More of Me
I enjoy pondering the complexities around smaller and larger issues. These issues range from politics, to technology, to sociology and history. Occasionally I find my mind wandering into the most wonderfully wicked of thoughts.
A few weeks ago a had a particularly disturbing thought. I was thinking about whole brain emulation, what that might mean for us should we actually develop the technology required to facilitate it. Much of this line of thought was sparked after hearing Sam Harris podcast with Jonathan Haidt (1). Whilst the podcast itself only briefly touched on whole brain emulation they discussed some of the moral issues which I will touch on here.
Whole brain emulation (WBE) is sometimes called mind uploading. It is the hypothetical process of scanning someone’s mental state, including long term memories and their sense of ‘self’, and copying it to a computational device.
Before you dismiss the thought as science fiction, perhaps peruse a paper entitled Whole Brain Emulation A roadmap (2). This paper was published in 2008 by the Future of Humanity Institute and Oxford University. The paper found that WBE appeared feasible. It concludes that presuming computer hardware requirements improve in line with the Moore’s law growth rate WBE should be possible by the middle of this century.
This technology opens up so many possibilities. It allows us to explore a kind of amortality and well and truly opens the door to immortality. With the possibilities come risks and a host of difficult moral questions.
To begin with just consider what is actually required to make WBE work. In broad terms you require a ‘map’ of all of your long term memories. Every thought and experience you can recall, displayed so that it can be replicated in a large computational system. If you value your private thoughts, your head might have just exploded.
Such a map provides fairly compelling evidence of just who is racist. Who is sexist. Who did what and when. I can’t imagine anyone who has ever committed a serious crime unnoticed would submit to WBE. The Catholic priesthood in particular seems unlikely to submit to WBE but that is ok. They don’t want to live forever. They are going to heaven.
If your still with me after absorbing the potential total loss of your privacy, consider the other options that WBE offers you. What might happen if you have a had a bad day. Not a tough day at work but a really bad day. Like being pack raped. You make it home. All you would want to do I imagine is forget.
Alcohol and illicit drugs has traditionally been good for that but now you have another option. You could simply upload yesterday and start again. Like it never happened. Technically it wouldn’t have, at least for you, because you can’t remember it.
Perhaps instead of a total upload from the previous day you could simply purge an hour or two from the current day. Remember you have the whole map of your entire mind. It’s very possible. Anyone could choose to do that. What’s worse is that anyone could choose to do that to someone else. How would they ever find out? They might get caught if the person doing the ‘editing’ uploaded themselves, but what if they chose not to?
Next consider some of the moral questions around the replication of everything that it is to be you. By copying your memories and replicating yourself you are in fact creating another you. As soon as two copies of one person are made most people wonder which copy is the ‘real’ person.
They are of course both ‘real’. They are both real because they are both exactly the same. Is this other you truly self-aware? Of course it is. It is you. A perfect copy of you. Does this ‘other’ you have rights? In theory both copies of you should both have equal rights. But do they both have equal rights? What does equal rights actually mean?
Consider what one might do with the copies of people. There are many potential uses for such copies. Alternatively, they could be deleted. But do you have the right to delete a copy of yourself? Do you own a copy of yourself? Are the copies that you have made of yourself, the copies that are you in every sense, your slaves? Would deleting such a copy constitute murder?
Once you’ve finished wrapping your head around the idea of enslaving the copies of yourself before murdering them consider how WBE might dovetail with the advances in generic theory over the past two decades.
We have cloned animals. I suspect that someone, somewhere has also cloned humans. We are not too far away from being able to grow specific organs for specific people. By the middle of this century I suspect we will be able to grow an entire human. We could then download someone’s consciousness into a pre prepared body.
Just imagine what all of this might mean for reproduction in general. Would people want to breed if they can simply create more of themselves, or more variants based on a ‘template’ based on themselves?
Could people not procure other peoples templates. Perhaps they might purchase a template and somehow splice it with their own. The possibilities are endless. Note that I’ve only talked about reproduction, not sex.
As a species we are already experimenting with ‘sex robots’ and we’ve had a fairly storied history with dolls and devices of all kinds to enhance our sexual experience. It would be ridiculously naive to think that some people would not use the technology associated with WBE to create their own perfect sex partner.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was where I wound up after an hour or two contemplating this. The disturbing idea that in the future we might not breed when we can copy. We might not use online dating when we can just grow our own perfect mate, who looks exactly as we want them to, who is then downloaded with exact type of mind that we might want.
Now that the shiver has finished creeping up my spine I think I’ll finish that glass of wine and head to bed. Hopefully I’ll not dream of that not quite dystopian, but not quite comfortable future.