Saturday, August 30, 2003

I have been on the Mind Uploading Research Group mailing list for a few years. They are trying to do some pretty interesting stuff with the simplest member of the animal kingdom, caenorhabditis elegans. They seek to emulate or "upload" into computers the nervous system of these tiny nematodes, which have only 302 neurons and 95 muscle cells (the whole animal has 959 cells).

By accomplishing this, the hope is that techniques learned in this study will be used with larger and more complex animals (insects, salamanders, mice, and so on); eventually the family pet could be uploaded in old age and its computer brain installed in a new robotic body.

The obvious conclusion of this whole process is the uploading of a human being. When that occurs, the result will be a human-level artificial intelligence with a lifetime of experience. Whether that intelligence is the same person, something more, something less, or something else altogether is open to debate.

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