Nonsense in NatGeo's “Year Million”

The National Geographic channel has a new TV series entitled “Year Million.” A recent episode in the series was entitled “Never Say Die,” and was about the prospects of human immortality. The episode was long on slick visuals, and short on intelligence. The episode presented the ideas that we will greatly extend human longevity by using nanobots and genetic engineering, and that later people will upload themselves into computers.

The episode presented a simplistic view of biological life, one that is purely mechanistic, epitomized by a person who said, "We are still biologically hindered by the squishy computer in our heads.” The assumptions seemed to be that biological life is merely some mechanical phenomenon that humans can completely master through technologies such as nanobots and genetic engineering. These assumptions are quite dubious because of all the profound mysteries involving biological life.

It is generally admitted that we do not understand the origin of life. It is generally admitted that we do not understand the mystery of protein-folding (why proteins conveniently form into three-dimensional shapes needed for our existence). It is generally admitted that we do not understand the mysteries of morphogenesis, how it is that a fertilized egg is able to progress to become a baby who then grows into a full-grown human. We also don't really understand the origin of species, as the theory of evolution by natural selection is merely a theory of accumulation rather than what we actually need to explain the mountainous degrees of coordination, structural fine-tuning, and functional coherence in our bodies: a theory of organization explaining the arrival of the fittest, not just the survival of the fittest. As discussed here, we also don't really understand where it is that the body plans of organisms are stored, because DNA is a minimal “bare bones” language unsuitable for describing three-dimensional body plan blueprints; so while DNA might be storing a list of chemical ingredients, it does not actually seem to have a specification of our body plans.

We therefore have every reason to suspect that biological life involves some mysterious forces or factors very far beyond our understanding. If that is the case, then the prospect for vastly increasing the human lifespan through injecting humans with tiny robots called nanobots and tinkering with DNA may be much less bright than many think.

But there is some reasonable hope that genetic engineering or nanobots might extend the human lifespan, so this part of the TV show wasn't nonsensical. The show did become nonsensical when it discussed the very dubious concept of mind uploading in a completely uncritical manner. Among the reasons why mind uploading is such a dubious concept is that we have no understanding of how a brain could even be storing memories that last for decades, given all the rapid molecular turnover and protein turnover that occurs in brains; and we have no idea of how brains can generate abstract ideas. Mind uploading cannot possibly work unless some reductionist model of consciousness and memory is correct; and there are very good reasons (discussed here and in this series of posts) for doubting that any such model is correct.

The show quoted neuroscientist Michael Graziano, who made this very dogmatic proclamation:

A lot has to be done before we can figure out whether we can take a pattern of connectivity from a brain and upload it or copy it. It's going to happen; I'm positive of that. Everything's moving in that direction.

Graziano's certainty on this matter is laughable. There is no basis for believing that minds can ever be uploaded. There is no progress at all in mind uploading. Instead of “everything's moving in that direction,” the situation is actually, “nothing's moving in that direction.” And why is Graziano saying he's sure it's going to happen, just after saying, “A lot has to be done before we can figure out whether we can take a pattern of connectivity from a brain and upload it or copy it”? Those two thoughts contradict each other.

The show then quotes string physicist Michio Kaku, who nowadays seems to have his head popping up on every science or futurism documentary put on television. Kaku states, "Believe it or not, we can actually upload memories, and record memories in mice.” This statement is false. The actual claims that have been made by certain mice researchers (researchers in optogenetics) is that memories in mice can be blocked or activated. Such claims are not well founded, and are based on a few doubtful studies using a dubious methodology. The studies typically report weak levels of statistical significance. See here for a discussion of the flaws in some of these studies.

Making claims about mind uploading, the show's narrator says this:

Once we shed our physical bodies, we will exist only as a computer copy of our brains. It's hard to imagine exactly, but basically you'd be digital information stored on a server.

The TV show assures us that mind uploading is the key to eternal life. The narrator says this:

But when we start talking about immortality, that's a whole other can of worms. If we really are serious about getting to forever-land, we'll have to replace our carbon based human bodies and upload ourselves to a super-computer.

The show then tells us this existence will be like some afterlife heaven. We are told:

We're talking about everlasting life in a digital paradise....All of society will live digitally in a virtual world called the metaverse that's a thousand times more intense than the one you live in now.

There are quite a few reasons why such a thing is very unlikely to happen. First, the brain does not store digital information, so the mind is very likely not something that can be uploaded into a computer. Second, there is not the slightest evidence that the brain uses any type of readable code to store information. DNA uses the genetic code, something we can understand and read. But we have zero knowledge of anything like a brain code that we can use to read information from the brain. Nor can we plausibly imagine how such a code could have originated, as it would have to be something almost infinitely harder to explain than the genetic code (the origin of which is very hard to explain).

Third, you could never electronically capture the exact state of a particular person's brain, even if you tried to use microscopic nanobots to do such a thing. Imagine trying to exactly map every synapse and neuron in a brain with nanobots. Each of the brain-mapping nanobots would have to somehow be aware of its own exact position in the brain, so it can record the exact position of each neuron and brain connection it encounters. So if a nanobot comes to a neuron that is 1.334526 centimeters from the left edge of the skull, and 2.734538 centimeters from the right edge of the skull, and 5.292343 centimeters from the back of the skull, then those exact coordinates must be recorded. But how can a microscopic nanobot do that? You can't supply a microscopic nanobot with a little GPS system allowing it to tell its position. So it would seem that nanobots are completely unsuitable for any such job as mapping the exact physical microscopic structure of an organ with billions of cells and synapses packed together in a small space.

Then there's the duplication problem. Imagine if there was a machine that could scan your brain, and then upload your mind to a computer. Even if that process was done perfectly, the computer would not have your mind. It would instead have a copy of your mind. You may realize this just by considering that if this uploading process didn't kill you, and the computer with your “mind upload” existed at the same time as you, there wouldn't be two you's. There would be one you, and a copy of you living in the computer. If you then died after this upload, it would not at all be true that you had survived death by the fact that a copy of your mind was in the computer.

None of these difficulties are discussed on the “Year Million” TV show. The show presents mind uploading as a sure thing, ignoring all the reasons for thinking that it can't ever happen. Not only did the TV show present mind uploading as something that will likely happen; the TV show assured us that mind uploading is the key to true immortality – on the grounds that once you are living in a computer server, you are guaranteed to live forever.

