Mind Uploading: could we transfer our mind into a machine?
17 October 2019 | Written by La redazione
It sounds like science fiction but some researchers believe it's technically feasible: there's just one super computer missing
We have seen it done hundreds of times in movies and science fiction books: people transformed into robots, back-up of their own conscience, cloud rescues of the self and simulations of human minds that are indistinguishable from real ones. Will we ever extract this technology from the world of fiction and crystallize it in the real world?
Is it possible to transfer the mind to a machine? According to some researchers the answer is yes, we simply lack the computing power to do it. The human mind is a complex machine, very complex, billions and billions of neurons communicate with each other at unimaginable speeds, continually creating and undoing connections, thoughts, memories and reasoning, forming our ego in a few words. What would it take to take that set of electrical impulses that jump from one synapse to another, transform them into a very long string of binary code, made of 0 and 1, and transfer them to a computer?
A super-supercomputer. If we wanted to, speculating on the actual computing needs for the execution of a human mind loaded on a technological support, these are very difficult to quantify, mainly because we do not yet know our own brain in sufficient depth. Several estimates, however, suggest that to simulate a human mind a computer still far from our computing power would be needed.
According to Henry Markram, chief researcher of the “Blue Brain Project” – a research project that aims to create a computer reconstruction of the functioning of the elements that make up the mouse brain (and possibly also the human brain) – “will be very difficult because, in the brain, each molecule has a capacity comparable to that of a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of billions of billions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern their interactions. We need computers that are thousands of billions of times larger and faster than anything that exists today. ”
Yet, efforts in this direction continue and every year there is a small step towards the creation of a machine capable, if possible, of simulating a human mind.
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