Rich and I got in a big discussion about this over lunch the other day and I wanted to see if it could spur some debate in the vast world spanning techRivet Community.

It goes a bit like this.

Assumptions:

1. Hard AI is eventually possible. [Rich BTW does not agree that it is]
2. Moore's law holds across technology implementations.  Meaning it is not tied to just silicon based semiconductors but will continue its pace of increasing speed as replacement technologies are developed.

If those assumptions are true then it follows that:

1. Hard AI is inevitable.
2. At some  point Timmy the 14 year old nerd will have a simulated universe in his mom's basement on his $400 Dell.  Complete with trillions of legitimate sentient beings.
3. We have no way of knowing if we are not already on Timmy's machine.

If those assumptions do not hold then:

1. Is that an implication that there is something unknowable about the human mind? 
2. A soul perhaps?

Of course you can take the practical way out and agree with Descartes "I think therefore I am." and call a spade a spade and that this whole argument is just foolish sophistry.

...but what's the fun in that?

Will we come to accept this as the ubiquitous norm?

If you've seen the movie "Minority Report" then perhaps you agree that the creepiest part of that movie is the acceptance shown by the general populace regarding universal tracking via retina scans.  You get on a subway train and blink-blink you're tracked.  You enter a building and blink-blink you're tracked.

Everywhere.

Which is creepy.

But the populace is shown to just ignore it and let it happen.  Is this our future?  Because the calm acceptance is creepier than the act itself.

Well...my alma mater, the University of Washington, is researching the impacts of a similar technology. 

RFID tracking.

"What we want to understand," Borriello said, "is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two."

They are interested in the implications, applications, privacy and restrictions.  Their explanation is that it is better to test now and understand the ramifications before anything is implemented in the real world.  Better the devil you know as it were.

It's still creepy.  It's also probably easier to implement in the real world than you think.  Just require the next generation of cell-phones to contain an RFID chip.  Done and done.

Like I said...creepy.

Give yourself some time to read this or even print it off.  It's a philosophical thought exercise made modern and "plausible" (ok maybe not).

Where Am I?

What if your brain could be removed safely and radio circuitry of some complexity implanted as the conduit with your body?  Where are "you"? Are you where your senses are? or where your consciousness is?

I decided that good old Yorick deserved a visit. I and my new body, whom we might as well call Fortinbras, strode into the familiar lab to another round of applause from the technicians, who were of course congratulating themselves, not me. Once more I stood before the vat and contemplated poor Yorick, and on a whim I once again cavalierly flicked off the output transmitter switch. Imagine my surprise when nothing unusual happened. No fainting spell, no nausea, no noticeable change. A technician hurried to restore the switch to ON, but still I felt nothing.

I demanded an explanation, which the project director hastened to provide. It seems that before they had even operated on the first occasion, they had constructed a computer duplicate of my brain, reproducing both the complete information-processing structure and the computational speed of my brain in a giant computer program. After the operation, but before they had dared to send me off on my mission to Oklahoma, they had run this computer system and Yorick side by side. The incoming signals from Hamlet were sent simultaneously to Yorick's transceivers and to the computer's array of inputs. And the outputs from Yorick were not only beamed back to Hamlet, my body; they were recorded and checked against the simultaneous output of the computer program, which was called “Hubert” for reasons obscure to me. Over days and even weeks, the outputs were identical and synchronous, which of course did not prove that they had succeeded in copying the brain's functional structure, but the empirical support was greatly encouraging.

A fun read.