
Will Uploaded Minds in Machines be Alive? - r11t
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rothblatt20091226/
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jacquesm
That makes the very large assumption that such a thing will be possible in the
first place, which is by no means a certainty.

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rbanffy
Since there are no physical impossibilities involved, it's just a question of
time until it is possible to completely acquire and simulate an organic brain
on a computer model.

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jacquesm
How much time though ?

It's only a matter of time before we make contact with an alien civilization.
But that doesn't mean we need to go and wonder overly long about how we'd
dress for the occasion, it is simply too far off for that.

What kind of an upper limit would you put on this kind of thing becoming a
reality?

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rbanffy
A hundred years, at most. The problem is not the computers to run the
simulation, but capturing enough of the state of an organic brain to run a
consistent simulation. That is the tricky part.

The brains we simulate today are currently running on clusters of machines
designed for word processing. If and when we decide to take brain simulation
seriously, we will probably do so on machines designed for that purpose.

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jacquesm
That's outside the betting territory, too bad!

I'd gladly taken you up on anything less than 20 years, a hundred is far out
enough that we might run in to some kind of spectacular development.

10^14th connections is quite an impressive number to map, especially if it
turns out that the state is stored at the molecular level (we have DNA as a
hint of how dense nature tends to pack information).

Henry Makram is on the record as saying it will take the blue brain project
less than 10 years, in a TED talk given the 22nd of July 09.

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pwmanagerdied
Though the topic is interesting, this article is rambling and senseless. For
example it states that life, by reducing local entropy, violates the second
laws of thermodynamics.

