Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality - Hardcover

Rothblatt PhD, Martine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250046637 ISBN 13: 9781250046635

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2014

Synopsis

Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness―simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology―becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics. Bina48 is a nascent Mindclone of Martine's wife that can engage in conversation, answer questions, and even have spontaneous thoughts that are derived from multimedia data in a Mindfile created by the real Bina. If you're active on Twitter or Facebook, share photos through Instagram, or blogging regularly, you're already on your way to creating a Mindfile―a digital database of your thoughts, memories, feelings, and opinions that is essentially a back-up copy of your mind. Soon, this Mindfile can be made conscious with special software―Mindware―that mimics the way human brains organize information, create emotions and achieve self-awareness. This may sound like science-fiction A.I. (artificial intelligence), but the nascent technology already exists. Thousands of software engineers across the globe are working to create cyberconsciousness based on human consciousness and the Obama administration recently announced plans to invest in a decade-long Brain Activity Map project. Virtually Human is the only book to examine the ethical issues relating to cyberconsciousness and Rothblatt, with a Ph.D. in medical ethics, is uniquely qualified to lead the dialogue.

About this title

About the Author

MARTINE ROTHBLATT, Ph.D., MBA, J.D. is a lawyer, entrepreneur, and medical ethicist. In 1990 she founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio (now Sirius XM). When her daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease, Martine left Sirius to search for a cure. She founded United Therapeutics in 1996 and has since served as Chairman and CEO. Martine is also a leading legal advocate for human rights and has led the IBA in presenting the UN with a draft treaty on the genome.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

[ONE]

THE ME IN THE MACHINE

 

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

The great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena toward a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine—even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar.

—ARTHUR KOESTLER1

Recently I exchanged family photographs with a friend through email. Looking at the multiple generations represented in snapshots always tugs at my heart. Like any grandparent, I wonder about how my children’s and grandchildren’s lives will blossom and expand; I worry about the challenges they will face and how I might support them in getting over life’s humps. However, unlike grandparents of the past, I’m confident that my potential to stay connected to my family and subsequent generations of relatives will be available and nearly limitless.

Digital consciousness is about life and the living, because, as you will learn, digital consciousness is our consciousness. We cannot ignore the fact that thanks to strides in software and digital technology and the development of ever more sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence, you and I will be able to have an ongoing relationship with our families: exchange memories with them, talk about their hopes and dreams, and share in the delights of holidays, vacations, changing seasons, and everything else that goes with family life—both the good and the bad—long after our flesh and bones have turned to dust.

This blessing of emotional and intellectual continuity or immortality is being made possible through the development of digital clones, or mindclones: software versions of our minds, software-based alter egos, doppelgängers, mental twins. Mindclones are mindfiles used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind. A mindclone is created from the thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and values you have put into it. Mindclones will experience reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is run on. When the body of a person with a mindclone dies, the mindclone will not feel that they have personally died, although the body will be missed in the same ways amputees miss their limbs but acclimate when given an artificial replacement. In fact, the comparison suggests an apt metaphor: The mindclone is to the consciousness and spirit as the prosthetic is to an arm that has lost its hand.

Never mind about human cloning through genetic reproductive technology that supposedly creates a new “baby us” in a Petri dish, without the benefit of old-fashioned procreation “techniques.” Digital cloning will be here much faster and with few if any of the regulatory hindrances that currently prevent human genetic cloning from moving faster than a snail’s pace. Remember Dolly, the sheep created from genetic material in 1996, and the questions she raised about artificial genetic replication and humans? After Dolly, bans on similar reproductive cloning of humans were enacted in more than fifty countries. Since that time, the U.S. government has restricted federal funding of such projects. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics unanimously opposed cloning for reproductive purposes but were divided on whether cloning could be used for research; nothing has changed as of this writing. The United Nations tried to pass a global ban on human cloning in 2005, but was unsuccessful because disagreements over whether therapeutic cloning should be included in the moratorium left the matter in a stalemate.

