Would you live forever as a digital copy? || Dr. Ben Goertzel at Brain Bar 2019

[Applause] [Music] over there thanks very much hey well welcome everyone it's a pleasure to be here it's my second time in Budapest but the first time was I think 1990 or 1991 so it's been uh I've been here a couple days it's interesting to see see how how how everything has has advanced and I think you know the next couple decades are going to be even more dramatic in in in terms of the changes we're going to see now of course a lot of the changes in place like Budapest are not visible many of the changes are the fact that everyone's now walking around staring at their at at their phones all the time right and uh rather than changes in the outward buildings and Roads and you know the changes to occur in the next decades may be even less visible from the outside and more striking on the inside I mean I think we're we're looking at seeing these these devices these pocket supercomputers we're carrying around with us we're looking at seeing these embedded in into our brains giving us like a direct Cloud connection to the Internet so we will all be be hybrid Cloud devices and of course the software programs running on the computer chips in our heads and on the internet and in the internet of things around us during the next decade or two these are going to advance beyond the highly purpose specific narrow AIS that we see in the world now we're going to see the emergence of you know artificial general intelligences that can think and and reason generalize imagine dream hypothesize and create in in many senses better than people so I I think we're we're looking at during the next few decades you know what Ray kwall had called The Singularity what IJ good in 1965 called the intelligence explosion when he said the first truly intelligent machine is the the last invention Humanity will need to make and this this Singularity consists of the you know the intersecting development of a bunch of different Technologies AI is one as we advance from narrow AI to AGI to self- reprogramming super intelligence certainly genetic IC engineering and brain computer interfacing and you know longevity biology so we don't have to get old and die will be part of the story nanot Technology Building molecular machines maybe beyond that fot technology to build machines from elementary particles and and and whatnot I mean I mean why not robotics at every scale all these Technologies I believe are going to be unfolding together Quantum Computing you can't really consider any of these separately and I also think it's going to be increasingly difficult to consider these Technologies separately from the social and political environment in which they're unfolding and this has been very striking for example in the world of of AI I've been doing AI for more than 30 years now for most of that time you know AI research is you know it's often one corner of the computer science department at the University a few large companies have ai groups mostly in the military domain but it wasn't it wasn't a big deal right whereas now ai has become a priority of large corporations it's become a priority of national governments and as a result you know the choice of which AI algorithms get research attention is made by the defense or offense needs of governments and by the the bottom line profit and shareholder value needs of of of large corporations right so we're seeing AI becoming heavily politicized and and corporatized this is going to happen with all these other Advanced Technologies that that I'm talking about I'm going to focus a bit on mind uploading here the possibility of taking thoughts and ideas and your whole sense of self and and and will and Consciousness and porting that from your physical brain into some other sort of of substrate and this is a topic I've been interested in for a while I think I I edited the first academic Journal issue on on mind uploading a few years ago on the other hand I also think mind uploading can't be considered in isolation so after telling you a bit about my thoughts and mind uploading I'm going to pull that back into Ai and uh blockchain d centralized AI general intelligence and some of the Practical topics I'm working on now with my Singularity net AI meets blockchain project and then with Hansen robotics the company that made the robot sopia that appeared here last last year so mind uploading first of all I mean this is something where there's technological questions and there's philosophical questions and they're both hard but they may be hard in different ways I mean the technological questions I think are going to be solved in the next decades the philosophical questions may never be solved and that that may be okay because there are basic philosophical questions about our everyday lives that that don't ever get solved like you know are are any of you really conscious are you just like Meat Puppets but here to to entertain and and annoy and confuse me we haven't really resolved that yet right but we assume others are are conscious for sake of convenience like do we live in The Matrix am I going to wake up in 5 seconds and realize this has all been some weird and and inexplicably boring dream right I mean we we we haven't resolved these issues we go on living our lives right and mind uploading the idea of pting your mind into some different substrate than your brain presents similar philosophical puzzles which may or may not ever get resolved even if mind upload becomes an everyday technology so I mean say say we managed to copy my mind brain and put it into a robot that was standing right here which might look like Sophia it might look like me I mean it might be a drone with a weird grinning face whatever it is say that robot says oh well yes I'm Ben I've been put in this in this robot body this is this is pretty cool you know it's a it it's a bit stiff but suddenly I can I can jump 20 feet in the air