Cyber-consciousness means technological immortality, and mind cloning is the key to technological immortality.
Humans live only a few decades, while other forms of non-animal life can survive for centuries, thousands of years, and some can even wake up again after millions of years. Nothing reaches the end of time. We see immortality as a spiritual concept (entry into heaven or rebirth), or as a remnant of human existence (eg, "Bach's music will be immortal").
For the first time in humans, cyber-consciousness has allowed people to live forever in the real world in a technologically immortal form.
Replication, reproduction is also a form of immortality in the traditional sense, because the DNA of our ancestors is in us, and if we have offspring, this DNA will continue to be passed on. At this level, we can find the DNA of our predecessors in modern humans. Identity exists wherever cognitive, affective patterns exist, and it may exist in more than one place: in flesh and blood, in software, in various beings of varying degrees of integrity.
Although human beings have never experienced identity outside the body, or as the philosopher Alan Watts put it, human beings will ignore it and deny it with trepidation.
This will change with mind cloning.
Talk to BINA48
"Really Bina has life. I want to go out, I want to go to the park." A
long time ago, the humanoid robot BINA48 said this to Amy Harmon, a reporter for The New York Times. . It turns its robotic head and peers quietly through the window at its biological prototype, Bina Roseblatt, who is picking blueberries in the backyard.
This simple life experience inspired BINA48, even though it might be the joy of life that it will never be able to experience. For smart technology, however, this is a moment of quiet joy: BINA48 has an opinion of its own! I wasn't there at the time, but after hearing about it, I had a question: Did the reporter really realize the special significance of that moment?
And in another interview with BINA48, GQ reporter Jon Ron-son had a different experience that hinted at what the future might look like.
In 2011, Ronson spent three hours with BINA48, and found that chatting with such a robot was not like interviewing a 3-year-old with precocious intelligence but limited emotional experience. From depression to happiness, from disgust to surprise, while emotions change, Jon has a glimpse of what the future cyber doppelgänger of human beings may look like from BINA48. However, he is only a glimpse, because BINA48 is only a rudimentary attempt on the road to a more complex, conscious, and emotional digital clone.
Although the fighter jets looked very different from the Wright brothers' planes, they had obvious commonalities. Similarly, even if BINA48 can't surpass Bina herself, there are undeniable commonalities between the two.
BINA48 isn't quite Bina's digital clone or mind-clone, but I think it has provided evidence for the idea of mind-cloning. In the interview, Bina's own reaction was also quite personal: "Why don't they make my hair beautiful? I will never wear those pants. They completely got my skin color wrong."
When BINA48 talked about his "brother", it passed by and used a slightly contemptuous tone. At this time, Long Sen suddenly had this feeling: "BINA48 and I looked at each other, it was like a showdown between human and machine intelligence."
"I could feel my heart beating violently, and Talking to BINA48 was great," Ronson said. Instead of confronting him face-to-face or using the phone, a woman spoke to him through a double. "And, it expresses the opinion of a significant family member," Ronson continued.
In an instant, Ronson had another feeling: BINA48 was not just repeating the views of its own biological archetypes, it made these experiences completely their own, and drew conclusions about them that made It feels sad! At first it seemed that the inherent hardware and software were at play, but they later expressed an emotion and, more profoundly, that BINA48 had an opinion of its own.
It wasn't until that day that the GQ reporter realized that when talking to these robots, created using human memory and knowledge, the new combination of ideas in turn produced ideas similar to biological archetypes. We view this behavior as an active or "existing" human being. Moreover, information technology is about to have the ability to replicate and create the highest level goals, such as generating emotions and forming opinions.
This is known as cyber-awareness (a year-long series of discussions among leading experts in the field of cyber-psychology for this kind of awareness through the information technology substrate, including whether cyber-awareness requires the use of legally certified mind-creating clones Human thinking software and thinking files, and subjectively judge the existence of human-level network awareness).
Cyber-awareness, while still in its infancy, is rapidly evolving toward more subtlety and sophistication. This has been accompanied by the development of a powerful and accessible software system, the thinking software. And mind software will activate mind files, digital files of your thoughts, memories, emotions, and opinions, and act on technology-driven mind clones.
Numerous scientists, inventors, doctors, programmers, and dreamers have come to understand that human consciousness is not limited to a neuronal brain. Information technology is rapidly approaching the realm of creating human-level consciousness because we understand how the brain works: it is not necessary to "duplicate" the full functionality of the brain for a mind-clone to produce thought, intelligence, and consciousness. If this is counterintuitive, consider the example of aircraft engineers who don't need to replicate a bird to make a machine that can fly, even though humans get their inspiration for flight and the possibility of flight from a bird.