Aside from ethical and legal obstacles, successful genetic cloning via reproductive science is also exorbitantly expensive, and prone to colossal and possibly heart-wrenching failure. Furthermore, a genetic clone of a person is not the person, just a copy of the DNA of a person. Genetic cloning does not create any part of a person’s consciousness, as, for example, identical twins do not have identical minds. Furthermore, a genetic clone of a person is not the person, just a copy of the DNA of a person. Genetic cloning does not create any part of a person’s consciousness, and, for example, identical twins do not have identical minds. Digital cloning of our own minds is an entirely different matter, albeit accompanied by considerable legal and social consideration, which I discuss in depth in this book. It is also being developed in the free market, and on the fast track. It’s not surprising. There are great financial rewards available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Vast wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness and obsequiousness of a utopian worker.

As uncomfortable as it makes some—a discomfort we have to deal with—the mass marketing of a relatively simple, accessible, and affordable means for Grandma, through her mindclone, to stick around for graduations that will happen several decades from now represents the real money. There is no doubt that once digital cloning technology is fully developed, widely available, and economically accessible to “average consumers” mindclone creation will happen at the speed of our intentionality—as fast as we want it to.

Consciousness Is Key

It is in the mind that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

—OSCAR WILDE

Before we delve further into the world of mindclones, it’s essential that we come to an agreement on the definition of the thing that will make these beings our clones, and that is their ability to attain and demonstrate human consciousness. Determining a working definition of human consciousness is crucial on this journey. It is our consciousness that makes us us. The same qualities that constitute our consciousness—our memories, reasoning abilities, experiences, evolving opinions and perspectives, and emotional engagement with the world—will give rise to the digital consciousness of our mindclones, or what I will refer to as cyberconsciousness.

At birth and in early infancy there is no I and therefore no self.… The baby has instinctive urges but no sense that these urges belong to anyone.… Earliest experience, circumscribed by instinct and fear, takes on the human characteristics of I and me when an awareness of agency emerges from the fog of infant consciousness.… I have a self when I realize that I am me.… The self is comparable to painting a portrait of oneself painting a self-portrait.

—PETER WHITE, THE ECOLOGY OF BEING

The problem is, everyone—scientist and layman alike—has a slightly different concept of consciousness. Marvin Minsky, American cognitive scientist, author of The Emotion Machine, and cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, calls “consciousness” a “suitcase word”2 in that it carries multiple legitimate meanings. Others in the field bemoan “the great variety of technical synonyms” for consciousness, and that this “perfusion of terms tends to hide underlying similarities.”3 Given the graduated fashion in which human brains have evolved and do evolve, it is likely that there are also gradations of consciousness. One common meaning of consciousness is self-awareness. But does it adequately describe the true nature of the condition?

Surely a baby’s self-awareness is different from an adolescent’s self-awareness, which is quite different from the self-awareness of a middle-aged person with their faculties intact and a quite elderly person who has lost some of their cognitive abilities. How “self-conscious” is a newborn versus an adult? I think of family photos—pictures of my parents when they were children or even of myself as a tiny boy—as evidence of loved ones who no longer exist and who, when they did, certainly had very different states of consciousness than the “final” or the most current version of the flesh-and-blood people the pictures represent.

While self-awareness is clearly an important facet of a conscious person, it’s not the only qualification. It certainly would not hold water as a definition of cyberconsciousness. In fact, a programmer can write a concise piece of self-aware software, one that examines, reports on, and even modifies itself.4 Software running a self-driving vehicle, for example, could be written to define objects in its real world including terrain (“navigate it using sensors”), programmers (“follow any orders coming in”), and the vehicle itself (“I am a robot vehicle that navigates terrain in response to programming orders”). A Google Car does these things right now, and few people would define the code it runs on, or the vehicle itself, as conscious.

Self-aware software and robotic machines don’t feel physical or emotional pain or pleasure either—they are not sentient. Most people require mental subjectivity to include emotions, that is, sentience, in order to qualify as consciousness, because recognition of how we feel is integral to human consciousness—to the “human condition.” Yet sentience still doesn’t get us where we want to be in defining consciousness, because we expect conscious beings to be independent thinkers as well as feelers.

Hence, “feelings” is not a stand-alone description of consciousness either. Physical feelings don’t require complex cognitive capability. When a hooked fish squirms, many of us would interpret it as evidence that the creature is experiencing pain, while others may consider it an autonomic response, with no accompanying emotional reaction. Many of us would also not consider the fish conscious because we don’t believe any part of its neurology is thinking about the pain, philosophizing about it, or complaining about it to others in its group. Instead, we think the fish is simply relying on noncognitive reflexes as it attempts to get out of a nasty situation. Once unhooked and back in its normal environment, the fish continues swimming as if it had never been hooked—and therefore it can easily be hooked again. Indeed, I know of a fisherman who catches and releases the same fish many times during the fishing season. The fish appears to feel the pain of getting hooked, but it never “learns” anything from the experience and no “lessons” are applied to its future aquatic adventures, displaying a lack of a certain crucial amount of self-consciousness.