This is nonsensical, because the programs running on computer servers sometimes crash and stop working; the programs running on computer servers are sometimes deliberately halted; and the computer servers themselves sometimes crash, lose power, or are turned off. If you were living in a computer server, there is no reason why you should be confident that you will be around for more than a century or two. 

 After the father and daughter mind-uploaded

The next episode of the “Year Million” TV series continued to be largely about mind uploading, speaking as if this extremely doubtful idea was on solid ground. There was also a pitch for the idea that we are already living inside computers. The “Year Million” TV series is on track to be the silliest documentary series ever put on about the human future.

Given our very low state of knowledge about the most basic riddles of biology, memory and consciousness, fantasies of mind uploading are rather like the fantasies of some boy who knows almost nothing about the contents of the sun, but who fantasizes that he will one day reorganize the sun into a shape and color more pleasing to him.

His Unbelievable Vision of a Post-Human Future

The Age of EM: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (a professor of economics at George Mason University) is a new book that speculates in the greatest detail about what kind of world will arise if a weird possibility occurs. The weird possibility that Hanson imagines is that humans become "not the main inhabitants" of the earth, being overshadowed by what he calls “ems.” Hanson defines an “em” like this: “An em results from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections.”

What Hanson is imagining is essentially android robots, but not robots who are controlled by artificial intelligence programming. Hanson is rather skeptical about artificial intelligence programming, and says on page 382 it will take two to four centuries before it is capable of achieving “human level” capabilities. But Hanson thinks there's a shortcut. He thinks we can get robots as smart as people by scanning human brains and then loading that information into robots. He thinks this will be feasible within about a hundred years. Hanson thinks that before our planet sees any robots smarter than man, there will be one or more centuries in which our planet is largely inhabited by robots about as smart as humans – robots whose electronic minds are duplicates of human brains.

Hanson gives us a cold vision that is morally repulsive. After discussing a destructive form of brain scanning that is rather like a turkey slicer (page 148), he suggests using eugenics to produce a superior stock of humans to have their brains copied into robots.

The rest of the world has pretty much rejected eugenics since the fall of the Nazis, but apparently not Hanson. On page 162 he says:

It is possible that sometime in the next half-century or so we we will be able to create babies of substantially higher genetic quality by embryo selection in the context of in vitro fertilization. If so, when they reach the right age these may be very attractive candidates for scanning into ems.

Does the professor thinks we should wait until the genetically engineered super-kids are grown, and then feed their brains into his brain scanner that is like a turkey slicer?

On page 146 the professor proposes that the millions of robot “ems” that are copies of human minds should be given only “wages near subsistence levels,” even though he assures us on page 150 that these “ems” are “mentally quite human.” He offers this cold justification for this cruel proposal.

Readers of this book may find near-subsistence wages to be a strange and perhaps scary prospect. So it is worth remembering that such wages in effect applied to almost all animals who ever lived, to almost all humans before a few hundred years ago, and for a billion humans still today.

And what about all the humans who would have all their jobs lost by this great army of “ems” that would appear? Hanson seems to have little interest in the fate of the old-fashioned creatures known as humans. I looked up “humans” in the index of his 384-page book, and I see the last reference to “humans” is on page 14. Hanson does not imagine that humans will become extinct, but he imagines on page 8 that humans will live in retirement cities, with the "em" robots living in separate cities (how is he is able to make so specific a claim I don't know). 

Hanson imagines that the human race will be economically eclipsed by robots that have copies of human minds, but we may ask: what would be the point of that? Hanson tells us that it would occur because such robots will be more efficient, and work much faster. But it is very far from clear that this would be true. Give me a year 2100 human armed with all the best year 2100 gadgets (and some pills helping him think faster), and such a person should do just as well as a robot with a brain copied from a human.

Hanson creates endless speculations based on this idea of robot minds being copies of human minds, but he does nothing to show the feasibility of the idea. So Hanson is like some person building a 10-story tower before laying a concrete foundation for such a tower. There are actually very good reasons for thinking that it is impossible to ever create a robot mind that is a copy of a human mind. One such reason is that while Hanson claims that the mind is just the brain, there are very good reasons for thinking they are not the same, and that you would not at all capture someone's mind by scanning his brain.

Let me specify some preliminary requirements that we should demand of any book centered upon speculations that robot minds can be created from scanning human minds. After these preliminary requirements are met, we can think to ourselves that we are not wasting our time by reading speculations about some possibility that will never be able to occur.

The first requirement we should demand is a detailed explanation of how it is that the human brain could possibly store memories stretching back 50 years. For the reasons I give in this post, scientists don't understand how the human brain can store memories for longer than three weeks. The most common explanation for memory is that humans store memories in synapses. But synapses are subject to molecular turnover which should prevent them from storing any memories for longer than a few weeks. So how is that humans can store memories for 50 years?

It may be too much to demand that a brain emulation theorist provide the answer to how humans store memories for 50 years, but we should demand that he can at least provide some possible answer – at least some speculative scenario which, if it were true, would explain how humans can store memories for 50 years. If no such scenario can be provided, we should not believe that you will ever be able to have robot minds that are copies of human minds.

The second requirement we should demand from our brain emulation theorist is an explanation of how such a mechanism for remembering 50-year-old memories could have naturally evolved (seeing that such a “humans will be replaced” thinker is presumably not someone who thinks some higher power had a role in human origins). This is a huge challenge, for while such a theorist may be tempted to imagine some very complicated scheme by which memories might be stored in the brain for 50 years, such a scheme will not be a plausible natural explanation unless it is something that might have naturally appeared through evolution. Here there is the huge difficulty that we cannot think of any reason why natural selection would give us memories lasting longer than a year or two. Primates could survive just as well if they only remembered memories going back a year or two.

The third requirement we should demand from our brain emulation theorist is some explanation that dismisses all of the evidence for human psychic abilities such as ESP and human survival after death. If such evidence is valid, then “your mind is your brain” assumptions are dead wrong. We have no way of explaining something like ESP as a function of the human brain, although it could be a sign of something like a human soul. If experiences such as near-death experiences are real, then we presumably have some kind of soul that survives death. But the brain emulation theorist cannot admit such possibilities.

