MSP110 [] The Mind’s Eye: Cloud Consciousness

This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jassan Dood together with CulturePop's M.A.M.T.A.M.T. It looks like MSP is going to have a new obsession for 2020, living forever. No great surprises all the time at M.A.M.T.A.M.T.

Needs increasing amounts of technology to keep his heart and lungs inflating. So, Matt, are you suddenly feeling your age? Hey, Jeff, no, I'm not, I just find all this stuff about anti-aging technology and eternal life really interesting. And it's the obsession that other people have with it that's fine, especially very rich people.

I'm not going to let it become an obsession, but I do want to talk about a fair bit of this anti-aging tech this year. When we talked about CES on the show last week, you said there was a whole hanger devoted to health technology. And a lot of that technology is actually about prolonging your life, because when you improve your health, you kind of de facto improve your life span. So, the more we do this, the longer we live.

And there are already estimations that the average 15 or 20-year-old today. If they lived a natural life span, there's no climate disaster or anything else in the way. They could effectively live naturally for maybe 100 years. And you have a problem with that?

Well, no, obviously not. But how are problems that you know, I'm just jealous. You know, there are problems and limitations with the science and technology, or rather that the science and technology will have to solve. So, the longer we live, the more chance of some mutations, so of course, a currency of diseases like cancer.

Gene tech and gene editing may help to mitigate that more thoroughly than looking for the cure for cancer or whatever, you know, just simply editing out so it doesn't occur in the first place. But what do you do with organs and joints and limbs that don't work anymore? What do you do about degenerative brain diseases? So, I think for people to live to that 100 years, there's still going to need to be a lot of intervention taking place to routine the extender lives to that kind of extent.

And those technology are within our grass? Well, yeah, weirdly, we are getting there. We've seen, especially over the last sort of three or four years, huge advances in anti-aging technology. But we also forget that the knowledge about the way our bodies function, just in general, is a lot more recent than a lot of people assume.

You know, it's a bit like not knowing if the Apollo moonlanders would sink on the moon's surface, which is why the Apollo missions had those big feet, because they didn't know if the surface of the moon would support the weight of the lambda. And oddly enough, I was listening to a really great audiobook over the weekend. It's called What Seems to Be the Problem with Adam Kay and Mark Watson. It's kind of an extended comedy podcast about medical history.

But from that, I got a lot of really useful information. You know, even sort of 300 years ago, we still totally misunderstood how our bodies worked. General medical opinion was that, for example, the heart warmed the body. And what did the lungs do?

Who knows? I mean, they could have been a place for maturing cheese or maybe somewhere you put a brace of pheasant to age. You know, even though you could follow, you know, the literal wires of what happened in our bodies. And, you know, we've been very active in cutting up bodies and following those wires for thousands of years.

People still got it horribly wrong. You know, like I said, even a few hundred years ago, we had it all back to front. We were still basing a lot of our medical knowledge on the findings of Greek philosophers and writers of the first and second centuries people like a guy called Galen. And they held it, it was imbalances in our essential humans that caused disease, you know, bile and blood and all of these things are just complete natural nonsense.

And for women, women were even worse off because most women's illnesses were essentially dismissed because of something they called the wandering womb. And I don't think I even want to ask. Well, you know, there are still a lot of problems with research into ways that drugs and treatments affect women. It's a current problem.

It's not just a historical problem. In the past, you know, medicine specifically targeting women were often exclusively trialled with male volunteers. You know, it didn't matter that these were problems for women, but it was thought that because women menstruated, they weren't good candidates for medical trials. It's completely nuts.

But in the past, yes, illnesses in women were dismissed as the movement of the womb. It was thought that when a woman wasn't pregnant, the womb was this empty thing that would literally wander around inside the body causing chaos. Jeff just shook his head because that is such a ridiculous thing to believe. You know, it's crazy to think that a doctor would treat heart problems in a woman as being caused by a wandering womb.

But that's where we were with medicine. And you don't think we're much further forward? Well, in terms of the health care for women, I think that's a discussion for another episode or possibly for a show not featuring two male hosts, unless we're taking the view that it's guys were educated on the educating rather on the very poor state of medicine for women. I mean, like the legislation that was passed last year in Ohio, that obliges doctors to re-implant ectopic pregnancies, even though there's no existing medical procedure that will allow them to do so.

