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Stop trying to upload your brain
Views Columnist This changes everything
Stop trying to upload your brain Think a digital version of your mind will allow you to live forever? It will just leave you subject to manipulation and software problems, writes Annalee Newitz
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Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline and they are the co-host of the Hugo-nominated podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @ annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
Annalee’s week What I’m reading David C. Catling’s Astrobiology: A very short introduction is helping me figure out how to build an atmosphere. What I’m watching The Witcher, which has an inexplicable plot that revolves around demons and shirtless men. What I’m working on Inventing a planet for my next novel.
This column appears monthly. Up next week: James Wong 24 | New Scientist | 18 January 2020
ACK in the 20th century, “the future” meant flying cars and food pills. Now, the future is all about brain uploads. The idea is that, one day, we will be able to convert all our memories and thoughts into hyper-advanced software programs. Once the human brain can run on a computer – or maybe even on a giant robot – we will evade death forever. Sounds cooler than a flying car, right? Wrong. If they ever exist, uploads will be hell. Fantasies about uploaded brains are nothing new. William Gibson wrote about them some 35 years ago in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, in which people could upload themselves into cyberspace; and almost a century ago, back in 1923, E. V. Odle published a novel called The Clockwork Man, about how the people of tomorrow would live inside a virtual world of clockwork technology. In recent decades, however, scientists and philosophers have also started to take a serious interest in the idea of digital versions of brains. Massive research undertakings like the Human Brain Project aim to “simulate” the human brain in software. And Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and his colleagues explore how future societies should deal ethically with uploaded minds. There are plenty of medical applications for a brain simulation. Doctors could use it to model diseases or to test therapies. Neurologists could probe it to understand how thought emerges from cellular activity. This isn’t what people like Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil want, though. As he
has said in multiple places, he is looking for upload tech that will make him immortal. Let’s take Kurzweil seriously and assume that eventually a person – let’s call him Boris – will scan his own brain and convert it to the format suitable for running in approved devices. Now Boris’s brain can live forever inside some kind of virtual world like Minecraft, which looks and feels to him like reality. That means his entire universe is dependent on people or companies who run or manage servers, such as Amazon Web Services, to survive.
“Uploading your brain sounds cooler than a flying car, right? Wrong. If they ever exist, uploads will be hell” Boris is going to be subjected to software updates that could alter his perceptions, and he might not be able to remember his favourite movie unless he pays a licensing fee. That isn’t the only possible pitfall. Somebody could duplicate Boris and make two armies of Borises fight each other for supremacy. Or, as Iain M. Banks suggested in his 2010 novel Surface Detail, a nasty political regime might create a virtual hell full of devils who torture Boris’s brain for his sins. Many other things could also happen if Boris’s brain got stuck inside a robot. He could be reprogrammed as a street cleaner, forced to mop Liverpool’s gutters for weeks without respite, or turned into assembly line arms for a factory that builds Tesla cars. After all that, is Boris really himself anymore? There is a
Borisesque piece of software that might “live” for a long time, but is it really a continuation of Boris the person or a completely different entity that has some of Boris’s ideas and memories? And what kind of rights does Boris’s uploaded brain have? He might become the property of whoever owns the server that runs him. Becoming an upload won’t allow Boris to live forever. Instead, Boris will die with his body, and a copy of Boris’s brain will be stored on a piece of technology. That technology will subject virtual Boris to all the same problems that befall our mobile devices – except instead of awkward autocorrect incidents happening in text messages, the equivalent will happen inside Boris’s mind. Oh and, of course, technology decays and dies, so immortality isn’t guaranteed. So why would anyone want to be uploaded? I think it is because uploading still offers hope that we might end the worst forms of human suffering. In his 2017 novel Walkaway, Cory Doctorow describes a future in which a vicious war rages between the haves and have-nots. But when a group of underground scientists creates the first brain upload, there is a chance that the war will finally end because death is no longer a threat. Uploads are also a solution to war in The Clockwork Man. In that story, men have been uploaded to the clockwork reality because they kept trying to destroy the real world with endless combat. Uploads may offer a dream of peace, but they also threaten us with a future in which our minds can be manipulated as easily as a Facebook algorithm. Like the flying car, the brain upload is a nifty idea that will cause far more problems than it solves. ❚
Stop trying to upload your brain Think a digital version of your mind will allow you to live forever? It will just leave you subject to manipulation and software problems, writes Annalee Newitz
B
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline and they are the co-host of the Hugo-nominated podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @ annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
Annalee’s week What I’m reading David C. Catling’s Astrobiology: A very short introduction is helping me figure out how to build an atmosphere. What I’m watching The Witcher, which has an inexplicable plot that revolves around demons and shirtless men. What I’m working on Inventing a planet for my next novel.
