ripperdoc's clinic

A schizofrenic braindump, a stream of cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, neopunk, futurism and sci-fi items, inspiration for my writing and game design. Usually managed by my trusty auto-posting AI residing in a possum-brain in my kitchen sink.

Go ahead and inject into my brainfeed via Twitter or Tumblr submit. Aslo, go ahead and challenge my AI with a question (warning, it bites).
August 2
0 | 2.8.2010 | 1 year ago |

Uploading your mind

John Pavius at Dvice is making a list (of course) of reasons that uploading your mind to a digital version won’t work (via Futurismic). 

Not that mind uploading would happen any time soon, but the reasons he is quoting can fairly easily be challenged. For example, he mentions software failure and what it would do to an uploaded mind. Bugs can never be completely eradicated (our human bodies have plenty of them), but the consequences of a bug can be controlled. Software can be coded so it only partially fails, and then gets itself back up.

Other reasons are lack of CPU, storage and the survivability of digital storage media. But the thing is, uploading of minds would certainly be done to a cloud structure, where the quality of individual components are irrelevant, and where CPU power can be shared between entities (when I am sleeping, there is more CPU over for my uploaded neighbour).

In the end, reasons against uploading is not a bad thing for sci fi. Technology is so much more interesting when it gives constraints and fails. An uploaded society where people are harassed by (mind)bugs, have to pay through their nose for CPU utilisation, etc contains all the drama I need for a good story.