Since such a theorist wishes to maintain that your mind is stored entirely in your brain (and not at all in any type of soul separate from the brain), such a theorist must somehow clear from the table all of the great deal of evidence that has been accumulated suggesting that there is a soul as well as paranormal psychic abilities. So our brain emulation theorist would have to somehow accomplish the long, difficult task of explaining why very many things that seem to be good evidence are not really evidence. I presume that would require at least a long chapter in a book.

As if all this is not hard enough, there is still a fourth requirement that our brain emulation theorist must accomplish before we should take seriously the claim that human minds could be copied to robot minds. The theorist must give a plausible explanation for how it could be that all the information in a human mind might be copied to a robot mind without destroying most or much of the information in the human mind.

There are good reasons for believing that even if your mind was entirely stored in your brain, it would be physically impossible to read the state of a mind in a way that would allow some robot mind to copy the contents of that mind. While things such as fMRI scanners can make large-scale maps of the brain, there is no type of external scanner that would allow us to know the exact molecular and electrical state of microscopic neurons. While we can imagine some tiny molecule-sized probe that could be injected into a brain and then read the state of one neuron, such a probe could never store more than a tiny bit of information. It would not work to simply inject millions of microscopic probes into someone's brain, for such probes would have no way of figuring out the exact positional coordinates of the neurons they were analyzing.

You might think that it is possible to do a destructive scan of the brain to determine its exact contents. We can imagine some machine that is something like a turkey slicer. First it would slice off one little slice of the brain, and then analyze that like a copy machine reading a document. Then the next little slice would be done, and so forth. But that would not work, for the very act of making these thin slices would disrupt any delicate information storage in the brain that was preserving memories.

To present a plausible scenario for robots emulating human minds, our brain emulation theorist would need to explain how this brain scanning would work, as well as do the three other items I mentioned. Hanson doesn't do anything like meeting the requirements I have mentioned.

Hanson does nothing to substantiate his claim that the mind is just the brain. Hanson's failure in considering the difficulties here are shown by page 148 of his book, where he says this about brain scans that would give human minds to robots: “The very first scans might perhaps be performed on cryonics customers, that is, people who had previously had their brains frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen, in the hope of being revived when technology improved, and who had agreed to allow em scanning later.” Determining the exact state of a brain that had just died would be a nightmare enough. Add brain freezing (with all of its resulting cell damage) to the mix, and the problem becomes 100 times worse. Hanson informs us that he is one of only 2000 living people who have arranged to be cryogenically frozen upon death.

The cryogenics fantasy (represented by the slogan “freeze, wait, reanimate”) was implausible enough. Apparently Hanson believes in an even wackier notion – freeze your brain, stay in cold storage for a few decades, then wait until someone copies your brain state into a robot.  What convenience – after that fatal car crash, you wake up 40 years later with a nice steel robot body! 

 

There are countless feasibility problems in the idea of copying human minds into robots, problems that Hanson has not paid attention to. The central assumption behind the idea is wrong. Your mind is not your brain, but something more than your brain. This is indicated both by well-substantiated psychic phenomena (such as ESP and near-death experiences), and also by the spectacular inability of neuroscience to explain basic facets of our mind such as consciousness, instant memory retrieval of obscure memories, and memories lasting 50 years despite very rapid molecular turnover in the brain (see here and here for why it is hard to imagine the last two will ever be explained neurologically). So Hanson's very elaborate speculations about what would happen if the world became full of “em” robots (with minds copied from human brains) are no more relevant than some speculations of what would happen if unicorns were to take charge of the planet.

Models of the Future the One Percent Want You to Believe

In the United States we are facing an increasing shrinkage of the middle class, as the top one-percent gobble up more and more of the nation's wealth. Imagine you are one of the lucky super-rich, trying to greedily hoard a larger and larger slice of the nation's wealth, to the detriment of more and more people who are struggling to just get by. What would your strategy be? One strategy might be to distract people with meaningless elements of popular culture, so that the average person paid more attention to gossip, celebrities, and fleeting fads and fancies than their dashed economic hopes. Another strategy might be to make people think that their votes will reverse the decline of the middle class, while helping to make sure that both of the candidates in the next election are loyal servants of the wealthiest elites. Then there is the strategy we saw in 2008 of declaring a “sky is falling” financial emergency, claiming that it can only be averted by shoveling trillions to the wealthiest corporations.

But the best strategy might be: make people think that their future is bright (regardless of the economic reality), by feeding them rosy technological progress scenarios. Below is a discussion of three of these scenarios, along with a discussion of why America's wealthiest would like you to believe them.

Model 1: The Singularity

The idea behind the Singularity is that before long there will be an “intelligence explosion” in which machines become super-intelligent. Singularity enthusiasts have said that this will involve all kinds of astounding things such as men merging with machines or digital immortality involving people uploading their minds into computers.

The conversation below helps to illustrate the value that such a scenario may have as a kind of opiate to soothe the anger of those who have to settle for crumbs while the richest gorge on ever more extravagant feasts.

James: I got out of college with a ton of debt, and could only find a job paying much less than I thought I'd get. To cover costs and the high rents, I had to charge lots of money on my credit card. I'm paying insane interest charges on my card, plus there's all those college loans to pay off. All my debt is killing me. And what kind of future can I look forward to? I'm just scraping by, so how can I ever save enough to retire? At this rate, I'll have to be running on the corporate hamster wheel until I'm 90 years old.

John: Don't worry about it! In another 25 years we'll all be uploading our minds into supercomputers. Who cares about what kind of house you'll have 25 years from now? By then we'll be spending all our time roaming around in ultra-realistic virtual worlds generated by super-intelligent computers. And think of how rich you'll get in a few decades, after you triple your intelligence by using brain nanobots!

We see the value of the Singularity concept as a kind of glistening “castle in the air” to plant in the minds of the economically damaged, to get them to overlook their diminishing prospects, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The Singularity also comes in handy if a person complains about government officials being virtually owned by the wealthiest one percent. Such a person can be told: why even worry about government when super-intelligent machines are soon going to take over the world? 

The average man's paycheck, also known as "chump change"

Model 2: Radical abundance

The concept of radical abundance is that before too long things like homes, cars, and consumer goods will all become super-cheap and super-abundant, because of breakthroughs in nanotechnology. The idea has been advanced in a book by nanotechnology expert K. Eric Drexler.

