Why You Could be Living Inside a Computer in Ten Years

this video is sponsored by the leading password manager dashlane find out more later in the video hey 42 here in march 2019 archaeologists in central china's henan province were excavating the tomb of a noble family from the western han dynasty when they discovered an ancient bronze pot filled with a mysterious liquid it smelt distinctly like liquor so the researchers assumed it was the last remnants of some kind of wicked homebrew luckily for them they resisted the temptation to do a few celebratory shots because further analysis confirmed the fluid was mainly made up of potassium nitrate which these days you'll mostly find in agricultural supplements rocket fuel and fireworks and alunite a mineral modern folks like you are more likely to put on your garden than in your friday afternoon sundowner so what on earth were posh people 2 000 years ago doing drinking liquid fertilizer simple they were trying to live forever the recipe for this concoction came from an ancient religious text that described the makings of an elixir of immortality and was part of a chinese tradition of alchemy thought to go back some 3 000 years the yellow emperor a mythical leader who ruled china from about 2700 bc is said to have achieved immortality and descended to heaven partly thanks to his ingestion of a magical potion admittedly the same guy was reputed to ride around in an ivory chariot drawn by dragons and surrounded by flocks of phoenixes so i'll forgive you if you're feeling a little skeptical but until as recently as the 18th century this story was serious business alchemists dedicated their lives to discovering the secrets of immortality mostly in service of emperors who fancied their chances of becoming gods according to the 24 histories the official books of chinese history at least 10 emperors either died went insane or were permanently incapacitated thanks to drinking immortality elixirs or taking pills most of which contained ingredients like mercury and arsenic which far from making you live forever dramatically decrease the odds of you seeing out the day naturally this madness wasn't only happening in china in the middle east and the west the alchemical legend of the philosopher's stone a substance that could grant eternal life and turn base metals into gold dates back millennia some even say it was handed to adam by god himself buddhism and hinduism also contain tales of a magical wish-fulfilling jewel called the kintamani stone which is said to convey immortality taken with a pinch of metaphorical salt these different traditions suggest the human notion of living forever has been around about as long as notions themselves even the epic of gilgamesh a 4 000 year old mesopotamian script regarded as the earliest surviving piece of literature is essentially the story of one guy's search for immortality and the friends he meets along the way it's like disney but on clay tablets the fact is humans have been scared to death of death for as long as we've been conscious of it and we've created endless myths and legends describing immortals or people who've managed to dodge the grim reaper for those of us knee-deep in the 21st century stories of alchemists brewing up toxic nightcaps may sound ludicrous but you have to wonder if we've really changed all that much since those days because the topic of immortality is hotter now than it's ever been before and some people claim they've already made it possible companies have been around for years selling cryogenic services that allow you to have your head or entire body frozen when you die on the assumption the technology needed to revive you will be developed at some point in the future although of course what we're really talking about there isn't so much immortality as resurrecting the dead forming out human popsicles and giving them the full frankenstein's monster treatment which would be some serious technology indeed perhaps more plausible if we can call it that is the suggestion that the human mind could be uploaded into digital form and whilst that also sounds pretty out there some people claim we'll achieve this unbelievable feat within the next three decades this is the hope of transhumanists people who believe science will provide a way for us to transcend our physical limitations and access cyber immortality we may not yet have cyber immortality but at least you can have rock solid cyber security with dashlane who've kindly sponsored today's video dashlane creates strong and unique passwords for all of your online accounts and auto fills them so you never have to click forgot password ever again and you don't have to sweat about the extremely rare chance that dashlane could be breached because dashlane safely stores and decrypts your data on your local device only using your master password this means that dashlane never has access to your personal data and any hacker would only see random noise dashlane also also fills your credit card information whilst online shopping so you can make purchases without having to fetch your wallet dashlane has a built-in vpn to encrypt your data and keep your online activity anonymous best of all it works on any device whether you're protecting your plans for a top secret artificial intelligence or just videos of your cat there's no better way to make sure your online world is impenetrable than by using dashley from my experience dashlane is the best all bases covered security and time saving tool out there you can try dashlane for free on your first device by heading to www.dashlane.com forward slash 42 then if you decide you want to upgrade to premium use my code 42 for 10 off the idea of uploading your brain to a computer including all your thoughts feelings and memories is called whole brain emulation and surprisingly enough it's not a particularly new concept similar ideas have been the fodder of science fiction writers for almost 100 years with legendary author arthur c clarke describing a city one billion years in the future in which citizens exist as data patterns in the city's central computer clark wrote that book the city and the stars in 1956 but the reason we're having this conversation today is that rapid advances over the last few decades in fields like nanotechnology biotech and artificial intelligence have got people wondering with some genuine interest could we upload our brains and live forever and if we could how would we do it and what would life look like of course once we've answered all those little chestnuts the bigger question that remains is should we one person who seems to have answers to all of these questions is ray kurzweil