I am watching a show right now about robotics and there is a guy speaking about the "singularity" where robots will become so advanced they will be smarter than us. he says the Robotic brain would think at light speed where ours only does chemical speed, which he explains as the robot would be able to get a PhD in literally minutes. Now if we can't stop the robots from getting that advanced (which seems idiotic we could simply stop developing it) why not start developing human cybernetics. Have you ever watched Ghost In The Shell? I doubt it would ever be that extensive but thats the idea, if we could develop a cybernetic brain (transferring our consciousness to it we could develop faster than the robots and keep on top. That is if this "Singularity" ever does happen. What do you think? is it possible?

As long as it improves society as a whole then I would support it. My only objection would be that these enhancements would be rather expensive and would mean that only the rich or highly ranked civil servants would receive them. If rich parents could cybernetically enhance their children so they had a massive advantage over non-cyborg children there would be a greater division of social classes. Sounds a bit silly but we are talking about cyborgs here.

The cyberbrains in GiTS aren't actually silicon-based per se. They are artificially augmented human brains. So still chemically bound, speed wise.

Essentially your premise is this:
1. Robots will eventually develop human-level consciousness and surpass it (timeline for this is probably anywhere from 20 years to 100 years away, depending on who you ask).
2. This is bad (robots are smarter than humans).
Your solution:
Develop a silicon-based brain that can accept squishy brain patterns.

Possible? Sure. Let's assume for simplicities sake that the human brain can store roughly 10 terabytes worth of data (this is an overestimate). So storage isn't the hard part. What's difficult is figuring out how to properly scan and map out a human brain - something that is currently being worked on right now. Once that scanning is down to such a level where a human brain can be scanned as it thinks and that scanning can be properly ported to a storage medium that can likewise continue to allow that construct to think as a human would (i.e. not simple storage) then you would have a human-mapped cyberbrain that would be the same speed as a cyberbrain whose mind was purely artificial in nature.

Of course, that possibility opens up a whole can of worms regarding natural humans versus cyborgs. Biiig questions there, many of which likely can't be discussed on this forum.

psh... I'll blow a hole through the dumb robot with a freaking shot gun. Lets see how smart it is then..

I guess you've never seen The Terminator. :whistling:

:lmao: good one...

but seriously, if something like that was going to happen, I'd hope somebody would stop it.. It couldn't possibly lead to any good. at first, sure, they would show you all the possibilities , but they would be all the positive ones, with no mention of the negative outcomes to the public.

Who's to say they would be hostile? Coexistence is a possibility. Worse case scenario, we become robots or die by them.

That silicon digital brain would essentially be a robot. If we started copying human consciousness into them to compete with robots, then the robots will have already won the contest anyway because all of humanity would have been replaced with more robots.

In any case I doubt it would be popular; would you volunteer to die so that some robot with your memories can run around controlling your corpse like a meat-puppet?

If they transferred your "mind" into a silicon brain, who's to say your current sense of self goes with it, "you" would still be stuck with your brain. And now you have a doppelganger to worry about.

This. A better solution would be to just ensure our robots are always programmed to serve man or self-terminate, and stock up on Nukes that can be detonated in the upper atmosphere.

Korea estimates that by 2020 every home in Korea will have a house robot, Bill Gates has said that by 2030 the Home Robot industry will be the biggest thing ever, making many billions of dollars a year. Now if there are thousands, possibly millions of robots on this planet who develop self awareness at roughly the same exact time I highly doubt you can "blow a hole" through every robots brain. Now about cybernetics being to expensive, my guess is that if you can buy a robot in the year 2030 for roughly the same price as an Ipod today cybernetics would not be so expensive. Their theory is that the robots would develop such an intelligence that they would view us merely as a nuisance kind of like a bug. I would think that we would not be stupid enough to not install a safety mechanism that automatically fries the robot if signs of self awareness emerge. If cybernetics got to a point where every human was implanted at birth we would cease to be Human in the traditional sense, I am sure there would be people who believe it to be wrong and would protest such things, but I think they would die out fast as more and more people became enhanced with cybernetics. Its only theory but theory can dictate that once you reach a certain level of intelligence you would see no reason to coexist with primitives. It worked that way in history, the Europeans thought them selves superior to the Indians look what happened. You would think that there would be a certain level of intelligence where you would say "well there is no reason to kill these lives, I am above that" but I believe there is always going to be that period of "these people deserve to die because they are inferior" (or thought to be) before that final peaceful level. Just some food for thought I guess.

