Live Forever

Nellie: Why do you always put on that muscleman body, Winston? You know how much I like your real one. Winston morphs into a man in his early 50s, still overly muscular.

Winston: (laughing) My real body?. How droll! No one but my neurotechnician has seen it for years! Believe me, that's not what you want. I can do much better! He fans rapidly through a thousand images, and Nellie grimaces.

Nellie: Damn it! You're just one of Winston's MI's! Where is the real Winston? I know I used the right connection!

Winston: Nellie, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. There was a transporter accident a few weeks ago in Evanston, and... well, I'm lucky they got to me in time for the full upload. I'm all of Winston that's left. The body's gone.

When Nellie contacts her friend Winston through the Internet connection in her brain, he is already, biologically speaking, dead. It is his electronic mind double, a virtual reality twin, that greets Nellie in their virtual Parisian cafe. What's surprising here is not so much the notion that human minds may someday live on inside computers after their bodies have expired. It's the fact that this vignette is closer at hand than most people realize. Within 30 years, the minds in those computers may just be our own.

The history of technology has shown over and over that as one mode of technology exhausts its potential, a new more sophisticated paradigm emerges to keep us moving at an exponential pace. Between 1910 and 1950, computer technology doubled in power every three years; between 1950 and 1966, it doubled every two years; and it has recently been doubling every year.

By the year 2020, your $1,000 personal computer will have the processing power of the human brain--20 million billion calculations per second (100 billion neurons times 1,000 connections per neuron times 200 calculations per second per connection). By 2030, it will take a village of human brains to match a $1,000 computer. By 2050, $1,000 worth of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth.

Of course, achieving the processing power of the human brain is necessary but not sufficient for creating human level intelligence in a machine. But by 2030, we'll have the means to scan the human brain and re-create its design electronically.

Most people don't realize the revolutionary impact of that. The development of computers that match and vastly exceed the capabilities of the human brain will be no less important than the evolution of human intelligence itself some thousands of generations ago. Current predictions overlook the imminence of a world in which machines become more like humans--programmed with replicated brain synapses that re-create the ability to respond appropriately to human emotion, and humans become more like machines-our biological bodies and brains enhanced with billions of "nanobots," swarms of microscopic robots transporting us in and out of virtual reality. We have already started down this road: Human and machine have already begun to meld.

It starts with uploading, or scanning the brain into a computer. One scenario is invasive: One very thin slice at a time, scientists input a brain of choice--having been frozen just slightly before it was going to die--at an extremely high speed. This way, they can easily see every neuron, every connection and every neurotransmitter concentration represented in each synapse-thin layer.

Seven years ago, a condemned killer allowed his brain and body to be scanned in this way, and you can access all 10 billion bytes of him on the Internet. You can see for yourself every bone, muscle and section of gray matter in his body. But the scan is not yet at a high enough resolution to recreate the interneuronal connections, synapses and neurotransmitter concentrations that are the key to capturing the individuality within a human brain.

Our scanning machines today can clearly capture neural features as long as the scanner is very. close to the source. Within 30 years, however, we will be able to send billions of nanobots--blood cell-size scanning machines--through every capillary of the brain to create a complete noninvasive scan of every neural feature. A shot full of nanobots will someday allow the most subtle details of our knowledge, skills and personalities to be copied into a file and stored in a computer.