The conversation below helps to illustrate the value that such a scenario may have as a kind of opiate to soothe the anger of those who get a raw deal in today's world, as the super-rich grab a larger and larger share of the national wealth.

Jane: How the hell is someone supposed to afford a house in this city? I've been working my butt off 60 hours a week at my crummy sweatshop of an office, and I'm still struggling to make the rent. How come all the white men have no trouble getting promotions, but not me?

John: Don't worry about it! Just wait a decade or two until we have precise molecular manufacturing and other wonders of nanotechnology. Nanobots will then be able to assemble you a new home or a new car almost instantaneously, using the raw materials in rocks and trash you gather. It will be an age of plenty, in which every man and woman lives like a billionaire!

Get the idea? The name of the game is: pie in the sky. It used to be that religion was the main source of promises of future bliss (commonly called “pie in the sky.”) Now it seems like the main ideas of “pie in the sky” are technological projections offered by futurist visionaries.

While they grab up a larger and larger share of the world's wealth, the super-rich would like you to believe that radical abundance is around the corner. That way you won't be upset about your ever-shrinking slice of the pie. They hope you won't look at studies involving oil, water, and metals suggesting that there is strong reason to fear an eventual “age of shortages” rather than an age of radical abundance.

Model 3: Extraterrestrial Exodus

The concept of extraterrestrial exodus is basically the idea that our planet is getting worse and worse, so we need to flee to elsewhere in space – perhaps to giant space colonies orbiting the earth, or perhaps to the planet Mars.

The conversation below helps to illustrate why a very rich person might want you to embrace such an idea.

Todd: I'm so upset about the way the big corporations are harming our environment, plundering the land for energy and often leaving behind a landscape that resembles a desolate moonscape. But what really gets me is how we're letting global warming get worse and worse.

John: Such environmental concerns are so outdated. Within a few decades, the best and brightest will shake off this crummy planet like a man might shake off the dust on his shoes. The grand space exodus will begin. Mankind will leave its planetary cradle, and people will head out into space to seek fame and fortune, just like the covered wagons left for the California gold rush.

Such an idea is very convenient for a billionaire who wishes to live like a king, with a total carbon footprint of 5000 Africans. He can tell himself that his carbon footprint really doesn't matter too much, since planet Earth is just mankind's “old home” rather than his “new home” in outer space or Mars or some planet revolving around another star. The same person can tell himself that it doesn't matter too much if the corporation he invests in is turning some lovely natural area into an ugly wasteland, on the grounds that our descendants or grandchildren will be born in outer space, far away from the toxic sludge left behind by the company.

Fight for social justice and your fair share of the pie, and do not be tranquilized by enchanting tales of future fortunes that may be told to keep you pacified while your future is being stolen, your planet is plundered, and you are slowly turned into a modern day serf.

The Pink Wall May Block the Superintelligence Singularity

Ray Kurzweil has advanced a very popular theory that the Singularity is near – a time where there will be an explosive growth in machine intelligence, one that sees computers and robots becoming far smarter than humans. To back up this theory, Kurzweil and his supporters typically show graphs showing exponential growth in the power and speed of computer hardware and computer memory.

But in order for you to have anything like machine superintelligence, we would need to see more than just computer hardware increasing by orders of magnitude (factors such as 100, 1000 or 10,000). We would also need to see computer software making similar strides. If today someone were to create a computer with a million times the speed and memory of the human mind, that computer would not be even as intelligent as a mouse. For such a computer to become even as intelligent as a mouse, you need strides in computer software on the same scale as the strides in computer hardware.

One problem is that computer software is not advancing at anything like the rate of progress of computer hardware. Computer software is progressing at a relatively slow rate, an issue I discussed in this blog post. Computer software is not progressing at anything like an exponential rate. The basic process of software development today is not fundamentally different from the process of software development in the 1990's – programmers slowly and laboriously grinding out code line by line. Code generators can create lots of code, but in a typical project most of the code still has to be created manually.

It would seem that we would need many centuries to complete the project of creating the software needed for a computer to be as smart as a human, assuming that most of it would have to be manually coded. But many singularity enthusiasts assume that we will have a gigantic shortcut – the ability to acquire much of this software by studying the human brain.

We can find an example of this type of thinking by looking at the Wikipedia.org page which summarizes Ray Kurzweil's predictions. In the predictions for the 2020's, we see this prediction:

Early in this decade, humanity will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence within a $1000 personal computer, followed shortly by effective software models of human intelligence toward the middle of the decade: this will be enabled through the continuing exponential growth of brain-scanning technology, which is doubling in bandwidth, temporal and spatial resolution every year, and will be greatly amplified with nanotechnology, allowing us to have a detailed understanding of all the regions of the human brain and to aid in developing human-level machine intelligence by the end of this decade.

The above description is imagining the mother of all shortcuts – the shortcut to end all shortcuts. The description imagines that we will be able to get the needed software for an intelligent machine by studying the operations of the human brain.

The problem is that there is little reason to assume that we will be able to do any such thing anytime in the next hundred years. Why? Because the mystery of how human consciousness and human memory work is one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, and nature does not give up its secrets easily.

Philosophers have long been troubled by what is called the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of how mind can be produced by matter, something that is fundamentally different. So far very little light has been cast on this problem. We do not understand how the brain stores memories, or how the brain produces thoughts. There is actually little hope that we will be able to solve this problem any time in our century.

You might get the wrong idea from studies that look at which parts of the brain have higher electrical activity when a particular brain operation occurs. Such studies merely show correlations, without throwing any light on how the mental activity is produced. Imagine a 3-year-old child studying a computer. Such a child may make some observations that lead him to conclude that a particular green light (at the front of a computer) blinks whenever some type of operation occurs, such as a file save. But that doesn't really move the child any closer to understanding the deep mysteries of how the computer is computing, and how its data is being saved. Similarly, MRI studies on electrical brain activity really don't take us very far in understanding the mysteries of how the brain works.

Although you hear about gray matter when people talk of brain cells, the human brain is actually a pinkish color. We may use the term the Pink Wall to refer to mysteries of the human brain which are blocking us from understanding its inner secrets. We want to pierce this Pink Wall, and make our way to the inner secrets of the brain. But the Pink Wall seems all but impenetrable. We have little hope of being able to get through it in the next several decades. 

