It's an interesting and informative piece but I'm sceptical of Ray Kurzweil's prediction that: "We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so."
The reason I'm sceptical is the problem of consciousness. You can reverse-engineer all you like but whatever you end up with is unlikely to be conscious. It's an issue that the quoted article addresses:
Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x cycles per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain apart and record the position and relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a brain.Unfortunately, it's not only science fiction writers who "hand-wave this step", neuroscientists are also guilty of a certain sleight of hand when it comes to consciousness. In general, they either ignore it entirely or they believe that consciousness emerges spontaneously as a result of the brain's functional complexity.
But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of that space will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain. Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein’s "Man Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick is that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough "random numbers," it just wakes up.
Kurzweil, with his dreams of reverse-engineering human personalities, appears to be banking on the latter. I wouldn't bet my life on it but Alan seems game:
It's just possible that if you, the reader, can hang on for another 30 years without snuffing it, you may be able to get an upgrade to better hardware.After you, mate!