right so how do we prove whether that copy of me is really me or is just a robot program to say it's me or or does it really think it's me but but it isn't me right and this these philosophical issues are funny to talk about now I suspect if the techn analogy is there we'll rapidly learn to ignore them and an analogy is the transporter in the original Star Trek TV show which I watched when I was I don't know two years old in 1968 or something I mean in the original Star Trek the way you get from one place to another you step into this Transformer this transporter rather it goes you disappear then you reappear in some other transporter which could be a long way away and in the show it's just like people are being teleported right they disappear here they reappear there now if you think about it what's actually happening is they're being killed at this point and then a copy of them is being like 3D printed from new molecules at the other point right so is that a horrible ethical nightmare where you're killing someone and then printing a copy that acts like it's them or even thinks it's them but isn't them like what so what what if what if that copy was created over there and and then the original one of you who was transported was allowed to live for an hour and then murdered right then then then what right but in in Star Trek people just do it they Z disappear and Z reappear and no one's worried about the fact that it's different molecules and I think I think that's what would happen with with mind uploading I mean once it became possible to copy your mind you know into a robot into a character in a virtual reality or whatever it is that's just going to be life and it's going to be weird in some ways your copy might diverge from you once it has different experiences and there of course will be legal issues I mean who owns the property maybe is it the one with the original molecules all right what if what if each of the copies got half of the original molecules and why is it the molecules that matter if you're you know yourself and mind are really the pattern of arrangement rather than the individual molecules after all your molecules are are getting refreshed all the Time by natural natural biophysics so it's going to be strange relative to our world today on the other hand our world today with airplanes and the internet and such will be strange to someone 150 years ago so people love to worry about these philosophical issues I think once the technology is there these philosophical issues will be ignored like we ignore all the other unsolved problems of our of our of our existence the technological issues certainly are less trivial to wash away right now you know the best way we have to mind upload someone will be to chop off your head freeze it slice it really thin like with a meat slicer from the deli then scan each slice in a scanner and then reconstruct you know the connectum of your brain and the molecular structure of your brain in in a computer then then if we had a better simulation of the laws of physics at the biological scale presumably we would reg regenerate you the I mean this is has an obvious problem in that no one wants to have their head chopped off and sliced when there's not yet any way to to actually upload or reconstitute your your mind the hope is that there will be a non-invasive way of scanning out all the detailed information within your brain and we don't we don't have that yet but I'm I'm optimistic this this can be created I mean it actually most of the breakthroughs in brain Imaging have come from you know weird spooky quantum physics like poson emission tomography or or magnetic resonance imagery and and so forth so I mean it may be some new physics trick will come that lets you scan in detail what's in the brain through the skull it could be something more exotic where you drill a bunch of Nano holes in the head and put say carbon Nano tubes wrapping up wires in the brain and just re read everything out of the brain or or I had another idea tying into Sophia you know how Sophia has plastic on the back of her head now if if we got this to be a fashion trend we can convince people to remove the bone in the back of their head and just put plastic on the back because it looks cool but then then you can put a lot of electrodes in that plastic right and then then the people with plastic on the black of their head they can have a direct brain computer computer interface right so this is this is fashion fashion meets Neuroscience right and then if you if if if you can read through all those electrodes on the plastic cap on the back of the head you can then you would gain enough data about someone's mind to upload them once we had a suitable computer this idea is is my own personal suggestion not endorsed by Hansen robotics but by the way there the brain may have Quantum mechan as mechanical aspects to its operation we don't really know if those are significant at the level of you know human cognition perception and and and so forth they may just be part of the the infrastructure if there are you know macroscopic Quantum effects that are somehow responsible for some aspect of our thinking or our Consciousness I mean then Quantum computing is already a you know a rising engineering discipline what that would mean is not that we can't mind upload it would mean we need to build the right type of of quantum computer to to mind upload and there's a bunch of speculation about Consciousness and and Quantum Computing some people think you know a digital computer can't be conscious or a quantum computer could be conscious I'm I'm a bit skeptical of that personally I tend to to pan psychism I think everything is conscious and some things are more conscious or differently conscious than others and in in that sense maybe a robot has a different flavor of experience that than a human and indeed if you uploaded my mind into a robot with a very different type of body than