Top Ten Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want

Science fiction, computer games, anime… cyborgs are everywhere. Transhumanists are philosophers who believe that one day, cybernetic upgrades will be so powerful, elegant, and inexpensive that everyone will want them. This report lists ten major upgrades that I think will be adopted by 2050.

The List

10. Disease Immunity

Between 20 and 40 years into the future, we will become capable of building artificial antibodies that outperform their natural equivalents. Instead of using chemical signaling that relies on diffusion to reach its target, these antibodies will communicate with rapid acoustic pulses. Instead of proteins, they will be made using much more durable polymers or even diamond. These antibodies will move through the bloodstream more quickly than other cells in the body, and will take up less space and resources, meaning that there will be room for many more.

Using super-biological methods for identifying and neutralizing foreign viruses and bacteria, these tiny robots will still function in harmony with our own bodies. They will probably be powered either by glucose, ATP (like natural antibodies), or acoustically. There are already bloodborne microbots today which are not rejected by the immune system — these are the precursors of tomorrow’s nanorobotics. Through their presence and continued operation, they will eliminate all susceptibility to disease in those who have them running through their veins. This will not make people immortal, but it will allow them to walk into a room contaminated with a flesh-eating virus in nothing but a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. For more on artificial antibodies and other body-integrated nanites, see Nanomedicine.

9. Telemicroscopic, Full-Spectrum Vision

There are microscopes that weigh one tenth of an ounce. Some birds of prey have vision so sharp that they can spot a hare a mile away. We have compact devices that can scan the electromagnetic spectrum from x-rays to radio waves, and everything in between. Our eyes in their current form can do none of these things. But in time, they will be upgraded. There are already prosthetic retinas that can provide low-resolution artificial vision for blind people.

It’s simply a matter of time until better prosthetic eyes are created, and their sharpness, contrast, and resolution is superior to what evolution gave us. The biggest challenge may end up not actually being about building a superior artificial eye, but remodeling the visual cortex so that it can process the info and relay it to the rest of the brain in such a way that it’s not overwhelmed.

8. Telepathy/Brain-Computer Interfacing

Ever wanted to send someone a message with nothing but your mind, or have a neural implant that gives your brain direct access to Google? Hundreds of corporate and academic labs across the world are working on projects that generate progress in this area. Check out the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface, which lets you move the cursor around on a screen with only your EEG waves and 20 minutes of training.

Miniature fMRI will allow us to continue increasing the bandwidth between brain and computer, eventually allowing for a “mental typewriter” that converts thoughts into text. A tiny transmitter could send this to a bone-conduction device on the receiving person, letting them hear the message without sound. NASA is also working on a device to transcribe silent, “subvocal” speech. Like many transhumanist upgrades, these will probably start as efforts to help people who are handicapped, then evolve into powerful tools that can be used by anyone bold enough to adopt them.

7. Super-Strength

Early in 2006, scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Dr. Ray H. Baughman, developed artificial muscles 100 times stronger than our own, powered by alcohol and hydrogen. Leonid Taranenko, the former Soviet weightlifter, holds the world record for power lifting a 266 kg (586 lbs) dumbbell. If Leo’s natural muscles were replaced with Dr. Baughman’s synthetic polymer muscles, he could lift 26,600 kg, or about 30 tons. That’s equivalent to this yacht, the Nova Spirit.

Super-strength is an interesting area in that the technology to do it has already been invented — the only step remaining is actually weaving the fiber into a human body — which, today, would be complicated and messy, not to mention probably illegal.

However, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be done, probably within the next couple decades. Further improvements to the process could make it safe for normal people, numerous ethics questions notwithstanding. One benefit of improved muscles is that we’d be far less vulnerable to unfortunate accidents. They could also provide armor against bullets or other forms of attack. One downside is that people could use them to bully others around. Guess the good guys will need even bigger muscles.

6. Improved Appearance

In general, there is a lot of agreement as to who is attractive and who is less so. Numerous experiments have shown that while there are slight subjective differences in who we want to get with, we are biologically programmed to look for certain facial and physical features that correlate with increased fitness.

