AI ‘mind uploads’ could allow the dead to trade forever

The savviest traders in the world could one day allow their expertise and financial portfolios to live on long after they’ve died through the magic of artificial intelligence. 

At least that’s the premise increasingly being pitched by AI enthusiasts and futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk. Other insiders, such as Anthropic AI’s Dario Amodei, believe that the technology necessary to make this possible — called “mind uploading” — will eventually be created, but not within the next decade.

On the other hand, a potential collaboration between OpenAI and the late Eddie Van Halen could serve as an accelerator for that timeline. 

Mind uploading

The big idea behind mind uploading is that, somehow, humans will one day be able to use AI to render a fully functional digital recreation of our brains. In theory, this digital recreation would be fundamentally indistinguishable from the real thing with the sole exception being that it didn’t exist in the physical world. 

Philosophically speaking, this could allow humans and AI systems to continue interacting with a digital version of a once-living human being after that person has passed away. 

However, there’s no theoretical science that we’re aware of supporting the idea that this digital copy would in any way be the same person as the mind upload it was based on.

While this all sounds like science fiction, the idea continues to gain traction as the rising tide of AI development brings new technological paradigms. 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, recently published a lengthy blog post describing a Utopian future world where AI-powered innovations will all but eliminate mental illness and disease. Amid the effervescent optimism, Amodei even managed to wax philosophical on the subject of mind uploads:

“This topic could be the subject of an essay all by itself, but suffice it to say that while I think uploading is almost certainly possible in principle, in practice it faces significant technological and societal challenges, even with powerful AI, that likely put it outside the 5-10 year window we are discussing.”

To be clear, Amodei cited the idea of uploading a human mind to an AI system as “sci-fi” in his blog post. He also said that discussions surrounding far-future AI-powered ideas such as mind uploading could cause people to dismiss the current, real progress being made in the field. 

However, he and other luminaries in the field have lent their weight to the idea over the past few years. Amodei and Musk, for example, were both co-founders at OpenAI before moving on to separate generative AI companies. And Kurzweil, the futurist mentioned above, was one of Google’s leading AI scientists. Their prognostications often carry extra gravitas in the AI and science communities.

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The trickle-on effect of their support has led to a generalized perception that mind uploading is on the list of tricks AI will be capable of eventually. These include fully autonomous driving, human-level reasoning, and general intelligence.

Scientifically speaking, however, there’s no peer-reviewed research available that we’re aware of indicating that any of those theoretical technologies, including human-level AI and mind uploading, are even possible. 

On the medical front, scientists haven’t yet fully mapped the neural network that exists inside the human brain. But it’s clearly orders of magnitude more complex than even the most advanced AI models in existence. 

That being said, progress in the field of AI has come in hitches and bursts since 2014 when generative adversarial networks (the technology that underpins AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude) were introduced. 

A breakthrough in the field of mind uploads could revolutionize the human experience in much the same way electricity, the internet, and artificial intelligence have. 

An immortal rock legend

While it may never be possible for a human to transfer their consciousness to a machine, the idea of a one-to-one recreation of a complex neural network is considered by many neurologists to at least be plausible in the long term. 

Alex Van Halen, the legendary drummer from the band named after him and his brother Eddie, recently explained that he’d contacted OpenAI in hopes of collaborating on something similar to a mind upload.

Guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen passed away in 2020 after battling cancer. According to an interview with Rolling Stone, brother Alex recently reached out to OpenAI in hopes of creating an AI system to recreate the late guitarist’s sound.

Alex reportedly asked OpenAI to develop a system capable of analyzing “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” to develop new solos for unreleased songs from the band. 

According to the interview, Alex Van Halen said he envisioned Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant as the replacement for estranged Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth — a combination that would likely have piqued the interest of classic rock fans of any stripe, AI-assisted or not. 

Ultimately, whether mind uploads are possible remains unclear. But, if OpenAI accepts Van Halen’s challenge and succeeds, it’s arguable that any machine capable of playing the guitar like Eddie Van Halen could learn to trade cryptocurrency at a virtuoso level. 

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