And that doctors who fail to do so can actually face abortion murder charges. So you've got doctors having to do something that's impossible or be charged with murder and of course, inflict pain on the patient. So sadly, you know, women's health needs are not as well understood as men's and they tend to be a lot more politicised. But today, yes, we're not talking about that.

We are talking about immortality and virtuality. Rather than virtuosity. Well, last week I asked you if you thought that VR was finally coming of age from what you saw at CES. Yeah, I thought it was about time and it will be the year VR with, you know, we've got like 5G and all this stuff.

So yeah, definitely. One of the things that we do with VR, we tend to look at it as us going into the simulation that's projected by the virtual reality. We're still here in the visual world, the real world. But we're not looking at that today.

We're looking about that virtual simulation becoming your entire existence. Like human beings living inside that virtual world. Like this holodeck, living inside a holodeck. Well, yeah, you know, with Star Trek Picard just launched this week, I think the Star Trek references are going to keep coming on the show for the next few months as I'm going to get more obsessed with that.

But beyond that, you know, today we're talking about living forever, forever. So we're looking at the reality of a simulated existence where your consciousness is a part of the cloud and you continue your life literally on that server in that cloud. So if you had no body, no physical presence at all, would you be alive? Would you actually be a person?

Well, those are some of the interesting possibilities. I mean, we'll get more into that after the break, that more philosophical side. But I guess first things first, you know, is this actually practical technology? Well, obviously not as wise.

I know there's no thought or mind transfer and technology out there. No, nothing that we have at the moment. But plenty of people are actually working towards it. Among the better known of the human brain project, this is a massive European Union funded project that's looking into amazing areas of neuroscience research.

And it's actually using super computers to do it. So they're trying to digitally map the human brain. They're also trying to digitally map the mouse brain. So you can see we are a little bit behind with this.

They're trying to create simulations of the human brain. They're looking at the processing abilities of computers running these human brain simulations. So for example, that would be AI combined with human brains. So you'd have all of the processing power of an AI, but the reasoning power of an Albert Einstein.

And also neuro robotics using actual machines as well as virtual ones to test these brain simulations. I mean, I have to make a note to do a follow up show on neuro robotics. And of course, you know, we have to look at the ethical and social impacts of this kind of technology. I imagine the ethics part is pretty important.

Well, yeah, unfortunately, I'm not the only person looking into it, fortunately for world. Oxford University's future of humanity Institute is also looking at the ethics of uploading the human mind. We'll get to that more after the break. But this kind of tech also makes it just as simple to mess with the brain and our memories.

People already feel the weight of living in this post-truth world. It's hard enough to discern truth in the information we receive minute to minute. How do you cope with the idea of truth if a third party can access and effectively replace, rewrite or delete your memories? It still seems that we're a long way from the reality.

Yeah, but there are a lot of deep pockets interested in this area of specialty. The EU project I mentioned is a 10-year long project. And it's pan-European. There's not a lot of money being poured into that.

Ray Kurzweil, Google's Director of Engineering, is actively looking for solutions to transfer human consciousness and prevent him from dying. He said publicly that he would like to achieve immortality using this kind of technology. And you know, there are plenty of Bond villain-style billionaires who fear nothing more than dying. Most of them are looking more into prolonging the life of their physical bodies.

But I don't think it will be long before they realize the limitations of that approach. And if you can house that cloud or uploaded consciousness in a robot or a synthetic life form of some sort, then you know, you really do start to be someone who lives forever. And these guys are going to start pouring money into solutions like that. So who knows, in 50 years time, Elon Musk's mind may be physically controlling every Tesla while his robot body dances across the surface of Mars.

Anyways, when we come back, the pitfalls of being a virtual human DFM, 89.9? Behind Famous Men. BFM, 89.9, the Business Station. And we're back at its MSP.

Before the break, we were talking about some of the advances and research projects that are looking into the consciousness mapping and brain simulations. While the technology is still a long way from being perfected, there is certainly plenty of interest from the research community and potentially deep-pocketed investor. So, Matt, if I wanted to live forever, is this the way to do it? Well, this is one way.

The model of life inside an AI or a cloud isn't actually a new one. Even as far as back as the 1920s, writers and thinkers were coming up with similar models. The Clockwork Man is a novel by a writer called Evie Odie. That was published in 1923.

And that had the idea of people living inside a Clockwork universe. Writers like William Gibson have made a career out of this. And there are lots of books that we'll actually get to in the geeks after the break, coincidentally. There's a really good dystopian sci-fi series, The Demimond, about the divide between simulations and reality by a writer called Rovary.

