No, I’m not talking about Heat Death or another Ice Age. I’m talking about what could happen if mind uploading becomes universally or near-universally adopted and every mind is accelerated by a factor of several million or billion. Such an outcome seems inevitable if mind uploading is actually possible.
You may have heard that mind uploading means emulating human brains in computers, along with expansive landscapes to keep them entertained. Mainstream voices, or even WIRED-esque voices, may disparage such a possibility as a fantasy of techno-nerds, but if functionalism is true, as many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists believe, then mind uploading will eventually become the new rage, whether or not it looks cool from the perspective of a 2009 journalist. Easy to make fun of, hard to actually stop.
With a complete readout of the data contents and algorithms of the human mind, combined with molecular rod logics, or even molecular nanocomputing, it seems feasible that million, billion, or trillionfold speedups could become possible. We will experience things millions or billions of times faster, a phenomenon known as subjective speedup. The rate at which we experience the world is dictated by the operation speed of our neurons. It is not set eternally by some Platonic ideal, which many unthinkingly assume. The fact that a “moment” is defined as a few seconds and not a few nanoseconds or a few thousand years is a simple consequence of the operation speed of our brain.
All biological neurons operate at about 200 Hz (cycles per second). If you look at much phenomena in nature and at the microscale, this seems relatively slow, but there is a reason — it was obviously built for feasibility and reliability, not maximum performance. If there were a God, he would have done the right thing and built our minds to operate at the maximum possible speed with both reliability and high performance, but there isn’t, so our minds operate quite slowly. Guess it will be up to us to change that. One element will involve making neurons smaller, so that they can switch at terahertz speeds without frying outright.
Emulating human minds will be quite the technological challenge, but luckily, and I agree with Kurzweil on this one, sufficient computing power and scanning capabilities will be all we need. No Unified Theory of Mind (physics envy much?), philosophical enlightenment, or other such nebulosities will be necessary, though they could be helpful if available. Reductionist materialism will triumph with this one, much to the chagrin of many, but very quickly the old rivalries will be forgotten and the unlimited potential of the technology will become the prime focus.
The utter power that uploading will confer to our civilization is mind-boggling. From the new perspective of a world with such power, all the old human achievements will seem inconsequential. Plato, Socrates, Einstein, Mozart, all mediocre. If I can pick up a fistful of sand on the beach and turn it into a thinking mind in short order, intelligence will become as common as drops of rain in the world’s storms. All problems that can be solved by the application of intelligence will be. Truly an End of History, if you will.
It becomes hard to pretend to care excessively about present-day ethical quandries and thoughts about stem cells, life extension, nutritional supplements, gene therapy, and the like, when such tremendous potential rests in the near future. From a utilitarian point of view, if functionalism is true, then getting to uploading as quickly and smoothly as possible becomes an overriding concern. Conversely, uploading could become an ethical disaster without sufficient oversight, as sadists could keep and torture virtual nations in computers the size of a bowling ball. The easiest solution might be to simply eliminate the predisposition to such sadism in the human genetic code, and prevent all existing sadists from reproducing, but apparently the actions and beliefs of Nazi Germany have made any such talk about eugenics verboten.
If mind uploading is possible, the physical world may become boring due to the slow rate of its operation in comparison to the subjective acceleration. I say “may”, because such an outcome is not certain. Phenomena that occur on nanosecond or even femtosecond timescales, such as the reaction of pigments in the eye to incoming photons, might command some interest in the new humanity with its hyperfast thought rates. Uploading is not a “release” or an “escape” from the physical world, but a window to experiencing it the way it was meant to be experienced. If uploading is possible, then all civilizations would likely converge to it, as numerous pressures — not the least of which being the desire for personal longevity — will trump any conservative blowback. If aliens exist, they are likely either worms or uploads. Meat-based general intelligence is a short-lived phenomenon.
Despite all my praise of the possibility of uploading, I am doubtful that AI will be achieved by a direct copying of the human brain in software, as Ray Kurzweil believes. It seems more plausible that such an advanced technology will be developed by AIs whose data requirements are measured in the hundreds of gigabytes, not the hundreds of terabytes. Before we can mimic the human brain, we will be able to sketch out the general contours that underlie its ability to function at all. Just like how we can understand biomechanics and build prosthetics before we can copy a muscle.
Some transhumanists seem to ignore the “high future shock” possibilities of uploading and superintelligence, but doing so is impossible, as these “fantasies” pump through the very veins of the movement. Mild transhumanism, thoughts about reprogramming the body using biotechnology alone, are a “gateway drug” to thoughts about superintelligence and uploading, so the logical progression is quite unavoidable. What is burdensome, on occasion, is trying to hide such thoughts from journalists for the sake of avoiding coming off like a kook, but media coverage in recent years has proven that trying to hide such things is impossible. Thanks to growing mountains of popular media and imagination that is on our side, speaking of such topics openly and freely is only becoming easier and easier.
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