少点错误 2024年08月25日
Why should anyone boot *you* up?
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文章探讨了在未来若能扫描大脑,但运行大脑模拟成本高且缺乏经济激励的情况下,是否应将人复活及相关问题。

🎯未来大脑扫描技术虽可实现,但实时脑模拟技术发展滞后,千年后运行扫描仍需成本,且被扫描者可能因缺乏知识技能而难以适应社会。

💡若能为扫描注入千年知识技能等,那是否还是原来的自己?且为何不直接创造具有相同知识技能的新AI,而要保留原有人的个性、记忆和情感?

📄谷歌研究者发布连接组学研究,虽扫描过程繁琐,但可得到大脑布线几何模型,且公开了相关数据,然而提取纳米级连接组未必能完整捕捉人的思想。

Published on August 24, 2024 5:51 PM GMT

Imagine the following scenario:

    We develop brain-scan technology today which can take a perfect snapshot anyone's brain, down to the atomic level. You undergo this procedure after you die and your brain scan is kept in some fault-tolerant storage, along the lines of GitHub Arctic Code Vault.But sufficiently cheap real-time brain emulation technology takes considerably longer to develop—say 1000 years in the future.1000 years pass. Everyone that ever knew, loved or cared about you die.

Here is the crucial question:

Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring you back from the dead? Why should anyone boot you up?

Compute doesn't grow in trees. It might become very efficient, but it will never have zero cost, under physical laws.

In the 31st century, the economy, society, language, science and technology will all look different. Most likely, you will not only NOT be able to compete with your contemporaries due to lack of skill and knowledge, you will NOT even be able to speak their language. You will need to take a language course first, before you can start learning useful skills. And that assumes some future benefactor is willing to pay to keep you running before you can start making money, survive independently in the future society.

To give an example, I am a software developer who takes pride in his craft. But a lot of the skills I have today will most likely be obsolete by the 31st century. Try to imagine what an 11th century stonemason would need to learn to be able to survive in today's society.

1000 years into the future, you could be as helpless as a child. You could need somebody to adopt you, send you to school, and teach you how to live in the future. You---mentally an adult---could once again need a parent, a teacher.

(This is analogous to cryogenics or time-capsule sci-fi tropes. The further in the future you are unfrozen, the more irrelevant you become and the more help you will need to adapt.)

Patchy competence?

On the other hand, it would be a pity if a civilization which can emulate brain scans is unable to imbue them with relevant knowledge and skills, unable to update them.

For one second, let's assume that they could. Let's assume that they could inject your scan with 1000 years of knowledge, skills, language, ontology, history, culture and so on.

But then, would it still be you?

But then, why not just create a new AI from scratch, with the same knowledge and skills, and without the baggage of your personality, memories, and emotions?

Why think about this now?

Google researchers recently published connectomics research (click here for the paper) mapping a 1 mm³ sample of temporal cortex in a petabyte-scale dataset. Whereas the scanning process seems to be highly tedious, it can yield a geometric model of the brain's wiring at nanometer resolution that looks like this:

Rendering based on electron-microscope data, showing the positions of neurons in a fragment of the brain cortex. Neurons are coloured according to size. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

They have even released the data to the public. You can download it here.

An adult human brain takes up around 1.2 liters of volume. If we could scale up the process from Google researchers 1000 times, we could scan a human brain at nanometer resolution, yielding more than 1 exabyte of data with the same rate.

I don't want to imply that extracting a nanometer-scale connectome of a human brain is enough to capture a person's mind in its entirety. By definition, some information is lost in the process. Fidelity will be among the most important problems in neuropreservation for a long time to come.

That being said, the most important problem in digital immortality may not be technical, but economical. It may not be about how to scan a brain, but about why to scan a brain and run it, despite the lack of any economic incentive.



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数字永生 大脑扫描 经济问题 连接组学
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