So you can also check out if you want to. All right. So it would be safe to see that there aren't a lot of people writing positively about this. For sure.

I mean, most of it does tend to be quite negative. Part of that is because it's not something we've done before. So it seems scary. It seems weird.

Very literally, we are attached to our bodies. There's no model or conception for consciousness having a separate existence. But you look at other advances. You look at the opposition that there was to stem cell research, for example.

A lot of people say, no, this will be the end of humanity. The end is nigh. But now some aspects of stem cell tech and treatments are mainstream and largely uncontroversial. And you think that once you've been uploaded to the cloud and you report that you're happy then it's all good?

Well, along those lines, I've rewatched the Matt Damon movie, Dan Sizing recently now. Obviously, this isn't a great example. But a lot of technologies promise us a new start. But like that movie shows, we tend to bring a lot of our existing social behavior and problems along with us.

In Dan Sizing, there still needs to be a poor underclass to serve all of these tiny people who have suddenly become rich. But that wouldn't be the case in a cloud or in a simulation. You wouldn't need to have any of those physical requirements, right? Absolutely.

But you then have to start thinking about what your reality would actually be. So in the 100, a TV show that I really love and AI wanted to free humans from their bodies and offer them salvation in its memory called by uploading their consciousness. The idea was that there would be a whole new utopian society and your physicality would be simulated. So you'd have your body as an avatar, there'd be skyscrapers to live in, there'd be roads, there'd be, you know, social spaces.

So it would be like kind of like the matrix, but without actually pretending it's real. All right. Let me guess the AI in the 100 turned out to be evil. Because they all are.

It eventually caused a nuclear meltdown just to force people to upload their consciousness. But of course, people being what they are, they went underground into bunkers and into a spacecraft to go into Earth orbit. But if we were looking at this kind of model, what would that simulation be like? Would it be a society where we all interact?

You know, would we all be living in some virtual realm that was a bit like Second Life or I don't know, even Minecraft? I can imagine the reaction a lot of parents would have if they were told they were going to spend eternity in Minecraft being hit with giant hammers by an excitable eight-year-old. Or would those realities not be showable? Would we each have our own separate reality?

You know, would each of us have our own reality staffed with creations of the cloud and models or even copies of the people we know and love? When you say copies, you mean avatars or algorithmic representations, right? Well, that's definitely one way to go. I mean, when we look at the deep fake technology we already have, we have neural nets that can learn speech patterns and behavior patterns from mind data.

We know that we can map that behavior to recreations of voice patterns. So potentially, we could each play out whatever our fantasy life was. Obviously, that model might be popular with loners, weirdos, people who like mental and physical torturing. And of course, billionaires who in those characteristics.

But I think copies might be the easiest way to go. In what sense? Well, why waste time recreating that person if you've already got a version of them sitting on your server? So you could have Elon Musk as your butler?

Well, not actually want that because I've already specified that I get Albert from the Batman copy. But yeah, that kind of makes more sense. Why spend energy recreating someone when you can just digitally, literally just press cut and paste on the file and paste them into your virtual reality world? But surely, there are ethical questions here.

I mean, enormous ones. That's why this is such a topic that people don't really want to confront. Because essentially, we're talking about this being the realm of companies. You would need a company to do this for you.

You would be entrusting your consciousness to that company to look after. So what would stop them from copying it and lending it or selling it to the fantasies of another customer? You, the supposed original, wouldn't know anything about it. And the copies probably wouldn't know that they weren't originals either.

So who would determine what suffering or inhumanity meant in this kind of instance? Presumably, there are other things that the host company could use the copy for. Well, one of the models we mentioned before, you know, teaming human consciousness mappings or simulations with AI. So the idea of Einstein and AI working together, obviously, that could increase our predictive and processing power.

So yeah, I mean, what if you could combine the virtual intellects of Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jobs and another famous Steve and rent them out to companies? You know, we talk about industrial espionage and protecting IP. But what if you could simply own a copy of the person who created the IP that you wanted to replicate? You could also imagine the potential for research and development in this?

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the devil's advocate position. You know, any company could have a dream team of the world's greatest mind. So yes, there's incredible potential there, but they are still human minds. They're not simulations, or at least they're simulations that aren't aware that they're simulations.

