Digital God
At the time of this writing (2008) IBM has already released their Blue Gene/P (see image below) supercomputer which reached its peak speed of 3 Peta flops. I’ve calculated that is 3,000 trillions of calculations per second and you can take it another way: 3 million billions of calculations per second, or 3 quadrillion calculations per second. Believe it or not this is still not at capacities of a human brain which speed was clocked at around 20 million billion calculations per second or 20 quadrillions per second. So Blue gene is approximately 7 times slower (1/7) compared to human brain. However, technology is not growing linearly but exponentially. Processor speed is doubling every year now (used to be every decade, then every two years, then ever 18 months), which by some calculations home computers will reach human intelligence levels by 2025 (probably sooner) while commercial and military grade (like Blue Gene) computers will reach it by the year 2010 or 2012 at the latest. And those are the most conservative estimates. Scary stuff eh?
Update: IBM announces that the last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 10 Peta Flops in the 2010-2012 time frame.
Image of IBM’s Blue gene
Lets think about that for a second. What could we accomplish once we have a non-biological technology equivalent to a human brain in our arsenal? Well for one, with that kind technology we will be able to make even faster processors and exponentially even better technology. This will make technology grow even faster at neck-breaking speeds. It’s inevitable.
One of those technologies are going to be nanobots ( Nano robots). They are micro scale (10-9 meters) programmable robots that can perform variety of duties with breathtaking accuracy and speed.
In medicine for example nanobots can be let into your blood stream to regulate your blood pressure, cholesterol, repair and rejuvenate cells, kill cancer cells, viruses and even make new and better proteins. They can even replace or at least interact (improve) neurons in our brain. Possibilities are truly endless, but the last one sounds the most interesting one so lets stick with that one.
In about 2025 nanobots will be able to map and copy our brain (every neuron, ever synapse, axon and every pathway) very accurately and save that information somewhere in a digital form, external from our bodies. We will be able to save our scanned brain to a hard drive or whatever medium will be used at the time. Our home computers will actually have enough power to sift through all that information and process it.
Now, the only thing we need in order to awaken our digital brain is software. Nanobots can take care of that too. Since they’re already in our brains mapping and copying information they can also simply mimic and learn from our biological brain and model appropriate software for our newly crafted digital brain. With the help of exponential growth, nanotbots will be able to make even better and more efficient software to run that digital brain than the one we have in our brains right now.
Next thing we need would be to find a way to communicate with our digital brain. This will be done wireless. Just like your wireless mouse can communicate with your PC right now, uploaded neurons would communicate via wireless with your biological neurons simulating all sensory experiences. This will probably be achievable through specialized glasses or implanted wireless chip into your brain.
We will have same memories, same senses and some scientists believe that our digital brain will indeed be conscious of itself.
As far as we can tell all of our current senses come from the actual interactions of neurons in our brains. Our digital mind will be able to do the same thing. Imagine now if we uploaded our brain to Internet. We would truly have endless sensory capabilities. Everywhere you went online, it would be communicated back to your true self through Internet back to your PC and then back to your biological brain. Everything from smell, taste, fear, ecstasy will be so realistic that you will not be able to distinguish it from reality. Words like online chat, blogging and Cyber-sex will reach a whole new meaning. Your digital self will be able to roam Cyber-space freely and unrestricted. Not only our digital brain will enable us to have true remote experiences, but it will be able to act as its own entity and think for itself and feel itself. Independent of our physical bodies. That means that after we die, our mind would still live on somewhere in a digital form, and since it’s modeled on our actual brain it will probably act as real us, have same or similar personality as us.
It will be able to interact with other digital humans and experience sensory stimulants beyond anything imaginable by today’s standard.
The word travel for example will also become meaningless. Lets say for the sake of argument that in the year 2030 you would like to travel to Paris and wanted to see The Eiffel Tower. Would you be able to send your digital mind (which will have exact same sensory experience as your whole-self would’ve had) instead? Yes you would. What’s experience anyway? You digital mind would have the same experience and same sensory outputs/inputs as your true self and would be able to beam that info back to your true self via Internet. Think of it as an extension to your brain. Think of it as if your neurons can reach all the way to Paris. No physical body is needed since even now, everything we see, feel, smell, touch, hear and remember is done in our brains. Everything. Period. You arm does not feel pain when you poke it. Your brain does. Your heart does not feel love. Your brain does. So you would indeed have the same experience as if you were really in Paris with your true physical body. You would not be able to tell the difference.
Even today we cannot distinguish some dreams from the actual reality even shortly after we wake up. Virtual Reality software and hardware is so advanced now that you would have a hard time making out what the reality is while using one of those things. Brain is the best 3D software there is.
Now, lets take the travel one step further.
Since all forms of communications will be done wireless, we would actually be able to upload our digital brains to a space satellite and for the first time see the Earth from outer space. And to take it even further; we would be able to make as many copies of our digital brain as we want so we could send number of them on the way to different planets and stars. We would drift away on our galactic plane into the vastness of the Cosmos and be able to safely explore mysteries and dangers of our universe.
Think about it. All of that from the comfort of our living room. Of course since our digital brains would be able to travel just at the speed of light (radio waves travel at the speed of light), we would be limited on how far we would be able to go. For example: we could explore our solar system within minutes, but closest star would take about eight years (4 years in each direction) so it would not be really practical.
Physical property (housing, cars, buildings, etc) will loose it’s value and will give way to a virtual property. As our digital brains are multiplied and self replicated, demand for online property will grow exponentially. More and more our lives will consist of less physical interaction. We could actually hibernate ourselves and live out our entire lives in a virtual environment (Matrix anyone?) and essentially reach virtual immortality.