The Pink Wall

The idea expressed in the italicized quotation above (that we can unravel the secrets of the human brain through brain-scanning) seems like wishful thinking. Imagine an extraterrestrial culture that had not learned the details of electromagnetism, had not learned about atoms or subatomic particles, and had not learned about quantum mechanics. Such a culture might think it could learn the fundamental mysteries of how matter is organized just by making scans of rocks with higher and higher resolutions. But such a thinking would be fallacious. It would seem to be just as fallacious to think that we can unravel the secrets of the human mind by scanning brain tissue in higher and higher resolutions.

Can we, for example, imagine a scientist of the future saying something like this?

I couldn't understand before how a neuron produces a thought, but now that I can view the neuron more closely with my new brain scanner, now I can see how the thought is produced.

Or can we imagine a scientist of the future saying something like this?

I couldn't understand before how a piece of brain tissue produces a thought, but now that I can view that tissue more closely with my new brain scanner, now I can see how the thought is produced.

We can't really imagine either of these things happening, because we can't imagine how anything that a scientist could see in a scanner could lead him to say, “Aha, there is a human thought being produced.”

It seems, therefore, that the Pink Wall will be blocking us for a long, long time. We will not have any time soon any brain-scanning shortcut that allows us to get the software for a silicon brain by borrowing it from the human brain. It seems that for a long time, the only option for getting the software for a silicon brain will be to build it through software development processes similar to those now in use. Such processes might take centuries before they could produce something like human consciousness.

So if you do not see the Singularity anytime in this century, blame it on the slow process of software development and the Pink Wall which blocks us from uncovering the sublime secrets of exactly how the brain works.

Dating in the Year 2030: Everything Will Be Different

Let us take a look at how dating may work in the not-too-distant future.

Geological eons ago, when I last participated in the dating scene, trying to find the right person for a relationship was hard, hard work. Circa 1990 a man might look for suitable dating partners through personal ads or dating services, and then contact a female by mail or phone (this was before email became popular). With luck he might then make a blind date for lunch with the female. Most of the time one or the other would end up disappointed, finding that the other person was in some major way unsuitable. It was just as hard work back in those days trying to work the bar scene or disco scene. You might have to approach someone you knew nothing about, and strike up a conversation, without any basis for a starting point (such as some knowledge about the person's job, likes, or background). It was no surprise that starter lines such as “Do you come here often?” were very popular. I never quite got the hang of those.

I am not familiar with the dating scene of the year 2014, but my guess is that it's not much easier. But around the year 2030, dating may be vastly easier.

This may be because of two different technologies: augmented reality technology and facial recognition technology. In the year 2030 the average man “on the prowl” may either wear augmented reality glasses or wear augmented reality contact lenses. When such a man looks through his glasses, he will see all kinds of popup text that identifies or describes the things that he sees.

Such a man will probably also have access to a very sophisticated facial recognition software service, capable of recognizing individuals from their facial features. The man might have to pay for such a service, or he might possibly get it for free (at the price of having to put up with many pop-up ads that appear on his augmented reality glasses).

So when the man goes looking for someone to date, he will merely have to put on his augmented reality glasses, and watch people walk by. The glasses will identify people, using the facial recognition technology. The glasses will also give some information that will make it easy for the man to start a conversation.

Below is a depiction of how things might look for a person wearing such glasses. The man might see Sarah Davis, and have her identified by his glasses. He might then say, “Hey, Sarah. How's that gene designer job going?” No need to use a cheesy all-purpose pickup line. 

 

How augmented reality glasses might look to a wearer

The software service may also provide a desirability rating from one star to four stars. The service might also estimate what the man's chances are of establishing a relationship with the identified individual. This might be calculated based partially on the identified individual's education, physical attractiveness, relationship status, and estimated income level, and also the education, income level, and physical attractiveness of the person wearing the glasses.

If you were a young, well-educated, highly paid, good looking person, you might look through such glasses and typically see a “relationship chance” figure such as 70% or 80%. But if you were an ugly high-school dropout working as a street sweeper, you might look through such glasses and never see a “relationship chance” higher than 5%.

Now imagine you started up a conversation with attractive young prospect Sarah Davis. Sarah might start talking about her job as a gene designer. She might start using technical terms such as DNA. How would you make yourself seem like someone who knows something about these complicated topics? If you ask Sarah “What is DNA?” she'll think you're an airhead. But you would have nothing to worry about. You would rely on your augmented reality glasses. You would switch on a “listen” mode. In this mode, the glasses listen to nearby words, and then give you a popup that gives you a little information about the words it recognizes. So when Sarah refers to DNA, you see on your augmented reality glasses a little popup telling you what DNA is. You can then say something that makes it sound as if you know something about what Sarah is talking about. Sarah is then impressed by your knowledge. 

 

But suppose you start dating lovely young Sarah, and then she dumps you, rejecting you in favor of some more suitable partner. No technology we can imagine will immunize you from this age-old danger. But technology will give you ways of softening the blow.

The first way of softening the blow might be for you to download a photo of Sarah into your favorite virtual reality software. The software will then adapt so that instead of being able to have virtual reality dates in glamorous locations with a virtual Marilyn Monroe, you will instead be able to have glamorous virtual reality dates with someone who looks just like Sarah.

The second way of softening the blow might be for you to download a photo of Sarah into the software of your home 3D printer. You might then be able to print out a soft, squeezable life-sized likeness of Sarah you can cavort with – or perhaps a 3D robot that looks just like Sarah.

The third way of softening the blow might be to play with the interface of your augmented reality glasses. You could instruct the software of the glasses to superimpose the face of Sarah over the face of your next girlfriend. You might then start dating some average-looking woman who is not as lovely as Sarah. But due to the wonders of augmented reality technology, whenever you looked at such a woman through your augmented reality glasses, she would look just like Sarah.

Will You Experience Godlike Virtual Psychokinesis?

Imagine walking through a world in which you can control things with your mind. If you come to a closed door, you need merely think to yourself: open. Then the door will open. If you are attacked by someone charging you with a knife, you need merely think to yourself: burn. Then the assailant trying to kill you will catch on fire. Or if you are walking along and need a car, you need merely think to yourself: car, and a car will appear.

