Lately I've been thinking about what shape the future will look like, and how it will evolve. The most likely candidate for a severe break with traditional civilization and the way the world will unfold I imagine will be simulation of baby brains.
Most technophile nerds like to imagine that they'll be downloaded into machines in some sort of cyberrapture. I don't think that's all that likely in time to help anyone that walks today, just in terms of engineering cycles. In order to do that you have to get nondestructive imaging technology of the brain thats fine grained enough to measure synaptic interconnection strength good enough to do a full simulation. And to do it in a way that would actually keep your consciousness continuous you have to do the whole ship of theseus thing, neuron by neuron. Now thats not impossible, but I'd say its more than twenty engineering cycles away if I had to hazard a guess.
Whats trivially less than ten engineering cycles away is mammalian brain simulation. IBM's blue gene project is allready doing full neocortical columns of rats. Its not a giant stretch to see where this goes. From neocortical columns to larger brain structures, to full brains. Rat brains to be sure at first... then virtual rat bodies in virtual environments running around eating cheese. Once thats done, someone will try to simulate a human brain.
An adult human brain simulation would fail horribly however. Without all the synaptic programming that we get doing this thing called life, it would be a grossly retarded collection of synaptic firings. So we would start with a baby brain in software, and raise it in a virtual environment. I can imagine the marketing schemes now for sim baby. Of course, you run into problems in several years after it grows up. A person that can make arbitrarily as many copies of themselves at will, hack their own brain and conjure up more power with a credit card extension, and is effectively immortal is a dangerous friend and a deadly enemy.
We're in the last days of meat, and I don't think we're invited to the next party. But don't let that stop you from buying your copy of sim-baby when it comes out. |
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dezakin's journal