For the time being, this is unavoidable. The only way to change it would be to reach inside our neural circuitry and start severing connections. Until we choose to do that, we can improve our own lives — and the lives of those who have to look at us — by looking as pretty or handsome as possible. We brush our teeth, keep fit, take showers, and all that other great stuff that helps us score.

Some of us even visit the plastic surgeon, with mixed results. Surveys show that certain procedures, like liposuction, have very high patient satisfaction rates. As the safety and precision of our body modification technologies improves, we’ll be able to change our faces and bodies with minimal fuss, and maximal benefit.

Everyone will be able to be stunningly attractive. And the really great thing? We’ll always be able to enjoy it. If everyone becomes attractive, we won’t regard the slightly less attractive of the lot as “ugly” — our brain doesn’t work that way. An attractive person is attractive, whether or not others are around. A planet full of attractive people could do a lot to improve our quality of life.

5. Psychokinesis

In the real world, psychokinesis is a bunch of wishful thinking and pseudoscience. Despite the roughly 30% of people who think that it’s possible to affect objects through the mind alone, history and evidence make it clear that this is total nonsense. There are no psychics and there never have been. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t create technopsychics artificially.

By 2030, we’ll be cranking out utility fog — swarms of tiny machines that fly through the air and interlock with robotic arms. By combining brain-computer interfaces, like the type used by Claudia Mitchell to move her prosthetic arm, with utility fog, we will have direct-thought connections with powerful external robotics, allowing non-fictional psychokinesis. Utility fog, once all the necessary software for it is developed, will be capable of cooperating to perform practically any physical task or simulate a wide range of materials.

Because utility fog could be distributed at low density and still accomplish a lot, a room filled with utility fog would look empty, and people in it could move and breathe normally. They would only notice once the fog is activated — either by a central computer, or a neural interface. Once a connection is achieved, practically anything could be accomplished with the proper programming. Throwing objects through the air, hovering over the ground, cracking an egg from across the room, materializing orbs of energy — all the antics we’ve always wanted to perform, but never had the means to.

4. Autopoiesis/Allopoiesis

Autopoiesis is Greek for self-creation. Allopoiesis is other-creation. Our body engages in both all the time — we start as a fetus that creates itself until it becomes an adult, then, essentially stops. Our body produces things external to itself, but usually involving an extended process of cooperation with thousands of other human beings and the entire economy.

In the future, there will be cybernetic upgrades that allow for personal autopoietic and allopoietic manufacturing, probably based on molecular nanotechnology. Using whatever raw material is available, complex construction routines, and internal nanomanufacturing units, we’ll be able to literally breathe life into dirt. If our arms or legs get blown off, we’ll be able to use manufacturing modules in other parts of our body to regenerate them. Instead of building robots in a factory, we’ll build them ourselves. The possibilities are quite expansive, but this would require technology more sophisticated than anything discussed thus far in this list.

3. Flight

Human flight, outside of an airplane… this was recently achieved by former military pilot Yves Rossy, who flew 7,750 ft above the Alps in his 10 ft wide, self-designed aerofoil. You can see a video of it here. The airfoil weighs only 110 lbs and cost just under $300,000.

Over the next few decades, the weight will come down, the strength and flexibility will go up, and eventually it will be difficult to distinguish between people in aerofoils and people that can just fly whenever they want.

Using high strength-to-weight materials like fullerenes, we will fly using wings that weigh only a fraction of our own weight and fold into our clothing or body when not in use. Rossy achieved speeds of 115 mph, but with superior materials and greater tolerance for acceleration and wind, our cybernetic flight speeds are more likely to top 500 mph. To take off from the ground, we’ll simply use our super-muscles to jump to the highest object around and begin our flight from there. With personal flight, commercial airliners will become obsolete. The only problem left will be dodging each other.

2. Superintelligence

When we think of superintelligence, we tend to think of the ways it is portrayed in fiction — the character able to multiply 6 fifty digit numbers in his head, learn ten languages in a month, repeat the catch phrase “That’s not logical”, and other tired cliches. True superintelligence would be something radically different — a person able to see the obvious solution that the entire human race missed, conceive of and implement advanced plans or concepts that the greatest geniuses would never think of, understand and rewrite its own cognitive processes on the most fundamental level, and so on.