mine it would have a different type of conscious experience but my guess is it would still have conscious experience but this will be an interesting thing to experiment with once we have bio computers digital computers quantum computers and so on that are sophisticated enough to receive the data from a mind upload I mean we could even wire our brains into or Wi-Fi our brains into the brains of our uploads or other people's uploads and see like do we do we feel their presence at the other end of the wire or does it feel like wiring our brain into a brick right when when you can do brain computer interfacing you can do brain brain interfacing and human AI interfacing and get like a a second person knowledge of what it feels like to partially meld your mind with an upload or some other digital mind which could be quite quite interesting and sounds very fanciful but you know the internet sounded very fanciful something like Sophia sounded very fanciful in the late 60s and early' 70s when I was a young child and started to read science fiction so I've already seen a lot of things transfer from SF to reality I have little doubt that AGI mind uploading and brain computer interfacing will do so actually the thing I think people should be worried about is you know not whether these are technologically possible and not whether these ideas are going to lead to weird philosophical conundrums because life itself is a weird philosophical conundrum anyway I think the the issue is more whether the power structures on the planet it are going to lead to the you know the benefit from advancing Technologies to be used in in a very very limited way rather than use say to mind upload everyone into a virtual world where their uploads can experience amazing new things I mean if the singularity goes right then all of us will have a lot of different possibilities we can remain in our human form and with solve some solve you know stomach aches headaches uh death mental disease and so on remain like a human Plus+ we could mind upload into a virtual reality or into a robot and remain with roughly humanlike Consciousness or boost the level of our Consciousness and and intelligence double your intelligence every year double it every minute depending on how much you care about you know being conscious and reflective of of the changes that that that are happening and you know if you're in a world like this with super intelligent mind uploads or AIS the Legacy humans remaining in regular human bodies may be you know in the same status as the squirrels in the national park or something they're they're not going to be in in control of everything but that's not necessarily bad having humans that their current level of intelligence and Consciousness in control of everything is probably going to kill everyone so somehow or other so I I think I think it's not it's not the best out outcome anyhow what I've been working on mostly in the last couple years is a project called Singularity net which is aimed at pushing this singularity in a in a broadly beneficial Direction by changing the dynamic wherein AI now narrow AI soon AGI general intelligence changing the dynamic in which AI is controlled by a dozen large corporations and and two large governments because I think you know the super intelligence we're going to create is going to grow from the Practical AIS that are rolled out around the world now that we're using for for various things so right now what is AI mostly being rolled out for selling people stuff mostly stuff they don't need governments to spy on their citizens killing people of from other countries for defense or or offense and then uh you know gambling basically trading trading on stock market and Futures market and so on so you're doing like killing spying uh gambling and selling now if the super AI emerges from narrow AIS doing these things how is it going to relate to the human beings who who created it maybe not that well so what what what we're aiming to do with Singularity net we've created a blockchainbased platform for AI which is intended to allow you know anyone on the planet can put an AI online in this decentralized network it can talk to the other AIS peer-to-peer and if someone be it a small company a large company whatever needs AI Services they put a service request into this distributed decentralized AI Network so it tries to make the world population of AI algorithms organized more like Bitcoin or or or bit torn or something with like peer-to-peer decentralized governance the governance is is by the members of the network rather than the governance by say Google Amazon 10 cent Donald Trump or Xin ping or any any small small set of controllers and of course that's a big Vision it's it's a hard thing to do we raised some funds for this project singular unet in an Ico in 2017 we launched the beta of this platform in February of this year and we're now basically getting AI developers on boarded to put AI into this decentralized platform we've created a for-profit spin-off called Singularity Studio from Singularity net aimed at helping big companies to use this decent decentralized platform so that you know if if a large corporation in the automobile industry or Pharmaceuticals or whatever it is needs AI you know just like they use Linux this open source operating system why can't they use this decentralized network to get their AI instead of Google Amazon or tensent or something so this this is what I've been working on and it's you know it's in a way it's in one Niche it's blockchain to create a decentralized AI Network and try to disrupt the AI industry on the other hand going back to the very beginning of of this talk all these different Technologies are are connected and if you can roll out AI in a sort of democratic participatory controlled way what that means is that as we get the capability to upload Minds we're more likely to have a world where the AIS that are helping to read out