Meeting notice: The 02.June.18 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: The Road to Uploading Strong uploading, in which a computer simulates the behavior of every neuron in the brain to a high degree of accuracy, is pretty far off. There is however what might thought of as uploading on training wheels, which is tweaking the behavior of a robot until it is indistinguishable to the careful observer from that of the biological source. Imagine a dog owner who for some reason is unable to care any longer for an animal's biological needs (because he has developed an allergy, or the retirement home does not allow pets, or he is unable to walk the dog as often as he should, or finds he has to leave the animal for longer than he likes, etc) or has a pet with a habit that annoys the owner, like barking incessantly, or humping the guests, but which he has not been able to train out of the animal. He calls a service who walks him down an inventory of dog personality or character expressions, checking the ones that make Fido or Rover unique, minus the barking and humping. The service then builds a robot dog that looks a whole lot like the source, down to and including voice timbre, thus transforming it into a Fido simulcrum, except not one that needs walking twice a day. Who doubts that we will see a service of this sort by the end of the decade? As our ability to build robots improves, the application will probably spread to human simulcra (who could of course be completely virtual). Spouses who have lost partners, parents who have lost children, etc. - - not all of them, of course, but some -- will order robots customized to look and act like the missing party in every way possible. While they are at it they might order two or three. All kinds of things that your wife wouldn't agree to when she was married to you might become possible. I suppose there might be a market in celebrity personalities, though I bet it would be a small one. Of course the big question with uploading (by which I mean 'strong uploading,' see above) is whether people will ever feel so comfortable with the state that they would accept it as an alternative to living in a physical body. The most forbidding problem is that we have no way of knowing if a computer program can be conscious in the sense we are, nor can we ever really know. The usual answer given is a thought experiment: if a person had seen friends of his get uploaded, and if he had not been able to sense any difference in their relationship and interactions before and after, then he might become comfortable approaching the decision to make the uploaded state his primary existence. While the same test might apply to customized simulcra, it is possible to imagine subjecting this technology to an even stricter standard on the issue. Assume a program P that all our friends thought behaved just like us in every respect. Suppose you were having a conversation with P. Would you be capable of assessing whether or not you seemed to be talking to yourself? If so, and you thought you were, then you might feel more confidence about even weak uploading. The difference between weak and strong uploading is that the former represents the least amount of information necessary to create a sentient being; the latter represents the most. Strong uploading is about proving a point -- if every one of your neurons is simulated and simulated precisely then presumably you must be uploaded. But it is very unlikely that I need all the neurons in my brain to be me. I may very well need just a relative handful. Weak uploading is a test of just how many lines there are in our .cfg files. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.