A cybernetic superintelligence would not just be another genius human, it would be something entirely superhuman — something that could completely change the world overnight. For the same reason that we can’t write a book with a character smarter than ourselves, we can’t imagine the thoughts or actions of a true superintelligence, because they’d be beyond us. Whether it is developed through uploading, neuroengineering, or artificial intelligence, remains to be seen.

1. Immortality

The ultimate upgrade would be physical immortality. Everything else pales by comparison. Today, there are already entire movements based around the idea. Realizing the possibility of immortality requires seeing a human being as a physical system — composed of working parts that cooperate to make up the whole, some of which have the tendency to get old and break down.

Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has identified seven causes of aging, which are believed to be comprehensive, because its been decades since a degenerative process has occurred in the body with an unknown cause. Defeating aging, then, would simply require addressing these one by one. They are: cell depletion, supernumerary cells, chromosomal mutations, mitochondrial mutations, cellular junk, extracellular junk, and protein cross-links. A few pioneering researchers are looking towards solutions, but accepting the possibility requires looking at aging as a disease and not as a necessary component of life.

First-Stage Nanoproducts and Nanoweaponry

Source:http://lifeboat.com/ex/nanoweaponry








Scatterplot of current R&D funding and scientists/engineers per capita in various countries.
The US, Japan, and China are clearly in the lead today — and China has declared nanotechnology to be a priority. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily reflect who will develop molecular manufacturing first. Here’s a bit from Ed Regis’ book Nano : The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology:

[Drexler’s] reasoning here was that if nanotechnology was going to be developed anyway, whether he helped it along or not, then it was crucial that it be invented here in America, or at least by one of the free democracies wherever they were located, East or West. This was crucial because the first nation to develop nanotechnology would thereby become the world’s dominant power, “the Leading Force”.

That nation, whoever it was, could build weapons that no other country would have defenses against. Its citizens would become healthy, wealthy, and young overnight. It would be Them against everyone else.

Moreover, it was not out of bounds to imagine one of the more unspoiled worldly monarchies being the first to develop nanotechnology. Nanotechnology research, after all, was not “big science” in the usual sense. You didn’t need anything like a Manhattan Project or an Apollo program or a Superconducting Supercollider effort to get the thing going. Conceivably, you could do it in a garage. You could do simulations of molecular machines on a personal computer; you could create billions of molecular structures in a test tube; you could custom-make DNA in a desktop synthesizer. All you needed for the great breakthrough was a laboratory, some extremely smart people and programming, and lots of luck at getting things right.

The above was written in 1995. “Healthy, wealthy and young” will perhaps not happen overnight, but after only a few years is indeed imaginable. Tabletop or industrial nanofactories would allow their owners to fabricate any quantity of medical equipment with raw materials and the engineering design being the only costs.

To truly defeat old age will require a thorough understanding of how the 7 mechanisms of senescence do damage and how to heal that damage without unhealthy side effects. Health will be boosted greatly by injecting ourselves with artificial antibodies and bacteriophages when they are developed, which should be before the closing of the second decade of this century. Wealth is probably the easiest item on the list to achieve, because what we consider wealth is largely based on material products, which can be manufactured in abundance when fabrication processes achieve high throughputs and are entirely automated.

Say you have a 10 kg nanofactory invented in an arbitrary country on January 1st, 2020. Let’s say that the design is similar to the Phoenix nanofactory, in which case we’ll work with the following assumptions:

The size, mass, energy requirement, and duplication time of this nanofactory design depend heavily on the properties of the fabricator. … a tabletop nanofactory (1x1x1/2 meters) might weigh 10 kg or less, produce 4 kg of diamondoid (~10.5 cm cube) in 3 hours, and require as little as fifteen hours to produce a duplicate nanofactory.

Say that this first nanofactory is used to make a duplicate nanofactory, then both nanofactories are used to make duplicates, and so on, until you have 200 million units, ready for distribution to the majority of households in the nation. How long would this take? Under 28 duplication cycles, or approximately 18 days. In our model that would be January 19th, 2020. Assuming another week for distribution, this would put nanofactories into most homes in under a month since the technology was initially completed.

