The future of the mind – uploaded to computers?

H+ Magazine recently interviewed AI researcher, Bruce Katz, who believes that we as a species will ultimately want to be free of the limitations of the human brain, which by extension means uploading our memory and consciousness to a different device, a computer of some sort.

Katz describes the brain as having a kludgy design and lays out those ‘kludges’ in his book, Neuroengineering the Future. They include:

  • Short-term memory limitations (typically seven plus or minus 2 items),
  • Significant long-term memory limitations (the brain can only hold about as much as a PC hard disk circa 1990),
  • Strong limitations on processing speed (although the brain is a highly parallel system, each neuron is a very slow processor),
  • Bounds on rationality (we are less than fully impartial processors, sometimes significantly so),
  • Bounds on creativity (most people go through their entire lives without making a significant creative contribution to humanity), and perhaps most significantly…

It will still be a while before we’re able to do this. Let’s face it, imperfect or not, the human skull does a pretty good job of protecting that delicate piece of meat we call a brain, and we hardly think about it.