Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: First upload Keywords: You have to crawl before you can run Message-ID: Date: 21 Jan 91 17:54:41 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Cincinnati, Cin'ti., OH Lines: 57 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article ems%nanotech@princeton.edu writes: >At some point it actually will become (almost?) possible to do an upload. >What then? There will surely be some sticky problems. A rational person >wouldn't take the risk of transferring to a supposedly equivalent brain >structure without a very good reason to believe it would be identical, >not unless the original person were in danger of immediate biological >death. A person in that "do or die" situation might very well take the >plunge, and some more-or-less equivalent person would result, but this >is unlikely to convince other healthy persons to risk their identities. >Something more is needed, or else uploading will always remain an option >of last resort. How does anything dangerous get invented? You start off with conceptual models, advance to computer models, bend some metal to get mock-ups and prototypes, then test with robots, animals, and/or courageous volunteers. Every time your prototype breaks, burns, or explodes, you figure out what went wrong, and you try to design that failure mode out of the next one. In the case of uploading, we can just let its ontogeny recapitulate our phylogeny (well, sort of). I would imagine that long before we let a robot probe/surgeon get anywhere near a healthy human brain, the technology will have been verified an enormous number of times on animal brains of successively greater complexities. Start off by uploading a slug's neural net. Once you've got that licked (or squished), then you can work your way up through flatworms, sessile molluscs, insects, mobile molluscs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. By the time you can upload an ailing chimpanzee's brain with virtually 100% reliability, and the chimp's keeper of however many years can't distinguish them, then you'll be ready to start with terminally ill humans. This isn't anything new, of course. Every invasive medical procedure leaves a trail of dead animals before it can heal people. Uploading animals might even be significantly useful in its own right, even if the "ultimate" goal of uploading humans hits some unforeseen show-stopper. Animal "models" are very popular for behavioral studies. I'm not sure how well an animal model would live in a computer, but it would sure stink up the lab a lot less in software. >One possibility is to produce a nanotech-style clone, and observe it's >every reaction, comparing it to your original reactions. If we still have private industry and its associated marketing by the time uploading becomes possible, I'm sure that at least a few of the first uploads will make a living of advertising their move to others. -- Dan Mocsny Snail: Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171 dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati 513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171