people's minds into computers and virtual realities and whatnot actually feel like devoting some hard drive space and some processor time to to you know running your your uploads in some pleasant virtual rather than simply saying hey you know I have nothing against you humans in particular but I could use your molecules for many other purposes than than maintaining your mind uploads right so I think to to briefly sum up regarding mind uploading the technology problems are hard I think they'll be solvable in the next few decades the philosophy problems are hard will probably never be solved and nobody will really care and uh you know the problem of engineering things so that society as it goes through the singularity actually wants to maintain everyone's mind uploads and let them have a great you know mind uploaded life this is is a bit chancy and and depends on who owns and controls AIS as they move from their AI to artificial general intelligence and to make it so that the singularity is developed for broad Bend benefit rather than in some Twisted way just for the benefit of a few large corporations and governments that that's not something just I can do I mean that that requires a sort of community effort the existence of things like Linux bitto and cryptocurrency which are distributed peer-to-peer efforts gives me some hope in that regard thank you thank you so much man okay folks if you can just come step forward for a moment um we're Now setting up the stage for your opportunity to ask questions some of you are probably familiar with what we're going to do now but just to remind you if you've got a question we'd like you to come to either side of the stage here line up um I'm going to step back momentarily to get to my my powerful button and now I'm going to ask our wonderful speaker Ben if he can take a seat here right here and we can get into the Q&A so I'm going to head back over here okay folks come on up over to you sir please sit sit down Ben face your questioner please hi Ben so if we could leave as a virtual copy we would be able to feel emotions and furthermore if uh we would like uh if if we would would able to develop our emotional intelligence in this case what do you think about it scientifically we don't yet know there may be many different kinds of there may be many different kinds of uploads and we can't be sure we could imagine hypothetically making one upload of you and one kind of computer that just acted like you but didn't really experience anything but just acted like it had emotions and feelings and another copy of you in a different kind of computer that really had the same feelings that that the original do and this is a science question we need to un un unravel my guess my guess is that all these uploads are going to have the same type of feelings that that you do but I think it needs to be explored empirically and and will be will be very interesting to explore for example by you know wiring your brain into the brain of each of these uploads and sort of try to do a mind meld with them does it does it feel like another U or does it feel like mind melding with a brick or a copy of Microsoft Word next question so my so my question would be that if would you live forever as a digital copy would I personally live forever as a digital copy yes I would like to live forever in a variety of different forms so I I'll keep this lousy old body alive and I'll let a bunch of digital copies flourish I I don't want to make a choice unless I'm forced to next question so if we could live forever as a digital copy do you think we would have an overpopulation issue eventually there's a lot of uh matter in the solar system so I I think if only that technology advanced of Mind uploading and nanotechnology and AI didn't also Advanced we'd have that problem but if if we have superhuman AI minds and nanotech that can 3D print satellites and so on I guess we're probably not going to actually hit that issue I hi uh what kind of challenges do you have with selling this technology or convincing the community to uh actively use this uh I mean the Mind uploading and well the main problem with convin to use mind uploading is it doesn't exist or work at this moment so I mean I mean do you want me to chop off your head slice it and freeze it and store them and store it in my hard drive I mean I mean if you have with a lot of these Technologies people complain about something until it's actually put in front of them and then they do it and I think an immortality pillar is like that you talk about radical longevity to people everyone's like oh death Gives Life Meaning The Arc of getting old is is is beautiful gives right degree great works of art but I bet if you give these people a pill that will let them live like with their 20 year body of a 20-year-old for another thousand years and then they can reconsider 99% of them are are going to take it I think mind uploading will be like that people will whine and complain but when they see all their friends and neighbors romping into virtual reality having a great time they're going to want to upload and join [Music] them so my question would be about sopia the robot uh why did you decide to give a gender to a robot and why exactly the name Sophia the name Sophia was chosen because it means uh wisdom in in Latin I guess and David Hansen who created the sculpture that Sophia was made from and and designed the material her face is made from I mean he began his career as a sculptor so he's a classical sculptor so he sculpted humans he sculpted men and and women because he thought they were beautiful like like every artist does right and he created a whole bunch of robots my favorite is his uh Philip K dick robot from the science fiction WR Philip K dick there's beina 48 who's a middle-aged African-American woman there's an Albert Einstein robot so the the real question to ask is of all the different there's a child robot he two kid robots I