The Future of Mind Uploading Technology (with Nick Bostrom and Randal A. Koene)

In this video I discuss Mind Uploading Technology and feature two amazing guests:
Randal A. Koene, Neuroengineer and co-founder of Carboncopies Foundation, and Nick Bostrom, a professor at the University of Oxford.
Image: Monica Knaapen

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Mind Uploading
03:00 - Scanning Problem
06:01 - The Main Bottleneck and WHO is working on it !
08:39 - Will AI solve it?
12:16 - Where is Consciousness
14:43 - What if it all goes wrong
17:08 - What year will Mind Uploading be possible?
18:29 - Simulation Theory

[dasanoneia]

There are a lot of issues with this idea one your making a copy of your brain on a server owned by who? Will you be your own user? will the storage be local to a server or distributed like on a blockchain? will you be downloaded into a robot body or what type of environment will your digital brain occupy? just to name a few?

[inspectorcrud]

You already uploaded your mind, in this video!

Love your guests, great for the channel.

[vazap]

We don't know whether mind uploading is possible at all, on a conceptual level. I'd say affirming that we're close to achieving it is either naive or manipulative.

[Gee]

Oh wait, literally every uploaded mind could be manipulated in unimaginable ways. Imagine being copied to 10000 versions then interrogated with threat of deletion until you disclose some information. Or if your internal clock were put 1 million times faster times faster, time would be 1 million times slower time slower. One hour would be 115 years, it would seem like everything has stopped moving and you'd go insane. You could also be put into a loop of fear for eternity. Jesus, it's not for me!

[Dr_Tripper]

This puts a whole new twist to walk a mile in my shoes! No need, I'll just upload your experiences, run them in a VM, and feel what you felt!

[chegist]

In regards of space travel this will enable us to travel to the other Galaxies as information traveling with fractions of speed of light is way more realistic then organic forms traveling with speed of Voyager.

[TheMoonKingdom]

If I can't upload my subjective awareness, & I'm only uploading a copy of my mind; what use is it? How is it different from cloning? It won't be me, but someone like me having different experiences. At the point of branching awareness; how is it different from being born a twin? If we can learn to shift our sense of presence to a digital avatar, rather than just uploading copies, then we'll really be talking immortality:)

[tedviens]

The ultimate test of Awareness within a thinking machine will be the indication of an Out-Of-Body experience. If one is not comfortable with an Out-Of-Body experience one cannot really understand the phenomenon of our Awareness.

[darthrainbows]

IMO augmented intelligence - a human brain with digital processing attached - is the gateway to digital minds. We'll start slowly, with small augmentations, brain-computer interfaces, etc, and as they get more and more advanced, the brain will become increasingly digital, until it is effectively an entirely digital mind with a bit of organic mush attached, which can be discarded with no ill effects.

[derasor]

My 10 year old self was going to become me, but I'm not my 10 year old self. Uploading may work the other way around, I will not become my upload but my upload will *be* me at uploading, and then he will begin his own process of *becoming* that will be completely alien from what has been experienced before. The experience of becoming itself is very dynamic, ''plastic" if you will, and this will not be uploaded since it is a real time flow. The data used in the upload will be an instantaneous state, plus the most important part, somewhat faded and fuzzy memories. For a proper upload, imho, you'd have to store the 'flow' as experienced internally (not as devices, such as a camera, would record it) and not mess with the biowetware fogginess of memories.

I also grow less and less convinced about intelligence having such a extremely large space to grow as currently accepted. 'Intelligence' may already be at a somewhat close max resolution. Beyond max resolution it could exist but it becomes irrelevant, and other factors, such as actual creation become more pertinent (intelligence is just a prerequisite to the entirety of labour needed to actually make things real)

Also don't buy that we are in a simulation. Imo, we may be experiencing a 3d-space shadow of the actual higher d space-time (thus the hints to simulation) but we are at base reality

Anyway, thanks for tackling the subject, very interesting. Cheers

[ct]

Regarding timelines: I think the main determinant for most tech, whether it's mind uploading, longevity escape velocity, molecular nanotechnology, fully immersive VR, or highly advanced brain-computer interfaces, is how quickly we can achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Whether AGI is based on the same principles as the human mind or not, once we have it, we would most likely enter a positive feedback cycle. In this cycle, AI would continuously improve itself, both software and hardware-wise, and consequently accelerate all other areas of science and technology. Some people now think wir LLMs etc.we'll achieve AGI this decade, but recursive self-improvement could follow very quickly afterward. We could potentially be talking about just a few years after AGI. In this scenario, we might see developments like mind uploading happen relatively quickly. So, it may all hinge on how fast we get AGI up and running.

[TropicalCoder]

I can't believe nobody questioned the basic assumption that Mind can be separated from Body. I don't mean physically - I am talking conceptionally here. Most of the brain is concerned with the physical body, and terminates in bundles of nerves travelling down the spinal cord. Of course before it gets there it encounters the brain stem. Then if you emulate the brain on a computer, can it even function without the I/O? Brain and body are intertwined. I've read that when we think, there are activations of the nerves in our larynx that formulate speech. Can we think without a larynx? And of course the brain is not an analogue of current neural networks at all. It works totally differently, transmitting neurotransmitters like dopamine across the synapse. It seems to use low frequency signals to synchronise its computations somehow. We have no analogue to that at all. We don't even understand it. Not even neuromorphic computing comes close. This is all science fiction - but admittedly fun to think about.

[HenryCalderonJr]

It is incredible especially for family or others but it is not you unless they develop your actual consciousness and emotions can be duplicated completely. That spark of life our personal energy

[virajelix]

Excellent video, Anastasi. Yes! Without any doubt, we are living in a Cosmic Simulated Mind; but not in a sense of Matrix movie; rather, in a sense of Cosmic Mind simulation as we make simulation inside our individual mind with a big essential difference. Such knowledge is only possible in deeper understanding of existence.

[jamesbarisitz]

The military would enjoy building the perfect soldiers brain and uploading it to a robot body. Imagine what's on the horizon of possibilities when quantum computing and ai merge to work on our ideas.

[commanderdante]

Amazing interviews Ana. Bostrom is a genius.

[Scottiedoesit]

I would 100 percent volunteer for my brain to be used in this tech. Love it.

[dvrrwd]

I like the idea of uploading "me". Not just my mind. They haven't said anything about continuity. If you upload your mind, it's just a copy. "You" aren't living longer, your copy would be. Everything they talked about sounded like uploading a copy of your mind. I want continuity involved in the process. Before I upload, I'd want to know it's the original "me" and not just a copy. If not than the original "me" would just live and die like normal. I would be uploading to extend my life, not create a second me.

[codatheseus]

I think there are a couple other issues we should keep in mind.

1) Neurons are NOT STATIONARY! They do move and can move quite a bit, creating completely different pathways along the way.

2) There are probably a TON of very important neurons scattered through your body which should also be scanned and copied into the virtual mind. How awful would it be if we copied someone's mind but they felt off the whole time they existed because there were neurons which made up who they are just missing in their current copy?

3) Human Rights. We need to find ways to make it more than just illegal to torture people forever or anything of the sort even by accident. We need to make sure there are no virtual environments which are terrible for the occupants. We need to make sure they have real human rights in the real world too.

[michaelwulfsohn]

Fantastic video, really liked it. If you want to do a follow-up, I suggest interviewing Robin Hanson on his book "The Age of Em". He uses social scientific principles to explore the nature of a society of human brain emulations. For example, what happens when some emulations run a million times faster than others, how would emulations interact with biological humans, is it like dying if a person creates a temporary copy of themselves then turns it off, etc.