The Future: Transferring Your Brain To A Robotic Body And Moral Decisions Facing Technological Advances

I want to pose a question that on the outside seems simple, but under a magnifying glad, becomes extremely complex. What makes a human being? I post this question because I want to talk about the possibility of uploading your brain onto the internet and putting that brain into a new body and living forever. Your brain would essentially be able to be downloaded, put into some sort of robot body with a storage device and some part of you would continue on forever. Your brain would be like the operating system on modern day computers to these robots. The question is are you still really the one in this body and human or something else entirely?

A popular movie in the anime series, “Ghost In The Shell” partially poses this question, with the main villain being an online entity that is a consciousness uploaded by a man at an earlier time to the net. But is he the same person as he was when he was alive, or is something lost in the transfer? Can this new consciousness grow organically like human beings can or is it stuck to its own limits within the net, and changing in ways it wouldn’t if it were human? These are all questions I don’t know the answer to, yet pose them to anyone who has an opinion on them.

If we are able to digitize someone’s brain I believe we would have to make it so it couldn’t be copied and downloaded multiple times or else essentially we would be cloning people. Except it would be a perfect clone with the same memories and experiences that were encountered by the first person. Think of the repercussions of such a technology. Imagine if we were to take new born brains, lacking any memory storage and creating a race if these robots which could all learn and evolve in separate ways, yet lack the flesh and blood holding humans back. What would make people want to stay in their human bodies if such a technology could exist? There would be no reason to sleep, we would become more efficient and effective.

Technology is an amazing yet terrifying thing in cases like the one I am posing to you. There already are projects that are attempting such a feat as the one im describing today. Likely they will have no success with current limitations, but it doesn’t mean it will always stay this way. For a long period of time, technological advances might have changed the ways we live, but not a large amount of times did they raise moral issues, like the technology being developed today. Even modern day efforts against stem cell treatments to genetic reconfiguration, show that human beings are afraid of what is to come. There is a moral line that can be crosses, but where we set that line is the question. To take a quote from Jurassic Park

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

I don’t necessarily believe we will have a human vs robot all out war, but I do believe that in the future the line between what constitutes a human and what constitutes a robot will be blurred. I think as we move forward, morally wrong or not, the technology that most terrifies us and threatens our existence as human beings will be created. As we become more integrated with robots in our everyday life, I think we will start to see ours brains become more integrated with them as well. Wrote this post as a way to jog your thoughts on the potential of what is to come and mostly to see what you believe in these regards. What would you do if you had the option to transfer your brain into another shell? Where is the point where your moral line is crossed?

-Calaber24p