reading intention (or even numbers) is child’s play compared to actually deciphering thought. Which is child’s play next to digitizing that thought.

I am reminded (as before) of another group of dreamers who were “brilliant” in a way-before-their-time-but-actually-kind-of-nuts way. The psychotropic drug scientists of the 60s and 70s were trying to open up consciousness into a new realm with random chemicals humanity essentially stumbled upon. But they didn’t really know what consciousness was and in the end were just mixing philosophy and hallucinations.

My favorite among these, John Lilly, was convinced he could translate dolphin speech by just slowing it down enough until he could make out words. But the complexity of deciphering another species’ language is lightyears more complex than that (though if you like crazy information theory and want to see a true thinkers ahead of their time, comb through this or this).shutterstock_107865470

The heart of the problem seems to be that after earning his fortune, Itskov realized that someday he would die and that his money would be useless (and again, kudos to Segal for gracefully bringing this out). Not long after that came the realization there was suffering in the world. So rather than join Bill Gates in the quest to end poverty (or the tens of thousands who have dedicated their lives to this, without getting rich), he opted for a moonshot to immortality.

But don’t get the wrong idea – I love dreamers (though wealthy dilettante dreamers drive me a little nuts). This kind of sci-fi, wanna-be big think does have a role in science. True, we will never download your consciousness into a machine but the effort may yield unexpected discoveries just as the effort to land on the Moon did or the quest for Mars will (the difference being that Mars actually exists).

No doubt we will someday see computers with human-ish thoughts. And lots of people will use machine interfaces to help them move and think. Heck, maybe even Itskov’s self-declared “most sophisticated mechanical head in history” is a step in that direction. It’s the small hops made by a concentrated group of clever people pushing toward a larger goal that pushes science ahead.

So okay, go ahead with this little project. Why not? As long as we do it with a wink and a nod that we all understand the end goal is a millionaire’s delusion and what we really want to see are the steps along the way.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock

 

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