This column appears monthly. Up next week: James Wong 24 | New Scientist | 18 January 2020
ACK in the 20th century, “the future” meant flying cars and food pills. Now, the future is all about brain uploads. The idea is that, one day, we will be able to convert all our memories and thoughts into hyper-advanced software programs. Once the human brain can run on a computer – or maybe even on a giant robot – we will evade death forever. Sounds cooler than a flying car, right? Wrong. If they ever exist, uploads will be hell. Fantasies about uploaded brains are nothing new. William Gibson wrote about them some 35 years ago in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, in which people could upload themselves into cyberspace; and almost a century ago, back in 1923, E. V. Odle published a novel called The Clockwork Man, about how the people of tomorrow would live inside a virtual world of clockwork technology. In recent decades, however, scientists and philosophers have also started to take a serious interest in the idea of digital versions of brains. Massive research undertakings like the Human Brain Project aim to “simulate” the human brain in software. And Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and his colleagues explore how future societies should deal ethically with uploaded minds. There are plenty of medical applications for a brain simulation. Doctors could use it to model diseases or to test therapies. Neurologists could probe it to understand how thought emerges from cellular activity. This isn’t what people like Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil want, though. As he
has said in multiple places, he is looking for upload tech that will make him immortal. Let’s take Kurzweil seriously and assume that eventually a person – let’s call him Boris – will scan his own brain and convert it to the format suitable for running in approved devices. Now Boris’s brain can live forever inside some kind of virtual world like Minecraft, which looks and feels to him like reality. That means his entire universe is dependent on people or companies who run or manage servers, such as Amazon Web Services, to survive.
“Uploading your brain sounds cooler than a flying car, right? Wrong. If they ever exist, uploads will be hell” Boris is going to be subjected to software updates that could alter his perceptions, and he might not be able to remember his favourite movie unless he pays a licensing fee. That isn’t the only possible pitfall. Somebody could duplicate Boris and make two armies of Borises fight each other for supremacy. Or, as Iain M. Banks suggested in his 2010 novel Surface Detail, a nasty political regime might create a virtual hell full of devils who torture Boris’s brain for his sins. Many other things could also happen if Boris’s brain got stuck inside a robot. He could be reprogrammed as a street cleaner, forced to mop Liverpool’s gutters for weeks without respite, or turned into assembly line arms for a factory that builds Tesla cars. After all that, is Boris really himself anymore? There is a
Borisesque piece of software that might “live” for a long time, but is it really a continuation of Boris the person or a completely different entity that has some of Boris’s ideas and memories? And what kind of rights does Boris’s uploaded brain have? He might become the property of whoever owns the server that runs him. Becoming an upload won’t allow Boris to live forever. Instead, Boris will die with his body, and a copy of Boris’s brain will be stored on a piece of technology. That technology will subject virtual Boris to all the same problems that befall our mobile devices – except instead of awkward autocorrect incidents happening in text messages, the equivalent will happen inside Boris’s mind. Oh and, of course, technology decays and dies, so immortality isn’t guaranteed. So why would anyone want to be uploaded? I think it is because uploading still offers hope that we might end the worst forms of human suffering. In his 2017 novel Walkaway, Cory Doctorow describes a future in which a vicious war rages between the haves and have-nots. But when a group of underground scientists creates the first brain upload, there is a chance that the war will finally end because death is no longer a threat. Uploads are also a solution to war in The Clockwork Man. In that story, men have been uploaded to the clockwork reality because they kept trying to destroy the real world with endless combat. Uploads may offer a dream of peace, but they also threaten us with a future in which our minds can be manipulated as easily as a Facebook algorithm. Like the flying car, the brain upload is a nifty idea that will cause far more problems than it solves. ❚