Download your Brain

So I had an interesting conversation at work with the head engineer about an article he read that talks about how our computing power will become powerful enough to be able to 'download' the human brain, effectively eliminating death. I mean, the biological body will still cease to function and it will still die but we are more than our bodies, right? So the part that makes us us will continue on.



But the question arises, what will we do as a downloaded entity. Immediately ideas of androids and robotic bodies come to mind. Or transference into newly 'grown' bodies/shells. My boss was joking around with the idea that all he'd given is a toaster. Or would you continue to be trapped as just data bits sitting on a flash drive in some data bank. Maybe the data would be shuffled together into a giant collective consciousness. (Boss inserted references to the Borg here.)

Then the topic came up about penchant plans and retirement. I offered the idea that as data, you really don't need money, so as soon as your biological body kicked it, you'd stop receiving money. Or maybe the artificial body would be the penchant. But if you are given a body, you could once more become productive and start earning money again. You wouldn't need to spend it on food if it was robotic, but there would still be a cost for energy and maintenance.

The economic opportunities that come with a second life would be good for the economy and for people, well, until we flood the workplace with second life robots. But their capabilities would be much different from the flesh and blood people. There would be more opportunity for space travel once organic limits are removed.

But the social reaction would be great to. At first this technology would only be available for the rich and powerful. So it would be a sign of status. Then there would be the obvious difference between organics and second lifers. There would be anger from the organics over the second lifers 'hanging around' and taking jobs and why only some people get to stay and not to mention the religious aspect of cheating death and living beyond the mortal body. There's a question of what a soul is. Is it connected to the mind or to the body and what would happen to it in digital form?

There is a lot of work that goes into exploring this concept, mostly found in science fiction of course. Two notable examples from my repertoire would be the book Old Man's War and the anime Ghost in the Shell. Old Man's War focuses more on the second life idea where Ghost in the Shell focuses on androids and electronic consciousnesses. But neither really focus on the process that got the societies to that point (like most science fiction).

Experts say that we will have the capability to download a brain by 2045, but we will really be able to? Will we really want to?



And I was going to leave it with that poignant question, but instantly my brain started swirling. What if people were being forced, what if people were being downloaded without permission? Very Matrix like crossed with a Doctor Who episode. There are too many what ifs in science fiction and so many more answers to each time it's asked.