an american inventor and futurist there's a moniker that gets thrown around a lot these days futurist in the past we used to call them fortune tellers and make them sit in caravans with crystal balls but these days we give them book contracts and consultancy packages anyway even from this slightly cynical starting point there does seem to be something a bit different about kurzweil firstly he's a genuine visionary and credible inventor and is a past recipient of the national medal of technology and innovation the united states highest honor in technology he's also been making predictions about the future for some time with well-known examples being nanotechnology ebooks face recognition software and a computer beating the human at chess by the year 2000. by 2009 kurzweil had made 108 predictions of which he claims 89 were absolutely accurate with another 13 partially correct or set to be absolutely correct within a few years so he's developed a bit of a reputation as someone who should be listened to when it comes to development of the future and the development kurzweil is most passionate about is the singularity the technological singularity is a theoretical point in time when technology will develop super intelligence that allows it to upgrade itself at an exponential rate making it increasingly smarter than us kurzweil says we humans will then merge our intelligence with machine intelligence and basically become super beings and all of this will happen by the year 2045. a key reason he thinks all this will be possible is because by the 2030s he believes we humans will have transcended the need for physical bodies and learnt to upload our brains to computers along with our personalities skills and personal histories kurzweil appears to be genuinely convinced he's going to become immortal and takes more than 200 pills a day to ensure he lives long enough to see the technology that will turn him into a digital mini-me and he's not the only one russian billionaire dmitry itzkov has stated he's 100 positive he can make humans immortal by 2045 by uploading people to artificial brains these brains could then be dropped into robots or projected as living holograms or you could simply be uploaded into the cloud where you could live out your eternal life in a 3d simulation of bliss and bottomless digital pina coladas but for any of this to happen we need to get a few important things right the first being the ability to scan the entire human brain to create something called the connectome a 3d map of the brain showing every neuron and molecule within there are big questions about whether this would ever be possible the brain is an insanely complex piece of machinery that we don't really understand all that well yes even mine so far scientists have only been able to map the connectome of one creature a one millimeter round worm which has a total of 302 neurons in its entire nervous system by comparison a fruit fly or ant has about 250 000 neurons a mouse has about 71 million and the human brain has 86 billion today mapping of the brain relies on technology like mris megs and eegs all of which give a partial but incomplete picture by a mile other potential scanning methods include electrodes that could be placed directly on the brain with each electrode capable of mapping thousands of neurons but as this technique requires cutting open the skull it's no surprise people aren't exactly queuing up to try it out but let's say for argument's sake you could find someone crazy enough or drunk enough to volunteer for this procedure and that the operation was even legal you could hypothetically get a perfect biological image of the brain but would that represent the person you are and how would you actually make it run would mapping the brain even be enough in the first place the human heart and gut are also full of millions of neurons that have been shown to affect our moods and state of mind but we need to find a way to upload these too if we go back to the example of the roundworm its connectome was replicated as software and loaded into a lego robot which the research team claimed behaved exactly the same as the original worm it moved towards food and it responded to touch but the robot exhibited no feelings and didn't even cry at the end of titanic so the question of emotional expression remains unanswered either way the human brain mapping exercise would require computer power capable of processing vast amounts of data zettabytes in fact how big is a zettabyte well if every person living in the year 2000 had had a 180 gigabyte hard drive completely filled with data all the data on all of those drives would occupy one zettabyte it's the same amount of data as 200 trillion mp3s that's a lot of one direction and nobody wants that these days we have some pretty impressive computers take summit for example one of the fastest supercomputers on planet earth today to borrow an analogy from the new york times if a stadium built for 100 000 people was full and everyone in it had a modern laptop it would take 20 such stadiums to match the computing strength of this machine summit fills a 000 square foot room and has been clocked at just under 2 billion calculations per second the fastest supercomputer in the world fukaku is almost three times as fast as that but even this kind of obscene technology doesn't even come close to the processing power we would need to create an accurate virtual copy of the brain it may be that quantum computers can step up to the plate for us on this one but we're still trying to figure out exactly what they can and can't do for now and it's hard to say for sure so yeah the hows of mind uploading are still yet to be entirely ironed out but for the sake of argument let's assume these hurdles will be overcome within the next few decades and we manage to create true emulations of human brains what do we do next as we've already seen we could pop our digital doppelgangers into robots or create mechanical versions of ourselves but that relies on robots evolving fast enough over the coming years for it to be worthwhile the most advanced robots around at the moment can climb stairs mix cocktails and do gymnastics but they're still nowhere near as agile and adaptable as your average ape hairless or otherwise the more likely and probably more affordable scenario for an average person would be the creation of a digital version of you that could be loaded into a simulated virtual reality this digital world would require the sensory complexity of this one with the ability to replicate all the ingredients that make up the human experience sights smells tastes and textures even emotions and thinking