So every copy of Albert Einstein would believe that he was the Albert Einstein. And to all intents and purposes, he would be. Would any pain or distress, they felt be real? I don't know.

I mean, that's why there's so many questions. And that's why we have so many work to do, so much work rather to do with AI. What would the rights be? What defines a person?

What defines a machine? Presumably the virtual reality version of physical pain could be toggled on and off according to user preferences. But what do you lose if your mental anguish can be toggled? Or if your memories can be edited?

And of course, you would need huge trust in that commercial company that's hosting your mind. Even if you resolve the ethical issues, would you still be vulnerable to outside influences? Well, that's the thing. We're talking about immortality.

So far, I'm not aware of any IT servers that have lived for hundreds of years, or even decades. So the chances are you would have to be migrated from time to time. A lot of companies already use distributed and mirrored servers. So the chances are there would be copies of you back up, sore redundancies, even if there was only one present version of you at any one time.

So I get it. In fact, you'd be a code. I mean, yeah, absolutely, you would be code. And the code could be altered.

Yeah. And we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that humans are hardware. Our brains may be operating systems, but they're still physical. They're not software in the classic sense.

A software human would be vulnerable to the same risk factors as any software. You could be overwritten. A bug or malicious virus could erase the subroutine or partition you were sitting on or simply corrupt your behaviour. Which wouldn't matter so much if you could be resolved from a backup or a fallback.

Sure. But it's like those memory sync things in the Arnie movie sixth day, which I also watched again recently. You know, at what point do those clones just become models that only have partial or selective memories of the person that they're supposed to be? And how could you protect yourself against hacking?

Would there be people in the real world to pay a ransom for you, for example, after you'd been at virtual presence in a server for hundreds of years? Would your behaviour be suspect to alteration as well? Well, first of all, we don't know what would happen to any kind of human consciousness existing for hundreds or thousands of years. Would you be cranky?

Or would you even be experiencing time at the same rate? Because you could live at processors, be? Well, yeah. You know, the worry that this kind of technology could be used as an eternal imprisonment or torture, because you wouldn't have any physical pain.

And the actual body might be put to death or whatever. But the consciousness remains there in this imprisonment for eternity. And what might a hang do to a virtual human? Well, again, we can only suppose this with all of this.

So potentially your memories or your behaviour or personality could be rewritten. Human societies have rules and conducts behaviour. So there's no reason that a virtual human society wouldn't have its own rules too. So maybe your memories could be overwritten to make you a better citizen of that society.

Maybe they could even be overwritten to make you a better consumer. You know, if your host company has an advertising deal with some company, you might suddenly believe that you've been a lifelong advocate for fossil fuels or industrial fishing or land clearing. Equally, it could be accidental. Badly written software updates could change your personality or behaviour.

And those changes might actually affect all of the copies of you. So you might not be able to back up to that pure Jeff version of the server code. And we're also assuming that the host company sticks around long enough to keep you alive. Well, that's the thing.

I mean, you know, if you're looking at being alive for thousands of years, we don't have companies that have been around for thousands of years. If you are interested in this as a topic or a thought experiment, there's a great short piece on the new scientist called uploading your brain. We'll leave you exposed to software glitches. New scientist really has to work on its cycles.

We said this only time. And that's why I write called Annalynn Newett. So she actually ends her piece with the thought that as humans increasingly migrate to this virtual world, that real world tech and progress will actually atrophy and break down because there are no humans left to actually drive it. No more progress because like I said, there are no one is left in the real world to design this technology.

So eventually you will die off anyway because there's no one to maintain the machinery. Do you go along with that idea? Not really because I think by the time that we're talking about this kind of level of automation and AI technology, I think it will allow for us to continue and be maintained because in the real world, there will be machines working to do that for us. But then you get to this kind of ultimate irony.

We're essentially swapping places. We're working towards a world where all the humans exist as code on servers while the machines and machine intelligence exist in the real world, the hardware and software are swapping places. Humans cared for by machines that are actually more alive than they are. So yeah, it really is a case to be careful what you wish for.

You know, at the end of this, I'm actually questioning myself with I'm even the pure Jeff now or I'm just some duplicate. Yeah, I mean, pure Jeff, I think is something we'll return to on the show. If you miss any parts of this conversation, you can download the podcast or you can get the transcripts on kotchobop.com. We'll be right back with Geek Squox after this BFM 89.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to BFM.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.