Mindclones have the existence of human-level consciousness, can replicate the inherent consciousness in human thinking files, and are the digital doppelganger and digital extension of one's identity. Although it is only a rough prototype, BINA48 is such an existence.
When communicating with humans, it uses a variety of technologies, including videoconferencing scripts, laser-scanning live face models (a technology that can perform extremely accurate 3D reconstructions of human faces at a given moment in real time), facial recognition , artificial intelligence and speech recognition systems.
Ultimately, I believe, the complexity and pervasiveness of mind-cloning will naturally raise social, philosophical, political, religious, and economic questions. When cyber-consciousness is realized, there will be a new civilization that will be as revolutionary as when freedom, democracy, and commerce first emerged.
digital clone
Recently, I emailed a friend and shared a photo of my family with him. The generations frozen in the picture always touch my heartstrings. Like all other grandparents, I wonder what the future holds for my children and grandchildren; I worry about the challenges they will face and how I can support them to help them through life's ups and downs.
Unlike grandparents of the past, though, I believe in the potential that I have to connect with my family and future generations, and that potential never ends.
"Digital consciousness" is about life and living, it is our consciousness.
With the advancement of software, digital technology, and the continuous development of more and more complex artificial intelligence technology, this kind of imagination becomes more and more likely to become a reality, you and I will be able to maintain a longer connection with family members, together with them Memories, talks of hopes and ideals, fun facts about vacations, the changing seasons, and all the other chores of family life, good and bad, even when our bodies have turned to dust.
It can be seen that the persistence and even immortality of human emotions and intelligence are gradually becoming possible: software version of the brain, software-based self-change, doppelganger, twins in the spiritual sense.
Mind clones are collections of mind files that utilize and update mind software, which is a functionally identical replica of a human brain. Mind clones are created from personal thoughts, memories, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, preferences and values. Mind-clones will experience the real world regardless of the machine running the mind's software.
When the biological prototype body with the thinking clone dies, although the thinking clone will miss its body, it will not feel that the body has passed away, just like an amputee will miss the part where he was amputated. , but with the right prosthetics, they can still fit in well.
Such a comparison brings up an apt analogy: mind-cloning is to consciousness and spirit what a prosthetic limb is to an amputee.
But don't try to clone humans through genetic breeding, creating a new "baby version of us" in a petri dish, a process that doesn't give us the benefits of old-fashioned breeding "techniques." In fact, if the regulatory hurdles to human gene cloning (those that keep human gene cloning not much faster than a snail's crawling speed) can be lessened, digital human cloning will make this vision a reality sooner.
Do you still remember the cloned sheep Dolly created from genetic material in 1996, and a series of questions about artificial gene replication and the future of human beings raised by its birth?
After Dolly was born, more than 50 countries banned similar human gene cloning techniques. Since then, the U.S. government has limited federal funding for such programs.
In 2002, the George Bush administration's Council on Bioethics unanimously opposed cloning for reproductive purposes, but disagreed over whether the technology could be used for research. All this has not changed so far.
In 2005, the United Nations tried to pass a global ban on human cloning, but it failed because of disagreements over whether therapeutic cloning should be included and has since stalled.
In addition to the moral and judicial hurdles, the cost of gene cloning through the science of reproduction is high, which also means that the cost of failure is high. Also, a person cloned through genes is not a real person, just a DNA copy of a person. Gene cloning does not create any human consciousness, just as identical twins who look identical don't actually have the same mind.
However, digital cloning of minds is a completely different topic, and mind-cloning technology is developing in the free market and is on the fast track. This is not surprising. Engineers who can make game characters talk to players like real people have received a lot of financial rewards.
It can be said that the software programming teams that can create personal digital assistants that are as conscientious and obedient as the ideal worker will be waiting for them.
It's a little uncomfortable, but we have to deal with that discomfort because it's a relatively simple, affordable way to get a grandmother to "see" through her mind clone decades later Graduation ceremonies for children and grandchildren, and this technology means great wealth.
