What if we could upload books to our brains?
Human brain might interface directly with non-biological forms of intelligence
What
if humans could upload all the great classics of literature
to their brains, without having to go through the arduous process of
reading? Wonderful and levelling as that may seem, it’s a prospect that I’m not
sure we should readily embrace.
A
while ago, I listened to an interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil on
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s radio show StarTalk. Kurzweil described
how our brains might someday interface directly with non-biological forms of
intelligence, possibly with the help of nano-bots that travel through our
capillaries.
Given
how much faster this interface would be than regular reading, he went on, we’d be
able to consume novels like The Brothers Karamazov in moments, rather than the
current rather clumsy form of ingestion known as reading, which, he said,
“could take months”.
At
this point Tyson interjected: Are you saying we could just upload War and Peace?
Yes, Kurzweil answered: “We will connect to neocortical hierarchies in cloud
with pre-loaded knowledge.”
This
snippet of conversation has baffled and fascinated me ever since. I confess
that I do not know a lick about neuroscience. But just knowing something about
reading makes the above story implausible, if not alarming.
From
my perspective, the learning that we do when we read a book has little to do
with knowledge — what would a pre-loaded version of The Brothers Karamazov
constitute? — and everything to do with responding emotionally and morally to
the story. As I’ve become older, I forgive hypocrisies more quickly, and I
identify with decay more readily. I understand spiritual conflict but I’m not
alarmed by it. Thus the book itself is different each time it’s read by a
different version of me.
I’m
not sure what Kurzweil thinks when he says our computer minds won’t need to
bother to read the book, and I want to give him and his other futurist
computer-brain friends some credit. They surely mean more than having the text
of the book itself available to us, or even memorised. That wouldn’t represent
knowledge. It must be something deeper, a representation of the book possibly
as a narrative, or maybe a movie. But again, if we have access only to that
movie, it doesn’t represent the same learning that would come through reading
and experiencing the book.
There
are only two more possibilities left, at least in my limited biological brain.
First, that the “true meaning” of the book is codified once and for all by a
computer, and is inserted into our long-term memories. This would inevitably be
unsatisfying, because it would mean that if I “read it again” I’d actually
experience the same exact thing. Also, whose experience gets codified?
Finally,
there’s the possibility that the book’s true meaning would change depending on
the state of my brain — that the interface would look into my mind, see and
understand my patience with hypocrisy and spiritual conflict, and then
transform the story accordingly. In which case, every time I uploaded that book
or any other, I’d experience a different story. I doubt this is possible, and
in any case I would find the lack of active participation creepy. That said,
I’d definitely pay a monthly subscription to try it out.
Source | Business Standard | 17 April 2017
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Event | MANLIBNET 17th
Annual International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida,
India
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