You may actually experience such a world in your lifetime, but it won't be real life. It will be virtual reality. But it may be so realistic it will seem just like real life, except for your godlike powers. In such a world you may have an ability to make some things happen just by thinking of them. In this virtual world you may feel like a god who can alter reality just by willing something.

Such a thing may be possible because virtual reality technology may be merged with mind-reading technology. The term “mind-reading technology” is somewhat misleading. It would probably be better to call such a technology “thought correlation technology.” The way it works is that the brain is scanned for some distinctive electrical pattern that corresponds to a particular thought. For example, scientists might get a hundred people to think of a dog, and try to look for a distinctive electrical pattern observed when people are thinking that thought. The scientists might then get a hundred people to think of a book, and try to look for a distinctive electrical pattern observed when people are thinking that thought. With sufficient practice, scientists might then be able to look at the electrical activity in someone's brain at a particular moment, and then guess whether the person was thinking of a dog or a book. 

Scientists have already made significant progress at such a task, as indicated by this link Mind-Reading Technology Speeds Ahead.  

If a great deal of progress is made in such technology, the creators of virtual reality worlds might be able to integrate mind-reading technology into their systems. The result might be a virtual reality system that requires two pieces of equipment. You would put on virtual reality glasses over your eyes. You would then put on some type of electrode cap over your head. The electrode cap would handle the mind-reading.

You would then enter a virtual world, in which you would be like the psychokinetic lead character in the movie Carrie, who can control matter just by willing it to move or burn. We can use the term virtual psychokinesis for such a system, in which you could alter a video game world just by thinking of things.

The ideal implementation of such a virtual reality system would be one in which you could think almost any thought, and it would materialize within the virtual reality world. For example, you might randomly think of Marilyn Monroe, and then, poof, you would see Marilyn Monroe within the video world, as a moving, talking 3D character. But the technology for a system that sophisticated is probably many centuries away. For one thing, we are unlikely to have anything like a general mind-reading system capable of recognizing almost any thought. The best we can hope for is a far cruder technology that simply consists of a few hundred cases (or a few thousand cases) in which we know what brain activity looks like when someone is thinking of a particular thing. For another thing, even if we could recognize almost any thought, it would be too hard to program a virtual world in which almost any thing could be brought into existence by your thoughts.

But developers could still create an exciting virtual reality system that recognized only a small number of thoughts. A user might be advised of a certain limited number of thoughts that the system can accept. For example, an instruction booklet might say, “If you want to destroy an attacker, think of fire or think of the opponent being instantly frozen.” Or the booklet might say, “If you need transportation in the virtual world, think of a car or think of a horse.”

Some might think that introducing such a feature might make the virtual world seem less realistic, but it might not be worse than some things in current video games. For example, let's take the popular video game Red Dead Redemption, in which you become a cowboy in the old West. In that game every time you want to switch from a lasso to a gun, you have to click a button, go to a menu, and choose one of the two items from the menu. That almost spoils the fun by reminding you: this is just a video game. If you had a virtual reality system in which you do things just by thinking about them, you wouldn't have this problem. There wouldn't be any pop-up interface to remind you: this isn't real life.

Let's imagine how you might feel in such a virtual world, in which you can make things happen just by thinking particular thoughts. You might feel like some kind of deity. You might say to yourself: I am the one lord of this domain. I can destroy my opponents merely by thinking of how they should be destroyed. I can make matter change its appearance merely by willing that it change its appearance in some way. Like a deity, I can bring into existence new objects merely by thinking that they should exist. This truly is godhood. I can perform stunning miracles solely through the awesome power of my mighty mind.

And then, when your virtual reality session ended, you would take off your goggles, and go back to your meek little existence as a subservient corporate serf.

The Downside of Gradual Brain Replacement

Futurists have advanced three scenarios for immortality. The first possibility is protoplasmic immortality, which is basically what we imagine when we think of the possibility of a youth pill. The second possibility is uploading your mind into a computer or robot. This would presumably involve the destruction of a person's brain while every neuron and connection in it was being scanned, in order for the person's consciousness to be recreated electronically. But there is a big problem with this possibility. If you destroy someone's brain to determine its exact state, and then reproduce that state electronically, it would seem that this is really just a making a copy of someone's consciousness, rather than really preserving it and continuing it. It would seem that the regular human would actually die when such a scanning was done, and that the new electronic consciousness would really be a newly created person rather than the continuation of a previous life.

But there is a third possibility that might seem to offer more hope. This is the possibility of gradual brain replacement. Under this scenario a person might gradually have his regular human neurons (the cells in his brain) replaced with electronic units, perhaps some kind of artificial neuron. This process would avoid the sudden and abrupt transition that might come from an “all at once” mind uploading.

For example, every week during twenty consecutive weeks, a person might have one twentieth of his neurons replaced with electronic units. Since the electronic units might take up less space, there might at the end of this process be enough room in the skull to allow the person to eventually have an entirely electronic brain with a number of artificial neurons twice as great (or perhaps even ten times as great) as the number of neurons in the average human brain.

After the process was finished, the person might be much smarter. Another advantage is that he might then have a brain capable of lasting for centuries. The next steps might be replacing the other vital organs with electronic substitutes. The person might then gradually transition from a mortal body of flesh and blood to a potentially immortal body of silicon, plastic, and steel.

Those who imagine such a scenario suppose that as a person's brain was gradually replaced, the new electronic parts would be seamlessly integrated with the old parts of the brain, the parts made of flesh and blood. But getting the two parts to mesh together seamlessly might be enormously difficult.

There is a horrible possibility that few have considered. It might be that when you had some of your brain replaced with electronic parts, those parts would tend not to link with the old flesh and blood parts of your brain, but would instead tend to link together to form a second consciousness or personality in your brain. Gradual brain replacement might be a ticket to a split personality.

In such a case we can imagine a person with basically two brains in his skull – the old brain consisting of flesh and blood neurons, and the new brain consisting of electronic components. The two brains might vie for control over the muscles and limbs below the neck.

So with gradual brain replacement there would therefore be a chance for a new type of Jekyll and Hyde scenario. I can imagine future legal defenses like this: I didn't kill my wife; the electronic part of my brain did it.

