Brain Uploading and Virtual Consciousness: A Comprehensive Analysis of Future Digital Life

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Some day we may have robots as smart as people. Artificial intelligence, AI, how could that happen? One route is that we'll just keep accumulating better software like we've been doing for 70 years at past rates of progress that may take centuries. Some say it'll happen a lot faster as we discover grand new powerful theories of intelligence. I'm skeptical but a third scenario is what I'm going to talk about today. The idea is to port the software from the human brain. To do this we're going to need three technologies to be good enough and none of them are there yet. First we're going to need lots of cheap fast parallel computers. Second we're going to need to scan individual human brains and find spatial and chemical detail to see exactly what cells are where connected or what type. And third we're going to need computer models about how each kind of brain cell works, taking input signals, changing internal state, and sending output signals. We have good enough models of all the kinds of brain cells and a good enough model of the brain; we can put it together to make a good enough model of an entire brain and that model would have the same input-output behavior as the original.

People have been talking about this idea for decades under the name of uploads; I want to call them M's. When they talk about it they ask: is this even possible? If you made one would it be conscious or is it just an empty machine? If you made one of me, is that me or someone else? These are all fascinating questions that I'm going to ignore because I see a neglected question: what would actually happen? I became obsessed with this question. I spent four years trying to analyze it using standard academic tools to guess what would happen, and I'm here to tell you what I found. But be warned: I'm not offering inspiration, I'm offering analysis. I see my job as telling you what's most likely to happen if we did the least to avoid it. If you aren't at least a bit disturbed by something I tell you here, you're just not paying attention.

The first thing I can tell you is that M has been most of their life in virtual reality. This is what you might look like if you were using virtual reality, and this is what you might see: sunlight limping off of water, goals flying above, you might even feel the wind on your cheeks or smell sea water with advanced hardware. Now, if you spend a lot of time here, you might want a dashboard where you could do things like make a phone call, move to a new virtual world, or check your bank account. While this is what you would look like in virtual reality, this is what an M would look like when virtual reality. It's computer hardware sitting in a server rack somewhere, but it could still see and experience the same thing. Some things are different for M's. First, while you'll probably always notice that virtual reality isn't entirely real, to an M it can feel as real to them as this room feels to you now or as anything ever feels. And M's also have more action possibilities. For example, your mind just always runs at the same speed, but an M can add more or less computer hardware to run faster or slower and therefore, if the world around them seems to be going too fast, they can just speed up their mind and the world around them will seem to slow down.

In addition, an M can make a copy of itself at that moment. This copy will remember everything the same, and if it starts out with the same speed, it may even be told it is the copy. And M can make archive copies; with enough redundant archives, an M can be immortal, in principle though not usually in practice. And an M can move its brain, the computer that represents its brain, from one physical location to another. M's can actually move around the world at the speed of light, and by moving to a new location they can interact more quickly with M's near that new location. So far I've been talking about what M's can do. What do M's choose to do? To understand that, we need to understand three key facts. First, M's by definition do what the human they emulate would do in the same situation. So their lives and behaviors are very human. They're mainly different because they're living in a different world.

Second, M's need real resources to survive. You need food and shelter or you'll die. Also, M's need computer hardware, energy, and cooling or they can't exist. For every subjective minute that an M experiences, someone usually had to work to pay for it. Third, M's report. The M population can grow quicker than the M economy, so that means wages fall down to M's subsistence levels. That means M's have to be working most of the time. So that means this is what M's usually see: beautiful and luxurious, but desks. They're working most of the time. Now, a subsistence wage scenario might seem exotic and strange, but it's actually the usual case in human history and it's how pretty much all wild animals have ever lived. Humans basically do what it takes to survive. And this is what lets me say so much about the M world.

When creatures are rich like you, you have to know a lot about what they want to figure out what they do. When creatures are poor, you know that they mostly do what it takes to survive. So we've been talking about the M world from the point of view of the M's, and now let's step back and look at their whole world. First, the M world grows much faster than ours, roughly a hundred times faster. So the same amount of change we would experience in a century or two, they would experience in a year or two. Second, the typical emulation runs even faster, roughly a thousand times human speed. So for them, they experience thousands of years in this year or two, and for them the world around M's actually changes more slowly than your world seems to change for you. Third, M's are crammed together in a small number of very dense areas. This is not only how they see themselves in virtual reality, it's also how they actually are physically crammed together. So at M speeds, physical travel feels really painfully slow. Most M cities are self-sufficient. Most war is cyber war, and most of the rest of the Earth away from the M cities is less important to humans because the M's really aren't that interested in it.

Humans must retire at once or soon. They just can't compete. Humans start out owning all of the capital in this world and the economy grows very fast. Their wealth grows very fast. Humans get rich collectively. Most humans today don't actually own that much besides their ability to work. So between now and then they need to acquire sufficient assets, insurance, or sharing arrangements, or they may starve. Now you might wonder why would M's let humans exist? Why not kill them and take their stuff? But notice we have many unproductive retirees around us today. We don't kill them and take their stuff. In part, that's because it would disrupt the institutions we share with them. Other groups would wonder who's next. So plausibly, M's may well let humans retire in peace during the age of M. You should worry more that the age of M only lasts a year or two and you don't know what happens next.

M's are very much like humans, but they are not like the typical human. The typical M is a copy of the few hundred most productive humans. So in fact they are as elite compared to the typical human as a typical billionaire, Nobel Prize winner, medalist, or head of state. M's look on humans perhaps with nostalgia and gratitude but not so much respect, which is similar to how you think about your ancestors. We know many things about how humans differ in terms of productivity. We can just use those to predict features of M's: for example, they tend to be smart, conscientious, hardworking, married, religious, middle-aged. M world also contains enormous variety. Not only does it continue with most of the kinds of variety that humans do, including variety of industry and profession, they also have many new kinds of variety. One of the most important is mind speed. M's can plausibly go from human speed up to a million times faster than human speed and down to a billion times slower than human speed. Faster M's tend to have markers of high status, embody more wealth, win arguments, and sit at premium locations. Slower M's are mostly retirees and they are like the ghosts of our literature. If you recall, ghosts are all around us. You can interact with them if you pay the price, but they don't know much and can't influence much, and they're obsessed with the past.

What's the point? M's also have more variety in the structure of their lives. This is your life. You start in the UN. This is the life of an M who every day lets off some short-term copies to do short-term tasks and then ends. This M will talk more about those short-term task versions in a moment, but they are much more efficient because they don't have to rest for the next day. This M is more opportunistic. They make more copies than cells when there's more demand for that. They don't know which way their future is going. This is an M designer who conceives a large system and then breaks it recursively into copies who elaborate that so M's can implement larger, more careful designs. This is an organization plumber who remembers that every day for the last 20 years they only ever worked two hours a day. A life of leisure. But what really happened is every day it had a thousand copies, each of whom did a two-hour plumbing job, and only one of them went on to the next day. Objectively they're working well over 99% of the time. Subjectively they remember a life of leisure. This could be you. You start in UN. Some people do this, taking a drug that meant they would not remember that party ever after that day. Towards the end of the party, will you say to yourself 'I'm about to die, this is terrible, that person tomorrow isn't me because they won't remember what I do'? Or you could say 'I will go on tomorrow; I just don't remember what I did.' This is an M who splits off a short-term copy to do a short-term task, and they have the same two attitude possibilities. They can say 'I'm a new short-term creature with a short life; I hate this.' Or they can say 'I am part of a larger creature who won't remember this part.' I predict they'll have that second attitude not because it's philosophically correct but because it helps them get along in this world.