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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1996 Death by Instalments If you were dying and all your mental faculties were complete, would you consent to the transferring of your mental awareness and capability into a computer? Most people I have asked say categorically no! Now, suppose the transfer was into an android with the ambulatory and tactile qualities of you the real person. The majority of people still say no. But I would say yes to either extreme and everything in between. I once asked my wife if she would still love me if I had to have a tin leg. She responded with an immediate €œyes€. She remained steadfast at the further prospect of a prosthetic arm, artificial heart, kidneys, pancreas, lungs, spleen, stomach and inner ear. But when I suggested artificial eyes she responded with a resounding €œno€ - followed by - "Just a minute, I am not having you dying by instalments!" The question I then posed, was: at what point are you going to say it is not me inhabiting an amalgam of flesh, blood, metal and electronics? Is it when we make the final step of transferring my biologically developed brain to an electronically manufactured brain? For the most part these are questions people do wish not to contemplate. For me they are a re-run of a mind experiment some years after my father had died. Had the technology been available to capture his consciousness from his dying body, I think he would have said yes. However, my mother reacted vehemently against the very thought of transferring a loved one into a machine form. Interestingly I would have done anything to have maintained contact with that intellect, that being who had initiated my life, nurtured, taught, and loved me from the moment I was born until we finally parted. His physical manifestation mattered less to me than his presence. I would have done anything to have maintained contact with him in whatever form. For various reasons, I never had the courage to ask of him this question, and I will always wonder which decision would he have made. I suppose as I age this question will be a re-occurring one and may even become pertinent. If not pertinent for me, then it will certainly be pertinent for my son€™s son or whoever. At some point in the future it is almost certain our technology will be able to transfer human minds into a silicon form. At our present rate of progress 20 years will see computers with an equivalent processing and storage capability to us, but this is just a start. Within 30 years the development of such machines should have reached our desk or pocket. Whether they will be capable of supporting new life forms, or imbibing existing ones, remains to be seem. Probably the key challenge they will help us solve is the understanding and access to the human mind itself. We do not understand how the human brain works as we have not yet unravelled its unbelievable complexity. Perversely, with future super computers, it might be possible for us to create sufficiently good models to achieve a full understanding. What kind of world will it be where no one ever has to die, or for that matter suffer unbearable sickness and failure of health? A world where we can live inside a static machine, communications network or inhabit some android or robotic form? The answer; totally different to anything we have experienced. Perhaps life and society will take on a new form - with the merging of intelligence and experience. We may even become civilised and stop slaughtering each other. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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