To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  “People ask how it’s possible to think freely if you live somewhere like North Korea, where the government is strictly controlling everything,” she said. “But our personhood is bounded by this secretive and unknown thing, this body. After my illness, I started seeing things differently. I became very interested in human enhancement, in how we might protect ourselves from this tyrannical onslaught of disease and mortality.”

  In an essay on mind uploading, Max wrote of his intention, if he lived long enough, to “exchange my physical body for a choice of bodies both physical and virtual.” The question of what these future vessels of being might look like, or how they might function, was wide open, but one possible answer took the form of Natasha’s Primo Posthuman project. This was a blueprint for what she called a “platform diverse body,” a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the logic of wearable tech, whereby the human form itself was entirely replaced by a sleekly anthropomorphic device—a “more powerful, better suspended and more flexible…body offering extended performance and modern style”—which would be inhabited and controlled by an uploaded, substrate-independent mind.

  This was her prototype for the unfleshed future, her vision of a form that would one day accommodate the uploaded content of human minds—including her own, and Max’s. The content of those detached heads in Alcor’s dewars, those human lives in cold storage, awaiting return. This was Natasha’s suggestion of how they might live again, in this gleaming anthrobot, with its nanotech storage system, its instant data replay and feedback, its embedded high-throughput contradiction detectors.

  And wasn’t Natasha’s vision of a wholly mechanized body, of an impenetrable shell of technology, also a dream self-portrait—a creative denial of her own frailty and mortality?

  “If this body fails,” she said, “we have to have another one. You could die at any moment, and that’s unnecessary and unacceptable. As a transhumanist, I have no regard for death. I’m impatient with it, annoyed. We’re a neurotic species—because of our mortality, because death is always breathing down our necks.”

  I could not disagree. It had always been unacceptable, this condition, it had always been the cause of our estrangement from ourselves. Speaking to Natasha reminded me of what I had always found so disturbing about transhumanism. There was the truth of its premise, that we were all of us trapped, bleeding, marked for death. And there was the strangeness of its promise, that technology could redeem us, release us from that state. These things both did and did not connect.

  These proposals—cryonic suspension, mind-driven avatars—seemed to hover on some unreal threshold between technological hope and mortal terror. I could not imagine placing my faith in them. But then I could not place my faith in the world in which I spent my life, the so-called real world with its improbable technologies, its economies and systems based on mass delusion, giddy suspensions of disbelief, unimaginable innovations and savageries. None of it was remotely plausible, as far as I was concerned, and yet here we were.

  Such were my thoughts, at any rate, as I sat at the departure gate at Phoenix airport, waiting to board a flight to San Francisco. I was still jet-lagged from my flight from Dublin, still feeling half unreal, half displaced. Wasn’t technology itself, I thought, a strategy for disembodiment? Wasn’t it all—social media, Internet, air travel, space race, telegraph, railway, the invention of the wheel—an ancient yearning to be out of ourselves, out of our bodies, our location in space and time?

  These thoughts were the outcome of the conversations I had had with Max and Natasha, and of the hours I had spent among cryonically preserved bodies, but also of the fact that I was about to meet, in San Francisco, a man whose goal was the final displacement of nature itself. I was on my way to see a neuroscientist whose long-term project was the exact future for which the cephalons of Alcor remained in suspended hope: the uploading of human minds into machines.

  * * *

  *1 For what it’s worth, he gave a slightly different reason for the name change at the time, in an announcement about it in the Summer 1990 issue of Extropy magazine, the house publication of the Extropian movement: “I am no longer ‘Max O’Connor.’ I’ve changed my name to ‘Max More’ in order to remove the cultural links to Ireland (which connotes backwardness rather than future-orientation) and to reflect the extropian desire for MORE LIFE, MORE INTELLIGENCE, MORE FREEDOM.”

  *2 In the 1970s, while incarcerated for a range of drug offenses, Leary developed a set of futurist principles under the snappy rubric SMI²LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension). He was a long-standing member of Alcor, active to the point of hosting, on several occasions, the foundation’s annual turkey roast at his home; but when the time eventually came to make the necessary arrangements, he went for the more show-stopping option of having his cremated ashes shot into space from a cannon. This is still a sore point within the cryonics community, and is seen as a significant tragedy—a stance that, when you think about it, is entirely consistent with the immortalist worldview. In a 1996 issue of Extropy magazine, Max and Natasha criticized Leary’s decision as a sad capitulation to “deathist” ideology.

  Once Out of Nature

  HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS. You are laid on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as spiders’ legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can. You’re in pretty deep with this thing; there’s no backing out now.

  With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computer’s hardware. As the work proceeds, another mechanical appendage—less delicate, less careful—removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal.