To compare, the time it took for the Internet to be adopted by 50% of American households since its invention was about 15 years. The MP3 player and cell phone have arguably taken far less time to achieve 50% adoption, more like a few years. Nanofactories could achieve 50% adoption in weeks, possibly months or years if the price is kept artificially high, which is Michael Vassar’s scenario in his Corporate Cornucopia paper. In any case, once a nation has 200 million nanofactories and the necessary raw materials, it could theoretically fabricate 2.3 billion metric tons of product per year, mostly durable goods, a productivity rate much greater than those seen in contemporary economies.

Early nanofactories would likely have high power and feedstock requirements, so the exponential explosion outlined above would be rather delayed. The described model is partially based on the assumption that, unless a nanofactory has relatively low power requirements and can accept non-perfect feedstock, it isn’t really going to be mass produced anyway.

The question is, will the technology be available to everyone, or will it be guarded by a jealous few?

On the downside, restricting nanotechnology would have a horrible negative effect on many of the poorest people in the world, who have little access to housing, electricity, water, and other basic needs. Because the marginal cost of manufacturing an additional product using a nanofactory is so close to zero, people in poverty have the most to gain if nanotech is widely adopted, and the most to lose if it is restricted.

On the other hand, nanotech opens up a dangerous Pandora’s box of problems that few people have even begun to understand. Nanoengineered weapons are in fact one of the greatest threats to humanity’s future that have yet been imagined. Even if the threat of extinction were as low as 1/100, that’s a 1/100 chance of the entire human future being destroyed, a future that potentially consists of trillions and trillions of beings experiencing worthwhile lives.

It would be ethically prudent to hold back this technology until we can be better reassured that we can handle it with minimal risk. Unfortunately, in the real world you can’t hold back a technology once international research gets started and investors are pouring money into it, which has already happened for nano. The upshot is that it might actually be beneficial for humanity if nanotechnology did end up being released to the public slowly, or in low-performance versions that make for a more fluid transition from manufacturing technologies of the past. But is that really practical once other companies and governments see the tremendous power of the technology and start developing their own versions?


By 2020, and potentially as early as 2010, we will know enough about carbon chemistry, kinematic self-replication, and nanoscale positional control to build a desktop nanofactory — a machine that uses many trillions of tiny arms to put together macro-scale products. Because tiny arms can move incredibly fast, they will be radically productive. It has been estimated that a 100 kg nanofactory will be able to manufacture its own weight in product in about three hours, perhaps less.


Nanofactory technology will begin with an assembler — a reprogrammable molecular machine capable of making a copy of itself. An assembler would be extremely small, composed of maybe a couple million atoms. This is about the same as a ribosome. For a reference, see this picture of some nanoparts next to a virus:


An assembler would basically be an artificial ribosome. Ribosomes are the little machines in the cell that manufacture every protein in your body. Its basic design hasn’t changed in over a billion years.

Feasibility arguments for molecular nanotechnology (MNT) are well-documented in the literature. Its not a question of if, but when. The technological and sociological impact of personal nanofactories (PNs) is certain to be extreme. If regulations permit it, you will be able to construct, right in your very home, just about any structure allowed by the laws of chemistry and available feedstock.

All current manufacturing, communication, and transportation processes will be fundamentally restructured over a period of mere years or even months. The first nanofactories are likely to use carbon feedstock, meaning most of the products will be made out of diamond. Water may be used as a ballast for some diamond products.

Products built using MNT will be extremely cheap: around the cost of their raw materials. This is because human labor, the primary cost of manufacturing today, is largely subtracted from the equation. Carbon is extremely cheap, and can be mined by the megaton from practically anywhere. Power requirements are modest. Made of diamond, a nanofactory will not require much maintenance.

Quickly, typical products made of plastic, ceramic, or metal will be redesigned to accommodate the new diamondoid medium. There will be diamond plates, diamond tables, diamond cutlery, ovens, coffee makers, microwaves, tiles, walls, chairs, televisions, cameras, printers, scanners, shelving, windows, computers, pens, notepads, pottery, showerheads, and so on. Something like 90% of all manufactured products will be replaced by diamondoid versions. This is what Neal Stephenson was thinking when he wrote a book called The Diamond Age.