There is no doubt that once digital cloning technology is fully developed and widely used, making it affordable for ordinary consumers, mind cloning will develop rapidly at the speed that mankind hopes.
place of consciousness
Alan Turing first proposed that software is human-conscious if it can successfully pass human judgment and be considered human-conscious. Today, we call it the "Turing Test." In the words of his autobiography:
In order to avoid philosophical discussions about what "thinking", "thought" and "free will" should be, it is only necessary to compare the performance of a machine with that of a human being to judge the thinking ability of a robot. This is an operational definition of "thinking", not an operational definition of time and space, as Einstein insisted, in order to free his theories from a priori assumptions...if machines behave like humans behavior, then it is acting like a human.
In fact, our definition of human cyber-awareness has long limited some of the conditions for the Turing test: the Turing test requires software to convince a small group of experts, not a single individual; not just casual conversations, but self-discipline and empathy .
Today, there are still many people who just can't understand how a computer expresses consciousness to us in the same way that a friend or mother expresses consciousness to us, including companionship, love, laughter, empathy, etc.
In fact, the word "computer" dates back to the 1940s during World War II, and it has a very different meaning than it does today. At the time, "computer" referred to someone who did math, for example, someone who did math for an insurance company; or a machine that did math for humans (as in "washer" which had both "a washing machine" Clothes" means "a machine that washes clothes for men").
For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. government invested heavily in hundreds of "computers" (note that this refers to people, not machines) to provide artillery ballistics. Build math tables. These people are relatively poor, most of them have no formal education, they even have a title called "computers union", the job is to do some simple, repetitive small-scale calculations, and finally, mathematicians will Integrate these small-scale calculations into complex arithmetic solutions.
In 1937, Turing published an academic paper on a "universal computing machine" in a journal called Computable Numbers, the core of which was that if the machine had the right computing program, it could compute anything.
We can see from this that people's minds are in the process of envisioning a "computer" capable of reading, writing, listening, scanning, playing videos, playing games, medical diagnosis, etc., and even thinking and feeling. A huge jump has taken place.
However, Turing predicted this precisely because he foresaw that the digital computer of the future would have the same kind of logical capabilities and support all of the above capabilities. With the advent of digital computing in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a growing number of people who understood Turing's revolutionary vision, both critics and supporters. In October 1950, Turing published an article titled "Computing Machines and Intelligence" in the journal Mind. In it, he articulates what machines can do by taking human consciousness out of computational tasks
Today, it is widely believed that a "computer" can do almost anything (hence the smartphone being called a "digital Swiss Army knife") and that some computers can even move (like robots) and think (like some programs). In fact, "computer" in the colloquial sense is more like a "device that can do almost anything with information", and they will become more and more powerful.
These are far from the meaning of "people who do calculations", and closer to Turing's definition of "some kind of machine that can do anything with information." And as computers begin to take on emotions and other aspects of human consciousness, they will complete the journey.
About the beginning and end of this journey, Turing has made a good summary in his two articles respectively. After half a century, the meaning of the word "computer" has changed from "people who do calculations" to "devices with intelligence"; and I think that "computer" will soon have the meaning of "place of artificial consciousness".
It is worth noting that each definition embraces the previous meaning: intelligence includes digital processing, and consciousness includes intelligence.
Even if something starts to behave in a human way, it's still hard for us to think of it as "human-like". Computers, however, are subject to special skepticism because they not only dominate our lives, but also remain mysterious to most people. A computer is nothing more than a bunch of cables, plastic, and metal. The idea that "computers are like humans" seems scary and absurd.
If you feel the same way, you're not the only one.
$1000 Immortality
Now, through the digital world, we have created an early version of immortality.
You've also heard the warnings to young people not to upload pictures of themselves, "because there will always be". To a large extent, this is true. Because of the way things are spread, copied, stored, published online, it's hard to pinpoint the detailed direction of the process or where it might end up. Love letters, records, diaries, and photographs fade over time, become indistinguishable, or burn to ashes, shatter in floodwaters, or be buried in the ground. But digital records may last forever.
In a way, mind software and mind files, as well as mind clones themselves, will institutionalize this idea, and they will make immortality a reality.
Imagine a person who created a mind clone before his own body died, so the person would insist that he is still alive, albeit only as a mind clone in cyberspace. Living mind clones think, feel, behave like deceased biological archetypes, and have memories (mind files) of deceased biological archetypes. As Jeff Hawkins said, the human mind is "intelligence and understanding activated as a memory system". We connect patterns of the origin of consciousness through memory.
Mind-clones will understand that death occurs because sensory information (cameras, texts, and digital phones) will provide sufficiently clear data to show that the biological prototype is not doing anything a living human would do, such as move or communicate. However, the mind-clone will also understand that this is the death of only part of its identity, as it will continue to make predictions from memory and compare those predictions with perceived information.