Another terrifying possibility is that as you underwent gradual brain replacement, rather than feeling that your brain was getting smarter, you might feel that your brain was getting weaker, and that you were losing control over your body, as some foreign electronic consciousness in your skull took control of your body. This is exactly what could happen if more and more of your natural neurons were replaced with artificial neurons, and those neurons failed to seamlessly integrate with the rest of your neurons, forming instead a second consciousness or personality inside your skull. It would be like you were Personality X, and the new electronic neurons were forming Personality Y. As Personality Y got stronger and stronger, and smarter and smarter, your personality (Personality X) might get weaker and weaker and stupider and stupider.

An analogy is that when immigrants from very different lands are introduced into our society, we hope they will assimilate gracefully, becoming like the existing inhabitants and working well with them. But sometimes immigrants fail to do that, and instead form their own society with its own agenda (for example, La Cosa Nostra). Something like that could happen in your brain if you replaced part of your neurons with artificial units.

Someone might argue that things could not get too out of hand, because in a scenario I have imagined you could always alert the doctors that something had gone wrong. But maybe by then you wouldn't be in the driver's seat of your body – maybe your dwindling consciousness would be like someone stuffed in the back trunk (with the electronic part of your brain in the driver's seat).

Perhaps the best way to illustrate such a danger is through a science fiction story. Below is a tale of a man who underwent gradual brain replacement, and lived to regret it.

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Gradual Brain Replacement: A Science Fiction Story
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So here I am, unable to see anything, unable to hear anything, unable to smell anything, unable to move a muscle, and unable to feel anything. I have only a week left to live – I mean the real me, not that electronic thing that took over my brain – so I might as well review (in what's left of my mind) the whole horrible story.

In the year 2051 when people started doing that new thing called mind uploading, I knew it wasn't for me. Mind uploading was that deal where they destructively scan your brain, and supposedly transfer all your memories to the computer inside a robot body. Sure there were cases where a person had his mind uploaded into a robot body, and then the robot came to life and starting saying, “I'm the same John Smith who used to have a flesh and blood body, so bury the ruined protoplasmic body of the old John Smith.” But how can you be sure that in those cases John Smith didn't really die, just to be replaced by a new electronic person, who got some of John's memories? You can't. So I wanted to try something different: gradual brain replacement. I figured that was safer, that it would preserve the real me.

Gradual brain replacement works like this: bit by bit, over a period of a few months, they gradually replace all the neurons in your brain with electronic artificial neurons. The 3D TV commercials promise that this preserves the real you, and that nothing can go wrong, because if you notice something wrong at some point in the gradual process, you can just tell the doctors to stop doing anything more.

When I went into the doctor's office, he told me I had made a smart decision, and that everything would go fine.

“Gradual brain replacement is the way to go,” said Dr. Preston. “You'll be able to think a lot faster once the operations are done, and you'll be able to remember a lot more. Plus there's the fact that it's basically the first step to immortality. Once you don't have to worry about your brain wearing out, you can later get your other organs replaced, and plan on living for hundreds of years.”

So I told Dr. Preston to get started with the first operation. When I woke up after the operation, my mind seemed pretty much like it was before. Dr. Preston told me it would be a while before I noticed anything different. Then I left the hospital.

When I was walking into the parking lot, I noticed something very strange. The fingers on my right hand seemed to be moving all by themselves, even though I wasn't willing them to move.

The next day I opened the door to the refrigerator, and started reaching for an apple with my left hand. Then all of a sudden my right hand started reaching for a juice bottle. But I hadn't willed for my hand to reach for that juice bottle. It had somehow happened all by itself.

Then later while talking to my wife, I started saying words that came out of nowhere. I hadn't willed my lips to say the words. It was as if my lips were speaking all by themselves.

I sat down to think about what was happening. There was only one explanation. The new electronic neurons they had put in my head were somehow acting as an independent mind. The new electronic neurons hadn't integrated with the old biological neurons in my brain. Instead of there being a single enhanced mind inside my brain, there were now two minds inside my brain: my old mind, and a new electronic mind. And the two of them were in conflict. They weren't on the same page. I had no idea what the new electronic mind was thinking.

I tried to call Dr. Preston to tell him about the problem. But every time I picked up the phone and tried to dial with my left hand, my right hand grabbed the phone and threw it to the floor. So I simply decided that I would wait for my upcoming appointment with Dr. Preston at the hospital, and I would tell him the whole story at that time.

Over the next few days I found myself hearing my lips saying more and more things I hadn't told my lips to say. I also felt my hands doing more and more things I hadn't willed them to do. These were the actions of my new electronic neurons that had formed their own independent mind. I had no idea what that mind was thinking.

Finally the day of my appointment arrived. I waited in Dr. Preston's office. He came in and asked me: “So do you want us to proceed with the next operation, the next phase in the gradual brain replacement?”

I willed myself with all my might to say: “No.” But the words that came out of my lips were: “Yes.” The new electronic mind inside my brain had got the upper hand, and was becoming more and more dominant.

There was still one thing I could do. I still had control of my left hand. So I made my fingers into a “Thumbs down” gesture, trying to say “No” in the only way I could.

But Dr. Preston didn't notice. He took me over to a room in the hospital where they started to prepare me for the next operation. I tried to scream as hard as I could, but my lips were no longer in my control. They put me under anesthesia. The operation was going to replace even more of my biological neurons with new electronic neurons.

When I woke up, I found I no longer had any control over my lips or my eyes or my hands or my feet. It wasn't like I was paralyzed. I moved around and talked. But it wasn't me controlling the movements and controlling what my lips said. It was the new electronic mind in my brain. That mind was now completely in charge of all of my speech and movements. It was like I had been shoved to the back seat of my body, and the new electronic mind was in the driver's seat. All I could do was enjoy the ride.

Dr. Preston thought the operation had gone flawlessly. He saw me moving around okay, and speaking intelligently. But it wasn't me speaking and moving – it was that damned new electronic mind.

For two weeks I lived a life of passive observation. I could still see my body moving around and talking and meeting people. I just had not one bit of control over what my body did. It was just like passively watching television.

Then my body arrived back at the hospital, for one more operation in the gradual brain replacement operation. I was put under anesthesia. When I awoke, I was horrified. I could no longer see anything. I could no longer feel anything. I could no longer hear anything. I could no longer smell anything.

All I could do was make a deduction. The latest operation must have given exclusive use of my senses to the new electronic mind in my brain, which must now be using up a larger fraction of my brain. That's why I can no longer see or hear or smell or feel.