Of course we humans would likewise reflexively protest being hooked, but we know we would feel the pain, swear about it, and think how to avoid it after the fact. We’d warn others against the pitfalls of the hook, passing on as much as we knew about it. Unlike a fish, we may not be so easily hooked the next time, because we internalize the original painful experience and try to avoid repeating it. We can use our brains to recognize a hook when we see one, and avoid it, as well as predict where the fisherman will stand next time he comes around, and move to another part of the lake. So clearly learning, reason, and judgment (the application of information) are also part of the consciousness equation. Autonomy, and an element of transcendence or what is thought of as our souls, is involved as well. It is in such recondite differences between fish and man that the definition of human consciousness resides.

In 1908 the deaf-and-blind pioneer Helen Keller poignantly and clearly described how human consciousness builds on communication when she said, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.… Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”

In other words, while consciousness has an acceptable minimalist definition of being awake, alert, and aware—“Is he conscious?”—it also has a more salient meaning of thinking and feeling like anyone reading this book. To think like a human, then, one must also be able to make the kind of moral decisions, based on some variant of the Golden Rule, that philosophers and scientists alike, from Immanuel Kant to Carl Jung, believed are hardwired into human brains. Ask any healthy person anywhere in the world if it is wrong to hit a child over the head with a baseball bat and they will tell you it is.

Yet another complication in defining consciousness relates to our subconscious mind, which professionals refer to as our unconscious mind. There is overwhelming evidence that we are not self-aware of much of what we think and feel, and sometimes even act without thinking. As Yogi Berra summarized so brilliantly, “Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”

Freud is famous for teaching that an unconscious mind, or Id, of which we are not fully self-aware is often at cross-purposes with a conscious mind, or ego, within which we autonomously reason. Modern psychology has largely distanced itself from Freudian interpretations of unconscious desires, but has accepted “the reality that the unconscious asserts its presence in every moment of our lives, when we are fully awake as well as when we are absorbed in the depths of a dream.”5 It is of course wrong to shoot someone dead over tweeting in a movie theater, but in 2014 a retired policeman did exactly that in Tampa, Florida, because his unconscious mind asserted its presence in a very bad way. President Barack Obama has described in speeches how white women reflexively grabbed their purses and moved away from him, before he was president; many of these reactions were likely unconscious responses to his skin tone.

Neither rationality, nor feelings, nor self-awareness need be present at all times for a person to be considered conscious like a human. Indeed, some level of non-reasoned, non-emotional, non-aware mental processing goes on pretty nearly at all times in the consciousness of everyone reading this book. To be humanly conscious necessarily implies an intermingled unconscious mind. As a human mind gets formed it inevitably shunts certain conceptions (generalizations and stereotypes), motivations (choose this), and decisions (avoid danger) to unconscious neural patterns, thereby providing more time and freeing up more brain power for conscious neural patterns. The same will occur with cyberconsciousness. Much of who we are is what we consciously attend to out of the unconsciously managed background.

A solution to the consciousness conundrum—too many clothes dangling out of the suitcase!—is Douglas Hofstadter’s “continuum of consciousness.” His approach declares consciousness not to be a “here or not” sort of thing, but instead to be present to a greater or lesser extent in things that demonstrate, to a greater or lesser extent, one or more of the aspects described above—self-awareness, sentience, morality, autonomy, and transcendence. In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter grudgingly (owing to the nastiness of his confession) admits a scintilla of consciousness even to the mosquito. While Hofstadter doesn’t talk about the Google Car, the “continuum of consciousness” would surely grant it a mosquito’s quantum of consciousness, and perhaps a bit more, because unlike the mosquito it need not do harm to another (biting and sucking blood in the case of the insect) in order to achieve its “life purpose”: it has been driven over a million miles with no accidents. Hofstadter’s confidence in the logic of the continuum is such that he concedes to Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer a greater consciousness than to himself, ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1250046637
• ISBN 13: 9781250046635
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Illustrator: Steadman Ralph