Artificial IntelligenceI'm sure that Hans Moravec is at least as sane as I am, but he cert

Artificial Intelligence

I'm sure that Hans Moravec is at least as sane as I am, but he certainly brought to mind the classic mad scientist as we sat in his fifth-floor office at Carnegie-Mellon University on a dark and stormy night. It was nearly midnight, and he mixed for each of us a bowl of chocolate milk and Cheerios, with slices of banana piled on top.

Then, with banana-slicing knife in hand, Moravec, the senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Mobile Robot Laboratory, outlined for me how he could create a robotic immortality for Everyman, a deathless universe in which life would go on forever. By creating computer copies of our minds and transferring, or downloading, this program into robotic bodies, Moravec explained, humans could survive for centuries.

"You are in an operating room. A robot brain surgeon is in attendance ... Your skull but not your brain is anesthetized (麻醉). You are fully conscious. The surgeon opens your braincase and peers inside." This is how Moravec described the process in a paper he wrote called "Robots That Rove". The robotic surgeon's attention is directed at a small clump of about one hundred neurons somewhere near the surface. Using high-resolution 3-D nuclear-magnetic-resonance holography, phased-array radio encephalography, and ultrasonic radar, the surgeon determines the three-dimensional structure and chemical makeup of that neural clump. It writes a program that models the behavior. of the clump and starts it running on a small portion of the computer sitting next to you.

That computer sitting next to you in the operating room would in effect be your new brain. As each area of your brain was analyzed and simulated, the accuracy of the simulation would be tested as you pressed a button to shift between the area of the brain just copied and the simulation. When you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copy, the surgeon would transfer the simulation of your brain into the new, computerized one and repeat the process on the next area of your biological brain.

"Though you have not lost consciousness or even your train of thought, your mind--some would say soul--has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine," Moravec said, "In a final step your old body is disconnected. The computer is installed in a shiny new one, in the style, color, and material of your choice."

As we sat around Moravec's office I asked what would become of the original human body after the downloading. "You just don't bother waking it up again if the copying went successfully." he said. "It's so messy. Humans have got so many problems that you might just want to leave it retired. You don't take your Junker car out if you've got a new one."

Moravec's idea is the ultimate in life insurance. Once one copy of the brain's contents has been made, it will be easy to make multiple backup copies, and these could be stashed in hiding places around the world, allowing you to embark on any sort of adventure without having to worry about aging or death. As decades pass into centuries you could travel the globe and then the solar system and beyond--always keeping an eye out for the latest in robotic bodies into which you could transfer your computer mind.

If living forever weren't enough, you could live forever several times over by activating some of your backup copies and sending different versions of yourself out to see the world. "You could have parallel experiences and merge the memories later," Moravec explained.

In the weeks and months that followed my stay at Carnegie-Mellon, I was intrigued by how many researchers seemed to believe downloading would come to pass. The only point of disagreement was when--certainly a big consideration to those of us still knocking around in mortal bodies. Although some of the researchers I spoke with at Carnegie-Mellon,

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