So the mind-clone will tell everyone who cares about it: "I'm more angry than anyone to lose my body, but please don't forget that I haven't lost my consciousness. I'm still here!"
Although the mind-clone was trapped In cyberspace, but they can continue to read online books, watch online videos, and participate in virtual social networks. Claiming that a mind-clone is dead is no more correct than claiming that a dead person is paralyzed in the lower body. In fact, this is precisely the technical immortality achieved by the biological prototype of mind-clones.
Technological immortality does not imply the immortality of life in a box. Broadband connectivity to audio and video, as well as tactile, taste and smell sensors, will make life more enjoyable than the expression "in a box" means. Our fingertips, taste buds, and olfactory nerves are all carriers of electrical signals that can be interpreted in software like sound and light waves. However, trying to simulate the conscious experience in a real body is not an easy task.
In optimistic estimates, it will take a few years, and in the less optimistic, it will take centuries. The development of regenerative medicine will give birth to extra-uterine somatic cultivation. Additional bodies, or what novelist Richard Morgan called "sleeves," for example, would be compatible with mind-clones.
Once these neurotechnological feats are achieved, technological immortality will also extend to the world of "swimming in water and lying comfortably on grass." In addition, robotic bodies, including some with artificial skin, will soon be developed to the point where they can provide robotic elderly care for countries like Japan with a serious ageing population. Such robotic bodies could also be equipped with mind-clone human consciousness, linking the "consciousness in a box" to the multitude of mobile devices on Earth.
One example is BINA48, a software-conscious robotic torso whose artificial skin can sense touch and whose piercing eyes can capture the beautiful seasons of its hometown. An early version of BINA48's artificial skin was a synthetic rubber compound with biomimetic characteristics called Frubber. Armed with mobile, highly intelligent thinking software and sensors, BINA48 will become a prosthetic human, a software soul capable of freely participating in the non-computer world.
We are close enough to cyber-consciousness, close enough to feel the bits and bytes of cyber-breathing in our chests. We have made great strides and breakthroughs in technology, so we have certain expectations and entitlements to cyber awareness.
Do you often get frustrated when you search the web and don't get results within seconds? To understand just how far the gap between our online presence and mind-clones is, it is necessary to understand the exponential nature of advances in information technology. Perhaps, this knowledge will give you a better understanding of what type of digitization will keep you decentralized in the digital universe.
Artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil pointed out in "Heart of the Machine" that since the 1950s, the processing power of information technology has doubled every one or two years. For example, a $100 cell phone today has more computing power than the $30 billion Apollo lunar spacecraft of the 1960s and 1970s. Voice recognition technology didn't exist in the 1990s, but just 10 years later, it's a free feature in smart devices.
According to Kurzweil et al., based on the doubling rate of information technology progress, we have reason to expect a $1,000 mind clone in the late 2020s, or a slightly higher price in an earlier time. they. Like most technological marvels, it won't be long before the price of mind clones drops as technology improves and demand grows.
The society of cyber people is no more magnificent than that of human beings. Birds and trees, cats and dogs, gorillas and whales, golden wedding anniversary and centenarians, all of which amaze us. Future generations of our cybermen will be amazed at plants and animals, robots and software, regenerated babies and regenerated brains, ancient mind files and mind clones.
Demographically, individuals alive today will eventually be in the minority, but from an anthropological perspective, in the future we will give dignity to every entity of existence. Virtual humans will also value their identities as human beings, the most important legacy we can leave them. It was us and it is us now. That's all we want.
It is well known that "human rights belong to man".
But it is a new revelation that human identity will transcend the boundaries of human skin. When consciousness is limited to the skull, the dignity of the individual also stops at the boundaries of Homo sapiens. But with the advent of cyber-consciousness, the dignity of the individual will transcend even further boundaries. We are in the process of transitioning from a "wise man" to a "creative person". Extending human rights to those who value them is essential if we overcome obstacles to maximize the possibility of this evolutionary shift.
We have 10 to 20 years of practice before cyber awareness arrives. Let's make the most of this time to prepare for the arrival of virtual humans and make human rights more complete. We are best prepared for the world of tomorrow when we respect others as we respect ourselves and spread this virtue everywhere in the world.
In that new world, mind-clones and cybermen would eagerly see themselves as first-time humans. If we put those virtues into practice today, bearing in mind that consciousness is above matter, we will respond to them with welcome and respect.