I also find my memory fading. I can no longer remember where I was born, or what land I live in, or what planet I live on, or who my parents or children are. The new electronic mind must be using up more and more of my memory.

Almost the only thing I can remember is that the final operation in the gradual brain replacement process will take place next week. By then my skull will contain an entirely electronic brain. The only problem is, it won't be my mind. It will be the mind of some weird new electronic thing. The real me will die as soon as my last biological neuron is replaced.

Why did I ever sign up for that gradual brain replacement?

8 Ways We May Be Regarded by Future Generations

How will the current generation of humans be regarded by future generations? Let us consider a full spectrum of possibilities.

They may view us as sluggish airheads

Before long parents may be able to take advantage of gene-splicing and genetic enhancements that can enhance the human mind. If such techniques are used over enough generations, we may see the evolution of a much smarter human race. Einsteins may be as common then as texting teenagers are today, and there may also be many super-Einsteins.

If this happens, future generations may look back at our generation and regard us as slow-paced dolts. They may ask themselves: how did these airheads ever manage to invent the Internet? They may also regard it as a major miracle if our generation somehow manages to avoid blowing itself up or destroying itself through technological or environmental folly.

They may view us as geniuses

Suppose, on the other hand, that there is no such great blossoming of human intelligence. Suppose that we merely see continued progress in automation and computers. It could be that the teaching of mathematics is dropped from elementary and high schools, or limited to be only a subject taught only to very enthusiastic learners who request it. This outcome is all too plausible. One can imagine parents saying, “Why are you torturing my child with algebra when Google will solve almost any math problem for you instantly for free?” The same thing could happen with computer programming courses: they could be dropped if we ever figure out how to make computers that can program better than humans.

In such a case it could be that the human brain gets a little soft and spoiled from not having to work so hard. The average human IQ might actually drop a little bit, and it could happen that some future generation regards us as the geniuses. In the year 2150 people might say, “I can't believe how brilliant people were back around 2015 – they actually had to learn geometry and trigonometry all by themselves.”

They may view us as disgusting savages

We regard the people who lived five thousand years ago with a certain level of disdain. We might refer to such people as barbarians or savages. They may have had a certain degree of civilization, we think, but they weren't really civilized.

But that's exactly how people living in the future may regard us. In the future, all people might be vegetarians who regard meat-eating with disgust. Such people might look back on us and say to themselves, “I can't believe people actually ate their fellow mammals back in those primitive days.”

Future man may also abolish war. If war is ever abolished, future generations will look back at all the wars fought in the past 100 years, and regard the humans between 1913 and 2013 as bloodthirsty savages. One can only imagine the history books of the future: “Before man became truly civilized, he engaged in the fruitless fratricide known as war.”

They may view us as zombies

In his sprawling online manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative, the philosopher and futurist David Pearce has imagined a future in which humans experience super-lives filled with super-pleasure, based on chemical and brain enhancements which dramatically improve our well-being and the richness of our emotions, as well as our capacities for appreciation. Pearce rhapsodizes here about the possibilities:

(S)he might then hear, and have the chance to play, music more exhilarating and numinously beautiful than his or her ancestors ever dreamed of; the celestial music of the spheres heard by privileged medieval mystics will be as a child's toy tin-whistle in comparison.... Erotic pleasure of an intoxicating intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers.....A painter or connoisseur of the visual arts will be able to behold the secular equivalent of the beatific vision in a million different guises, each of indescribable glory....States of divine happiness orders of magnitude more beautiful than anything the contemporary mind can access will pervade the very fabric of reality in generations to come. Even the most virile of imaginations can apprehend in only the barest and formal sense the ravishing splendour that lies ahead.

Imagine if something like this comes to pass, and most humans get drastically enhanced emotional capabilities. They might know not just love but Super Love, not just joy but Super Joy. Such humans may regard our generation as a race that can barely even feel anything. They may regard us as kind of zombies, vacantly stumbling through life without any real appreciation of things.

They may view us as lucky ducks

If things go bad future generations may regard our generation as the most fortunate of all generations. There are many possible scenarios for how things might go bad: we might run very low on oil; we might suffer the effects of a nuclear holocaust; we might lose all our electricity in an electromagnetic pulse event (caused by a nuclear bomb in the high atmosphere or a very bad solar flare); we might suffer an economic collapse like the one that almost occurred around 2008.

If any of these things happen, future generations may regard us as people who were living in a kind of golden age. They may look back on us and say: “Those people in the early 21^st century – they had it made in the shade. Plenty of energy, a moderate climate, electricity available to anyone, free internet downloads –no generation ever had it so good.”

They may view us as slaves

In the future automation and robots may lead man to an Age of Leisure. The four day work week? Instead it may be a three day work week or a two day work week, and quitting time may be at noon. Or instead of a single weekly Day of Rest as in the nineteenth century, there may be a single weekly Day of Work. It's possible that almost all work will be assigned to robots and machines.

If that happens, future generations may look back on our generation and think of us as corporate slaves. They will read about our work habits: working at least 40 hours a week, and often as many as sixty, as well as working fifty weeks a year, from age 22 until age 65. They may regard us with the same kind of pity that we feel thinking about the cotton picking slaves of the Old South.

They may view us as saints

In the future social mores may change. Monogamy may be regarded as an outdated relic of the past. The average citizen may have multiple spouses, or may engage in sexually promiscuous swinging behavior, cavorting with multiple sexual partners at the same time, including both human partners and robot partners. In addition, there may be a legalization of many drugs that are now prohibited.

If this happens, future generations may look back at our largely monogamous and hard working generation, and regard us as being saintly paragons of virtue. They may ask themselves: how did that generation ever keep trudging so tirelessly down the straight and narrow path?

They may view us as selfish narcissists

Another possibility is that future generations may look back on us as self-centered egomaniacs. They may look at how we let global warming get worse and worse, while we were busy engaging in environmentally destructive conspicuous consumption, largely so that we could add another “look what I bought!” Facebook update to make a fleeting impression on our social network friends. They may look back at how we spent much more time posting online pictures of ourselves than we spent worrying about how to stop environmental decay that led to the extinction of countless species. They may then regard us as the “me first, Earth last” generation.

A narcissist's favorite painting