The father of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, lists a few things which would become possible with MNT:

• desktop computers with a billion processors
• inexpensive, efficient solar energy systems
• medical devices able to destroy pathogens and repair tissues
• materials 100 times stronger than steel
• superior military systems
• additional molecular manufacturing systems

MNT has been called “magic”, and the word choice is not entirely inappropriate. We will be able to build products with greater performance and more diverse functionality than anything you or any university Ph.Ds have imagined. All shortages of energy, food, water, and shelter will be rapidly solved, as long as nanofactories are made available to developing countries. Subdermal heaters, nanoproducts designed to do little more than generate waste heat, will eliminate the problem of obesity practically overnight.

The size and range of products will be limited only by whatever regulations are built into the first round of nanofactories. Hopefully these regulations will be extremely strict. You see, nanofactories will be the most dangerous technology that mankind has ever faced, thousands of times more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Given an unrestricted nanofactory and a few million dollars worth of programming and engineering, here are a few products that you could manufacture in almost arbitrary quantities, given a couple months manufacturing time:

• Sniper rifles that weigh less than 5 kg, capable of firing a lethal projectile at Mach 10 towards any target within my line of sight.
• Extremely light and strong armor capable of stopping 10 kg explosive shells moving at 10 km/sec.
• Metal Storm systems which fire as many as 1,000,000 projectiles per minute through ballistics arrays.
• UAV swarms capable of actively neutralizing very large rockets, providing comprehensive area denial, working together to disassemble buildings, etc.
• Highly maneuverable VTOL craft able to destroy almost any number of F-22 Raptors or F-35 Lightnings.
• Gigawatt-class, solar array or nuclear-powered microwave beams capable of completely melting tanks, aircraft, destroyers, incoming missiles, etc. from hundreds of miles away.
• Isotope separation systems that enrich uranium efficiently, at great speeds, giving enough fissile material to make bombs in days rather than years.
• Gigantic lenses capable of redirecting sunlight towards arbitrary coordinates in extremely high concentrations; a solar furnace.
• Missile swarms composed of individual missiles about 1 meter long, carrying 1 kg warheads, manufactured by the millions, capable of traveling through the upper atmosphere and surviving reentry.

Because products made out of diamond can be extremely strong and light, 100 kg of carbon gives you a very large bang for your buck. For example, a Mercedes S-class today weighs about 2,000 kg, but with diamondoid building materials, this weight could be reduced tremendously, if desired — the primary motivation to preserve the vehicle’s current weight would be the preservation of inertia, rather than engineering limitations. An automobile made out of nanodiamond could have an absurdly low weight, on the order of a hundredth of an ounce, not including fuel. If this sounds fantastic to you, take a look at what is already possible today:

This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick weighing 2.5 kg. The aerogel’s density is 0.1 g/cm³.

Anyway, the point of all this is simple: nanofactories need to be extremely restricted in the products they can build, or there are going to be big problems. The open source, anti-digital rights management, P2P-generation needs to get this. Information may want to be free, but if weapons designs are readily available and manufacturable in the post-MNT world, there are going to be problems of the likes we’ve never seen.

To minimize the risk of danger, the safest option is to have all product designs authenticated by a central authority. Yes, that scary phrase, “central authority”. This central authority needs to be capable of determining which designs are safe, maintaining an extremely high level of nanofactory security, and enforcing the law when people try to circumvent it. The libertarian dream of minimalist government, unfortunately, must be discarded.

When it comes to managing magic, decentralized solutions simply won’t do. There needs to be a global standard and global regulations. Rogue states won’t do, either. One rogue nation could use MNT to manufacture enough weapons to turn the capitals of any opposing nation, no matter how large, into a series of smoking craters. This is a risk we shouldn’t be willing to take, and once the potential of MNT starts to sink in with higher-level government officials, they won’t.

Life extensionists: realize that the greatest risk to living longer is not actually aging, which we will eventually defeat cleanly, but existential risks of the type we frequently discuss, including superintelligence and nanotech arms races. You can extend your expected future life more by lowering the probability of these disasters than through any other means.

What are the Benefits of Mind Uploading?

Source:http://lifeboat.com/ex/benefits.of.mind.uploading

 

Overview

Universal mind uploading, or universal uploading for short, is the concept, by no means original to me, that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, or living in houses. The concept is rather infrequently discussed, due to a combination of 1) its supposedly speculative nature and 2) its “far future” time frame.