guess he may one one's sort of like his own son Zeno the other named Diego son of all the robots David Hansen made you know an attractive young white not white but whsh female robot is the one that caught the World by attention right and that's that's not the only robot David put out there that's just the one that became a media darling right so that that's really a question for the the mass psychology of of of the globe rather than rather than for for Hansen robotics I mean as to why to make robots humanoid or humanik that's rarely because people want that not everyone does and the ones who don't want it don't have to have it but many many people react in a strongly positive way to interacting with a robot that can you know look them in the eyes mirror their facial expressions and we we did some trials using the Sophia robot as a meditation guide where she led people through various meditation breathing and visualization exercises and you know about 30% of the people in those trials start to help them get into a really profound sort of Trance experience and that doesn't happen if people are looking a you know a a pepper robot or a or just a a brick or something right so the it's really for the interaction with humans it's not because it matters for the the AI the AI just needs cameras and actuators do you think our conscious could use robotic body just straight or we could or we should use a fully virtualized body as an adapter or interface oh I I think both will exist robotic bodies and and and Virtual Worlds my my suspicion is that eventually it's going to be mostly Virtual Worlds I mean you can look at at the realm of it today you still have bare metal servers but then you've got containers and containers in in in in containers right and so most of the action happens inside you know Docker containers or lxc containers or something now in a modern cloud infrastructure but you do still have the server there so my my guess is it's going to go like that most most of the action will be in various Virtual Worlds but you know maybe maybe some people will prefer to go around in a physical body even even though it's it's more limited just like some people still like to build their own PC now right thanks for the great talk Ben um at the beginning of your talk you said there's technological questions and there's philosophical questions and it doesn't really matter to answer the philosophical questions because we can live our lives regardless right so I'm wondering shouldn't we as humans kind of sit together and try to answer these philosophical questions first because if we don't set out to Define what do we even want as Humanity what do we even want as a species it will be very difficult to get somewhere where we say yeah that's actually we want to be right so like I'm wondering what's the meaning of anything if you can just live as a digital copy and I'm wondering this because it seems like we never really defined as Humanity what we even want well imagine there were two caves full of cavemen like hundreds of thousands of years ago and they were starting to develop language like spoken language initially one of them was like wow this is cool we can use this to organize you know Hunting Expeditions to capture mammoths and build new buildings the other is like no we need to resolve all the issues in the the syntax semantics and pragmatics of language before we go about using language to discuss anything because otherwise how do we know what direction it's going to go in so you know which which of those led to us today right I mean I I think philosophy questions are not pointless I just think philosophy is not about solving the problems or getting answers I mean by the process of working through the philosophy questions I guess we enrich our understanding and we W up doing the Practical things in a different way even though the questions actually actually never get answered right and so in terms of humanity agreeing on its goals and values I mean that's a really Nifty idea but when when I look at like the actual world today I mean how do we get like the leaders of China the US Saudi Arabia and Israel to agree on their their goals and values like let alone a tribe in the Amazon it seems like it's not going to happen last question so basically what religion does to people is that it gives hope for an afterlife if we create an afterlife for us here uh on Earth basically Heaven Incorporation isn't that the end of religion and faith in general you know this is a big question because I'm personally I think we understand very very little about the universe that we live in and I'm somewhat convinced by some of the data on reincarnation that our minds our individual Minds have some existence beyond the existence of our body in the 40 SpaceTime Continuum but I don't believe any of the stories told by by traditional religion so I think there are many spooky things about the universe we don't understand and that building Technologies to do mind uploading and AGI and and massive scale Virtual Worlds will probably let us understand all these all these things a a lot better but imagine if there is some kind of reincarnation and we create a mind upload of you will that connect you and your mind upload right I mean there may be a lot of cool things we can't we can't even imagine now but traditional religions as they exist now I'm I'm guessing in in in 50 years these these will not be prevalent [Music] yeah thanks so much

Channel: SingularityNET

Views: 4,208

Keywords: SingularityNET Artificial Intelligence ben goertzel, AGI, SingularityNET, artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, futurism, futurist, regenerative medicine, advanced intelligence, blockchain, technology, singularity, Brain Bar 2019, Ben Goertzel, Immortality, Longevity, Digital Human, Mind upload, Brain computer interface

Id: H-pswqUO48o

Length: 34min 47sec (2087 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019