| rdfs:comment | - Artificial intelligence is hard. Why reinvent the wheel, when you've got plenty of humans walking around? Who will miss one, right? Alternatively, you might be one of those humans looking for easy Immortality. Either way, once you finish scanning the brain, you end up with a file that you run in a physics simulator, and presto, you have a computer that remembers being a human. If you do it carefully enough, the original brain won't even notice it happening. There's also a pile of legal, moral, and theological questions that might be addressed in the story:
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| abstract | - Artificial intelligence is hard. Why reinvent the wheel, when you've got plenty of humans walking around? Who will miss one, right? Alternatively, you might be one of those humans looking for easy Immortality. Either way, once you finish scanning the brain, you end up with a file that you run in a physics simulator, and presto, you have a computer that remembers being a human. If you do it carefully enough, the original brain won't even notice it happening. This computer has a number of advantages over a meat human. The simulation can be run many thousands of times faster than objective speed, if you've got enough computing power. It can be backed up with trivial ease. You can run multiple copies at the same time, and have them do different things, make exotic personality composites, and tinker around with the inner workings of the brain in ways that are either difficult or impossible to do with a meat brain. These advantages are a bit overwhelming if you're trying to incorporate brain uploading into a story. It kind of kills the tension when the protagonist can restore from backup whenever the Big Bad kills them. Authors have devised a number of cop-outs, which you can recognize by asking these questions:
* What is the underlying mechanism of the upload? Is the computer simulating every atom in every neuron, or is the upload applying memories and personality characteristics to a default template?
* Is uploading destructive? Depending on which process you use, it may be possible, but many authors deem it convenient to have it destroy the original, to avoid the confusion of having two copies of the same character running around.
* Can you augment intelligence? Or does the brain's pattern need to be copied exactly to still function like a mind, leaving no room for radical enhancements?
* Can the upload be copied? If the answer is "no", the work might be on the soft end of Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness, although it's also possible to make it a little harder by running the AIs on a quantum computer and saying something about the "No-Cloning Theorem". There's also a pile of legal, moral, and theological questions that might be addressed in the story:
* Is the AI considered to be the same person as its human predecessor or a digital twin? Is it a person at all? If an upload is a person, how different do copies of that upload have to be before they're separate persons?
* Is one copy responsible for the debts and/or crimes incurred or committed by another copy? Is the original responsible, assuming nondestructive uploading?
* Assuming nondestructive, undetectable uploading, is uploading without consent of the original a crime? What if the original objects, but the upload doesn't want to be deleted? What about uploading dead people who specified they didn't want to be uploaded after death?
* What do you do with the backups of an upload who commits suicide?
* Would the soul be copied over? Is there a soul at all to be copied? While some people might see the debunking of mind-body separation as just another case of science marching on, a great deal of people would find the idea that even their mind is quantifiable to be rather frightening. Or worse, would see those who go through with the upload as less than human, and campaign for a ban of the procedure for it violating human dignity or some other such nonsense. Widespread Brain Uploading tends to lead to The Singularity or something very much like it. Or it may be a result of said Singularity. Compare with the Virtual Ghost, where the uploaded brain can control a projection of themselves to interact with the real world. Contrast Neural Implanting, where computer files are uploaded to the brain instead of the other way around, though both tropes are occasionally used together. See also Heart Drive and Body Backup Drive. Compare Living Memory. Also compare Save Scumming. This article from The Other Wiki contains a list of examples...
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