Discussion

Before I explore the idea, let me give a quick description of what mind uploading is and why the two roadblocks to its discussion are invalid. Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds.

If functionalism is true, like many cognitive scientists and philosophers correctly believe, then all the features of human consciousness that we know and love — including all our memories, personality, and sexual quirks — would be preserved through the transition. By simultaneously disassembling the protein brain as the computer brain is constructed, only one implementation of the person in question would exist at any one time, eliminating any unnecessary confusion.

Still, even if two direct copies are made, the universe won’t care — you would have simply created two identical individuals with the same memories. The universe can’t get confused — only you can. Regardless of how perplexed one may be by contemplating this possibility for the first time from a 20th century perspective of personal identity, an upload of you with all your memories and personality intact is no different from you than the person you are today is different than the person you were yesterday when you went to sleep, or the person you were 10^-30 seconds ago when quantum fluctuations momentarily destroyed and recreated all the particles in your brain.

Regarding objections to talk of uploading, for anyone who 1) buys the silicon brain replacement thought experiment, 2) accepts arguments that the human brain operates at below about 10¹⁹ ops/sec, and 3) considers it plausible that 10¹⁹ ops/sec computers (plug in whatever value you believe for #2) will become manufactured this century, the topic is clearly worth broaching.

Even if it’s 100 years off, that’s just a blink of an eye relative to the entirety of human history, and universal uploading would be something more radical than anything that’s occurred with life or intelligence in the entire known history of this solar system. We can afford to stop focusing exclusively on the near future for a potential event of such magnitude. Consider it intellectual masturbation, if you like, or a serious analysis of the near-term future of the human species, if you buy the three points.

So, say that mind uploading becomes available as a technology sometime around 2050. If the early adopters don’t go crazy and/or use their newfound abilities to turn the world into a totalitarian dictatorship, then they will concisely and vividly communicate the benefits of the technology to their non-uploaded family and friends. If affordable, others will then follow, but the degree of adoption will necessarily depend on whether the process is easily reversible or not. But suppose that millions of people choose to go for it.

Effects

Widespread uploading would have huge effects. Let’s go over some of them in turn…




1) Massive economic growth. By allowing human minds to run on substrates that can be accelerated by the addition of computing power, as well as the possibility of spinning off non-conscious “daemons” to accomplish rote tasks, economic growth — at least insofar as it can be accelerated by intelligence and the robotics of 2050 alone — will accelerate greatly.

Instead of relying upon 1% per year population growth rates, humans might copy themselves or (more conducive to societal diversity) spin off already-mature progeny as quickly as available computing power allows. This could lead to growth rates in human capital of 1,000% per year or far more. More economic growth might ensue in the first year (or month) after uploading than in the entire 250,000 years between the evolution of Homo sapiens and the invention of uploading. The first country that widely adopts the technology might be able to solve global poverty by donating only 0.1% of its annual GDP.


 
2) Intelligence enhancement. Faster does not necessarily mean smarter. “Weak superintelligence” is a term sometimes used to describe accelerated intelligence that is not qualitatively enhanced, in contrast with “strong superintelligence” which is. The road from weak to strong superintelligence would likely be very short.

By observing information flows in uploaded human brains, many of the details of human cognition would be elucidated. Running standard compression algorithms over such minds might make them more efficient than blind natural selection could manage, and this extra space could be used to introduce new information-processing modules with additional features. Collectively, these new modules could give rise to qualitatively better intelligence. At the very least, rapid trial-and-error experimentation without the risk of injury would become possible, eventually revealing paths to qualitative enhancements.




3) Greater subjective well-being. Like most other human traits, our happiness set points fall on a bell curve. No matter what happens to us, be it losing our home or winning the lottery, there is a tendency for our innate happiness level to revert back to our natural set point.

Some lucky people are innately really happy. Some unlucky people have chronic depression. With uploading, we will be able to see exactly which neural features (“happiness centers”) correspond to high happiness set points and which don’t, by combining prior knowledge with direct experimentation and investigation. This will make it possible for people to reprogram their own brains to raise their happiness set points in a way that biotechnological intervention might find difficult or dangerous.