yes we're basically going to have to build the matrix but unlike pre-red pill neo the inhabitants of this world would know full well it wasn't real in the traditional sense and that would allow us to code in some serious upsides you wouldn't experience death or disease unless you wanted to you could fly look however you want be with whoever you want go wherever you want basically a true fantasy universe like ready player one's oasis but running an environment of such complexity would again rely on massive computing power designing and optimizing it would almost certainly require artificial intelligence of some kind and creating a continuous high quality believable experience would require giant technological strides forward for example the computer game industry has fueled incredible advances in graphics in recent decades meaning it might be possible to make a digital universe look pretty great in the near future but for obvious reasons no real work has been done on how to satisfy the other human senses like smell touch and taste in a digital setting and even assuming we were able to meet the technological demands to build a satisfying and realistic digital afterlife for our uploaded minds how would that system operate it would require huge data centers running 24 7 across massive networks in the same way the cloud does now but just as you have to pay a subscription for your cloud storage each month you would presumably have to pay for the storage of your virtual self what if you were no longer able to pay would your data be switched off effectively killing you it's a system that feels open to abuse too it's the ultimate monopoly in the real world if you don't like the rules where you live you can move somewhere else but when your entire universe is owned and managed by the same company or organization if you don't like it you're kind of screwed and nobody wants mark zuckerberg as their overlord then again these kinds of challenges only really matter if this digital being is actually you in the first place consider for a moment the force experiment known as the ship of theseus if you aren't familiar with this one just imagine the great greek heroes vessel was anchored in a bay as a museum relic but over time pieces began to rot and were replaced gradually more and more parts of the ship are replaced until eventually there are no original pieces left would the ship that was now anchored in the harbour still be theseus ship or is it something different the fourth experiment was first posed by greek philosopher heraclitus almost 2500 years ago to highlight the question of identity who are you and it's been bugging philosophers ever since let's look at a more contemporary example of the same conundrum when crew aboard the starship enterprise used a ship's transporter their atoms are disassembled in one place and then reassembled in another if your whole body is dissolved and then your atoms are reassembled somewhere else is it still you and if it is you where are you during the time between departure and arrival whilst your atoms are separated and drifting through space there are two basic ways mind uploading could be achieved the first is the copy and paste approach we've been looking at so far in which we create a copy of the brain and then upload it to the digital effort the second method is to copy and delete approach that sees individual neurons in the brain gradually replaced by computer functions until the original organic brain is fully replaced by a computer simulation just like theseus's ship in either case the question still remains is the virtual version of you well you would we regard it as conscious say you were able to create something that was hypothetically identical to you in every way same thoughts feelings memories likes dislikes weird fantasies about swimming naked in jelly and then you loaded that creation into a simulated world in the cloud who would be you the simulation or the person in your body or both the answers to those questions pretty much depend on your perspective as far as your digital clone is concerned a moment ago they were a living breathing human being and now they're a digital and immortal super being likewise to your friends and family or anyone else looking in from the outside your clone would be indistinguishable from you and would therefore be you only digitalized and immortal so far so good but from the final perspective your own things look a bit more grim just because your brain has been perfectly copied it doesn't mean your consciousness will magically jump from your body into the computer in fact you would go on experiencing the world just as you always did meaning you would grow old and you would die and the fact a perfect digital copy of yourself gets to have all the fun flying around in the matrix might not seem like all that much of a consolation in fact it might seem like kind of a piss take which means that even if we do manage to overcome all the technological ethical and practical challenges and upload our minds there are still serious questions to be asked about whether or not that would actually give us the kind of immortality we hoped it would in the first place there are no simple solutions to these questions that's why we aren't doing it philosophers have been kicking around conundrums about identity for millennia and we still don't have answers we can all agree on but perhaps that won't matter as far as transhumanists are concerned there's no need to let metaphysics get in the way of progress let's build cyber versions of ourselves anyway and see what happens we can sort out the definitions of words like me and i later still there's no avoiding that in a future reality where uploaded versions of people are regarded as equivalent to physical people we will still need to answer some really weird ethical questions for example will simulated digital versions of people living eternal lives have the same rights and responsibilities as people living in the physical world how will digital people contribute to society how will they earn money will they even need to with brain twisters like these to contend with it's no wonder people like ray kurzweil want to plug their minds into computers and access super intelligence whether that will be possible remains to be seen but first we have to decide whether it's even a good idea thanks for watching and thanks again to dashlane don't forget to check them out using the link below

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 308,355

Rating: 4.9238143 out of 5

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Id: A_KZ3X71yQg

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021