  This is material you will no longer be needing.

  At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe—with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity—the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

  The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.

  This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravec’s conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. It’s a belief shared by many transhumanists. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind uploading. “An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system,” he writes in The Singularity Is Near, “would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of one hundred trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics.” The technologies required to perform such an emulation—sufficiently powerful and capacious computers, and sufficiently advanced brain-scanning techniques—will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

  And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist—to the extent that you could meaningfully be said t
o exist at all—as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

  I knew that this notion of disembodied mind was central to transhumanism. I knew that this final act of secession from nature was, in fact, the highest ideal of the movement, the very future for which all those bodies and heads were being preserved in giant dewars at Alcor. But it was my understanding that the concept remained squarely in the realm of speculation, a matter purely for sci-fi novels, techno-futurist polemics, philosophical thought experiments.

  And then I met a man named Randal Koene.

  I was introduced to Randal at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasn’t speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. He was a cheerfully reserved man in his early forties, and he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native-English speaker who had long mastered the language. We talked only briefly, and I must confess that I was not at that point entirely clear on what it was that he did. As we parted, he handed me his business card, and it was only much later that evening, when I’d returned to my rented place in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, that I removed it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylized image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: “Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A. Koene, founder.”

  I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a “nonprofit organization with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds.” This latter term, I read, was the “objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain.” And this, I further learned, was a process “analogous to that by which platform-independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms.”

  It seemed that I had met, without realizing it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain uploading scenario that Anders and Max and Natasha had spoken about, and which Ray Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

  —

  Randal Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man, and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent, and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; and so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. He’d be talking about some tangential topic—his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities—and I’d remember with a slow uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

  One evening in early spring, Randal drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. (The menu, as it happened, featured a dish named “Half Rabbit,” and although Randal was tempted, he felt that he could not, in good conscience, enjoy such a dish in the knowledge that he would have to return home and meet the gaze of the whole rabbits with whom he shared an estate. He went with chicken instead.) He was dressed entirely in black—black shirt, black cargo pants, black shoes—with the jazzy exception of a bright green Nehru jacket, leaf-patterned and mandarin-collared, all of which lent him the somewhat self-contradictory and misleading appearance of a survivalist mystic.

  The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Randal was born in Groningen, and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist, and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

  Now a boyish forty-three, he had lived in California only for the last five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home he’d encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since he’d described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke, or to simply walk off mid-conversation.

  Randal was not joking about any of this. For the last thirty years, he had dedicated his life to the ideal of extracting the minds of individuals from the material—flesh, blood, neural tissue—in which they have traditionally been embedded. And this was not an interest he’d happened upon by way of his study of neuroscience. This was an obsession that has shaped his life from the age of thirteen.

  The fact that the project of mind uploading, were it to finally succeed, would lead to the effective immortality of the digitally duplicated self was obviously a major area in this whole speculative field, but it wasn’t something that especially exercised Randal—not as an end in itself, at any rate. His interest in uploading, he told me, came out of a preoccupation with the limitations of creativity, a precocious awareness of how many things he wished to do and experience, and how little time was allowed for the pursuit of those projects.

  “I couldn’t optimize problems in my head the way a computer could,” he said, taking a neat sip from his beer. “I couldn’t work on some problem for a thousand years, or even travel to the next solar system, because I’d be long dead by then. There were so many restrictions, and I realized they all came down to the brain. It was clear to me that the human brain needed enhancement.”

  In his early teens, Randal began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: the human brain was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldn’t get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldn’t just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

  Around this time, he read Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, a novel set in a future a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the city’s posthuman citizens, and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of future reincarnation. Randal saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible, and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest, and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

  The emerging discipline of computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasn’t until he began using the Internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

  As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Randal was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

  “I didn’t hide it, as such,” he said, “but it wasn’t like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. I’d work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, for instance, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map fo
r whole brain emulation.”

  Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology start-up funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit aimed at advancing the cause to which he’d long been dedicated. He conceived of Carboncopies as a kind of central gathering point where researchers in various fields—nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, brain imaging, cognitive psychology, biotechnology—crucial to the development of substrate independent minds could meet to share their work and discuss its potential contribution to the cause. Randal described his role within this as an essentially managerial one, although his position was not one with any kind of top-down structural authority.

  “I make a lot of phone calls,” as he put it. “I don’t have postdocs or research assistants. What I have is collaborators, people who feed me information from various sources.”

  Randal’s decision to work outside the academy was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If he’d gone the university route, he’d have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist, and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next. But Silicon Valley’s culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential people, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought—a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.