On
The Atlantic web site, neuroscientist
Michael Graziano imagines a bright future when individual minds will be
routinely uploaded on to some sort of IT hardware (“Why You Should Believe in
the Digital Afterlife”). The vision he projects is surprisingly poetic—though
not quite in the “machines of loving grace” tradition: “Think about the quantum leap that might occur if
instead of preserving words and pictures, we could preserve people’s actual
minds for future generations. We could accumulate skill and wisdom like never
before. Imagine a future in which
your biological life is more like a larval stage. You grow up, learn skills and
good judgment along the way, and then are inducted into an indefinite digital
existence where you contribute to stability and knowledge.” Of course, Prof.
Graziano’s utopia could be another clever hoax meant to provoke silly comments
from clever readers. In case it isn’t, it may need to be amended slightly: 1)
machine learning could at some point take care of the accumulation of skills
and knowledge commonly associated with humans—making the latter superfluous; and
2) the project could work only for individuals like Graziano himself, Ray Kurzweil
(whose foresight the neuroscientist praises), the early Dr. Sheldon Cooper, Richard
Hendricks, etc.—whose thought processes run along strictly logical/algorithmic lines.