Edit to address other posters: When I said transfer your consciousness I meant you would be transferring everything that makes you you, lets just say your brain is a house and you want to move to another house (a cybernetic brain). If we where able to figure out what is in our brains that makes us Conscious and self aware then this could work. If we have to become robots to be superior to robots, so be it I say. But like I said, if we are smart about it, it should never come to any of this. Perhaps as a very very desperate last resort we would have a massive EMP wave "generator", I guess, knock out all electronics on the planet, it would stop them all if we where to stupid to put in a safety mechanism. As I said that would be a very last resort we would have to be thrown back to the middle ages to save our race.

Sorry, I don't believe it will ever happen. I am one of those weirdoes that thinks we all have our own "soul" and that it cannot be created nor duplicated or transferred.

And isn;t there a saying that a computer can only be as smart as the person programming it? So it will still have human errors.

But perhaps the soul is more scientific and biological than we currently think. I to believe we have souls (I wont get to far into that because it is bound to start something religious) but is the soul really all that different from the flesh?

I don't believe we will see "True" Artificial Intelligence just yet and i'm betting the world will put laws in place to prevent that. They will allow for AI, but not AI that can become self aware to the point it exterminates life. As for human cybernetics we are already advancing to that point. Would have to look it up, but there is a quadriplegic person with a microchip implanted into his brain with a connector on his skull. This allows him to interface with a computer by thinking certain patterns.

Another thing is the mechanical brain will never be the same as the human brain due to the fact that we as organisms can think in vastly different ways. With computers it is always Point A to Point B unless the computer program is taught to think differently even then it is usually only "Slight" random occurrences. With humans we can think in 100+ different ways to approach and solve a problem.

Why would an AI want to exterminate all life?

Another thing to consider is that the human brain is influenced by a huge number of chemical and enviromental factors that simply don't exist for computers. A computer is never going to get an andrenaline rush. HOw would that effect the psychology of these "robo-copies" of human minds?

Also, it strikes me that there's no way we could really transfer the human mind. We might get to the point where we can "copy" this information to a machine, but this doesn't mean said information magically leaves the human brain. It would still be there, and would have to be deleted if we wanted to get rid of it. Of course, deleting said information would be murder.

As you said, too much can't be said about such as it might turn religious, but no, I believe that Bill Cosby described it best when he said that the soul is like a hand, and the body like a glove. The body just houses the soul. I'll stop there so it doesn't get into the no-no area.

Maybe a better way to describe is would be, a computer case is the body and the electronic parts are the soul. You can still run a computer without the case as long as all the parts are running on a currency, but the case makes it much less messy and takes up less room.

Why do we go to war? Why did the Nazi's want to exterminate the Jews? Why did the Europeans want the Indians out? Why did people enslave other people? Exactly the same reason Robots would do it to us. They believe themselves to be superior, or in the case of a robot may actually be.

Also to Darth Ravager, we would have to get to a point where we could transfer without deleting. Is it even possible in computers? I mean if I transfer something to a flash drive it is actually just copying it to my flash drive I have to delete it from the computer. What about with Xbox, you can transfer your profile but not copy it, is this a different process than what I just said or is it the same thing?

Many years ago we believed the earth to be flat, we knew without a doubt that the earth was flat. Today we "know" many things, doesn't make them true. The fact that most of what we know in this area is just theory makes me believe we could be very wrong.

You give human attributes to something that may not be at all human?


Unless you build something that can learn

I believe there is always going to be a stage before enlightenment that causes the species or race to destroy. After all you have to do something before attaining enlightenment. The very goal of robotics today is to make something that is human like that can serve us.

They wouldn't. People put too much believe in sci-fi.

Why wouldn't they, I have explained why they may, now you explain why they may not.

Okay, so we build a robot/computer that can learn. It's still never going to learn to have a soul. It may be able to duplicate senses, feelings etc. but will never actually have a conscience or a soul. To that I would bet everything I have and will ever have.

I can't tell you about xboxes, I don't own one. Though I'd guess it'd be the same thing, only automated.

@Phlooph, that would be a pretty solid bet for you, as you'd probably win whether or not souls actually existed. But if you were betting on consciousness, well, that's a matter of perspective.

Because we aren't stupid enough to build them without a failsafe.