Ian Pearson, head of British Telecomunication’s futurology unit, seriously predicts that it will be possible to upload your mind into a computer by about 2050.
(article)
Unlike robotics researcher
Hans Moravec, who concludes that affordable computer hardware sufficient to match the intellectual performance of a human being will be available in the 2020s, Pearson goes a step further with his belief that the technology necessary to copy a human mind from its usual, organic host, into an artificial, cybernetic one, will exist not too long after.
I believe Moravec is correct in his prediction that sufficiently powerful hardware will exist. I’m much less certain that brain imaging technology will be able to copy a human mind by 2050. I don’t even want to consider the social and philosophical implications of such a technology.
