by Oliver Waters
The first article of this series argued that in principle we should expect our personal identities to survive a transition to artificial brains. Obviously there remains the minor technical problem of how to actually build such brains. The most popular conception of how to approach this is known as ‘whole brain emulation’, which entails replicating the precise functional architecture of our current brains with synthetic components.
This is a cautious approach, in that the closer the design of your new brain to your old one, the more confident you can be that every precious memory and personality trait has been copied over. However, this also means copying over all the limitations and flaws that evolution bestowed upon our biological brains. Yes, you won’t have to worry about your cells ageing anymore – a definite upside! But you will remain stuck with outdated structures like the amygdala and hippocampus as well as the convoluted circuitry linking them together. It would be like upgrading your 1950s classic car engine with all new modern parts. It’s still the same, inefficient, loud, polluting machine, just shinier and more durable.
This is why we will choose to design far more advanced brains instead. Though this raises a risk of its own: what if we create kinds of minds that are far more powerful than our current ones and they destroy us before we have a chance to upgrade ourselves to rival them?
This is known as the ‘existential risk’ posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI). Read more »