Eventually our digital brain will want its own body, and it will be able to make it. It would probably first look like hologram (see picture below), but by the inventions of organic printers (printers that can print organic material on atomic and molecular level) it will be able to produce exact copy of you.
Digital Brain Hologram
Estimates are that by year 2035 technology will far surpass human intelligence and nanobots will be able to replicate itself with terrifying speed. And not only that but they will be able to learn and share information instantaneously between each other which will in turn jump start development and technological advance even faster. Law of cumulative returns dictaes exactly that. The fact is that there’s nothing we can do to surpass our biological brain speed limit of 1026 calculations per second. That might seem huge to you , but non-biological entities (computers and technology itself) will far exceed that number by the year 2035. Law of accelerating returns almost guarantee that. Some scientists and mathematicians think that will exceed it by a factor of thousand and by the year 2099 by the factor of trillion. By that time computing will be done on quantum scale (qubits instead of bits) and true immortality will be reached. Taking over humans race is inevitable. If that’s the case than there’s no doubt in my mind that we will reach a whole new level of evolution and human race as we know it will probably become obsolete at some point. It will be replaced by a new digital species that might resemble humans at some point but probably not in a distant future.
Once we could not develop ourselves any further on our biological evolutionary scale (at least not without destroying ourself and consuming every little resource this planet has to offer), we’ve jump started natural selection and created a whole new species on the fly.
Think about what we’ve created here.
It took universe 9 billion years to create earth.
It took evolution 3 and half billion years to create humans.
It took humans about 10,000 years (only 200 of technological advancement) years to create entity better, smarter and more efficient then the actual creators themselves. This is what some call Singularity. They in turn are able to create yet another species that is even more advanced and so on. This will go on until there is bodiless super-intelligence in the universe that lives (if you can call it that) in a totally different dimensions and can create matter, energy, worlds, other beings and anything it likes at will.
I’ll leave it to your imaginations to guess what we’ve created here.
This article was inspired by scientists, free thinkers and transhumansits like: Isaak Asimov, Carl Sagan, John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Ray Kurzweil.
Well, while a chip may be able to duplicate or exceed the raw speed of our brain, i hesitate to agree that it will be able to duplicate our ability to think freely. Our brains function in a non-linear capacity and have the ability to physically reconfigure itself – neural dendrites can create, modify or eliminate neural connections on the fly. Big blue can’t put that on a chip just yet – while they can reroute processing using software, they can’t reconfigure the physical connections. I think this is where our brains have the edge … not to mention, we don’t really have a good grasp of exactly what consciousness is in our own minds, so i think we’d have a tough time duplicating it. As for the nanotechnology, big things can happen there – especially, as you point out, in the medical field. Another application that i see is in textiles and raw materials. If a nanobot will have the ability to alter the physical structure of a particular medium at the atomic or even molecular level – we will be able to manufacture any raw material simply by supplying the ingredients to the bots. No more energy crisis, food shortage or surgery.
This sounds all fascinating, but I have one simple question: Why? We rush into these technological advancements ahead of our ethical standards and this can create major problems. The potentials in the nanotechnology sound promising, but imagine if a terrorist got hold of it, or imagine all the possible side-effects of that technology. And why use the digital copy of your brain to visit Paris, for example, when you can do it on your own?
bloodnut,
First thank you for taking your time to comment.
Remember: human neurons are mostly devoted to maintaining life support of other organs and not for information processing, and besides, our current electronic circuits are much faster (10 million times faster) then neuron’s electrochemical processes. You’re right that our brains function in non-linear fashion and just speed of the processors will not be able to mimic that. That’s precisely why we will have software totally devoted to that part of the our digital brain. Without appropriate software it’s going to be useless.
Fyodor,
We’re not rushing into anything. Free market (if there’s such a thing) and competition are driving forces this time. Remember, technology is its own entity that evolves and will evolve exponentially regardless of our ethical standards.
Just an update.
It looks like IBM’s Blue Brain supercomputer (not to be confused with Blue Gene) is on the way of building a first digital brain simulation.
Here’s excerpt from the article:
“This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up,” says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. “There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there.”
Read full article here: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php
Welcome to our new deus ex machina overlords.
I think the Israelis created a bio-computer in like 2001 or 2002 that was composed of enzymes for hardware and DNA for software. Now it couldn’t do 4 petaflops, more like 1 gigaflop, but the advantage is size. You could fit like a billion of them in a drop of water. Plus computer chips only talk to each other when the programmed instruction set tells them to. Neurons can create links on the fly like bloodnut mentioned and if youve got billions of these little bio-processors all linking up and thinking together. Wow. Is it ‘alive’ at that point? And if youre downloading peoples thought and / or copying them into robotic copies of you, is it alive? does it have a soul.
All this stuff makes my head hurt thinking about it.
Like bloodnut said previously we don’t have very good science on consciousness. Your questions is: At what point mechanical things become aware? Think about it, we are made of non-organic matter too and we ARE aware. So I don’t see any reasons (given powerful software and ability to replicate) why computers would not become aware of their surroundings and themselves.
Computers will also have neural networks so essentially it will be able to feel pain. What’s pain to a human anyway?
I will try to post some scientific updates and achievements here in regards to the article.
Here’s the latest one:
“A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.
The molecular device – just two billionths of a metre across – was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say it could also be used to boost the processing power of future computers.
Many experts have high hopes for nano-machines in treating disease.”
Full article canbe found here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7288426.stm
Here’s another interesting article:
Pentagon’s Mind-Reading Computers Replicate
“Augmented Cognition,” the Darpa program to build computer interfaces that adapt to their users’ brains, has officially run its course. But efforts to build mind-reading PCs continue throughout the military establishment.
Full can be found here: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/03/augcog-continue.html