Experimental data and simple observation has shown that high happiness set-point people today don’t have any mysterious handicaps, like inability to recognize when their body is in pain, or inappropriate social behavior. They still experience sadness, it’s just that their happiness returns to a higher level after the sad experience is over. Perennial tropes justifying the value of suffering will lose their appeal when anyone can be happier without any negative side effects.




4) Complete environmental recovery. (I’m not just trying to kiss up to greens, I actually care about this.) By spending most of our time as programs running on a worldwide network, we will consume far less space and use less energy and natural resources than we would in a conventional human body. Because our “food” would be delicious cuisines generated only by electricity or light, we could avoid all the environmental destruction caused by clear-cutting land for farming and the ensuing agricultural runoff.

People imagine dystopian futures to involve a lot of homogeneity… well, we’re already here as far as our agriculture is concerned. Land that once had diverse flora and fauna now consists of a few dozen agricultural staples — wheat, corn, oats, cattle pastures, factory farms. BORING. By transitioning from a proteinaceous to a digital substrate, we’ll do more for our environment than any amount of conservation ever could. We could still experience this environment by inputting live-updating feeds of the biosphere into a corner of our expansive virtual worlds. It’s the best of both worlds, literally — virtual and natural in harmony.


 
5) Escape from direct governance by the laws of physics. Though this benefit sounds more abstract or philosophical, if we were to directly experience it, the visceral nature of this benefit would become immediately clear. In a virtual environment, the programmer is the complete master of everything he or she has editing rights to. A personal virtual sandbox could become one’s canvas for creating the fantasy world of their choice. Today, this can be done in a very limited fashion in virtual worlds such as Second Life. (A trend which will continue to the fulfillment of everyone’s most escapist fantasies, even if uploading is impossible.)

Worlds like Second Life are still limited by their system-wide operating rules and their low resolution and bandwidth. Any civilization that develops uploading would surely have the technology to develop virtual environments of great detail and flexibility, right up to the very boundaries of the possible. Anything that can become possible will be. People will be able to experience simulations of the past, “travel” to far-off stars and planets, and experience entirely novel worldscapes, all within the flickering bits of the worldwide network.


 
6) Closer connections with other human beings. Our interactions with other people today is limited by the very low bandwidth of human speech and facial expressions. By offering partial readouts of our cognitive state to others, we could engage in a deeper exchange of ideas and emotions. I predict that “talking” as communication will become passé — we’ll engage in much deeper forms of informational and emotional exchange that will make the talking and facial expressions of today seem downright empty and soulless.

Spiritualists often talk a lot about connecting closer to one another — are they aware that the best way they can go about that would be to contribute to researching neural scanning or brain-computer interfacing technology? Probably not.




7) Last but not least, indefinite lifespans. Here is the one that detractors of uploading are fond of targeting — the fact that uploading could lead to practical immortality. Well, it really could. By being a string of flickering bits distributed over a worldwide network, killing you could become extremely difficult. The data and bits of everyone would be intertwined — to kill someone, you’ll either need complete editing privileges of the entire worldwide network, or the ability to blow up the planet.

Needless to say, true immortality would be a huge deal, a much bigger deal than the temporary fix of life extension therapies for biological bodies, which will do very little to combat infectious disease or exotic maladies such as being hit by a truck.

Conclusion

It’s obvious that mind uploading would be incredibly beneficial. As stated near the beginning of this post, only three things are necessary for it to be a big deal — 1) that you believe a brain could be incrementally replaced with functionally identical implants and retain its fundamental characteristics and identity, 2) that the computational capacity of the human brain is a reasonable number, very unlikely to be more than 10¹⁹ ops/sec, and 3) that at some point in the future we’ll have computers that fast. Not so far-fetched. Many people consider these three points plausible, but just aren’t aware of their implications.

If you believe those three points, then uploading becomes a fascinating goal to work towards. From a utilitarian perspective, it practically blows everything else away besides global risk mitigation, as the number of new minds leading worthwhile lives that could be created using the technology would be astronomical.

The number of digital minds we could create using the matter on Earth alone would likely be over a quadrillion, more than 2,500 people for every star in the 400 billion star Milky Way. We could make a “Galactic Civilization” right here on Earth in the late 21st or 22nd century. I can scarcely imagine such a thing, but I can imagine that we’ll be guffawing heartily as how unambitious most human goals were in the year 2010.