Boys,
So you have this big wooden ship. And you go sailing and things are great and ooops you hit a rock and damaged one plank. So you make it back to harbor and you take that plank off the ship — you don’t mess with the sails or the anchor or the mast or the big wooden wheel or the cannons or even the crew for that matter. But you replace the board and you go back out to sea. New board; same boat.
Then as time goes on, you have to replace another board or two. You get a new mast. Even the crew retires or dies or gets arrested because sounds like they might be pirates?, and you upgrade that wheel at some point. Eventually, you replace every single part of that boat from what it was when it was first built. Not a single fiber that is now on the boat came from that first boat.
Is it the same boat?
When did it change? Was it after that first board was replaced? Was it when more than 50% of the boat was replaced? Was it only after that last nail from the first boat got replaced, than it went from being the old boat to all of a sudden, there is a new boat outside in the bay? Even if you replaced those board with planks from the same tree, and everything looks exactly the same as the original boat was, whose to say whether it’s the same or not.
And lets say every time you removed a plank or a nail or a wheel, you put that thing in storage. And once that last nail came out, you rebuilt that first boat using all those pieces from that first boat, but you put it in the harbor right next to that new boat. Do you have two boats? Are they the same boat?
Keep that answer in your pocket.
———-
Okay so I drive a lot for work and my favorite thing to listen to while I drive to and from work are podcasts and audiobooks. I go through phases where I’ll be exclusively podcasts for a while, then I’ll find a book and flip totally toward listening to a book and neverminding podcasts for a few weeks. Nothing crazy; feel like I’m in the majority there.
My podcasts are pretty basic – Lions and golf stuff, some dad stuff (meaning advice for dads, nothing weird), some history and what I’ll classify as “strange but true” kind of things. Do Aliens exist? How will we use bitcoin ten years from now? Check my feed and you might find some answers.
Right now, I’m in a book phase. My books are usually one of these four things: golf (something interesting, not like, how to putt out of my mind or anything like that. Stories, Tiger stuff, Tom Coyne, etc.). If it isn’t golf, it might be a self-improvement book. These are good when I’m in a rut and need motivated. I also like Western books by authors like Cormac McCarthy, and I will mess with a little sci-fi/or fantasy novels (Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe/League of Legends lore).
But every now and then, I also like to get into learning something new. Which leads me to where I’m going with this post. And I’ll just say now that this post is going to be long and I’m going to go on rants because it’s just so….forking…..interesting to me.
The book is called The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. It’s a follow-up to an earlier book he wrote, the title of which I bet you can name. Anyway, the whole thing is just mind blowing – to be fair I’m probably only halfway through; but I got a feeling, ya know? And I’ll just say this now and not again, but by the time you read this, we’ll probably have answers to all the hypotheticals we’re cooking with here. So maybe you can look back and say how I was early to the party, or maybe I was the unicorn who missed the boat. #ArcJoke
So the book is about where artificial intelligence (AI) is going. But what kind of stopped me in my tracks was the question of identity and consciousness (terrible band name). So we think of AI as imitation. We think it can learn how humans talk and write an essay on whatever school project you had that day. Or we think of it as a way to create a stunning website in seconds when it used to take coders weeks to do. Right now, people like to create stupid country songs about whatever goofy words you key into a prompt. I actually have this account in my instagram feed that teaches you weird facts by making up a song about it and I’m sure it’s all done by AI — there are cartoon visuals to follow along so that your brain actually learns the thing. Super fun!
But that is just the most basic toy in the whole store when it comes to what AI is doing and what it can do. Think about this — think about the amputee who can all of a sudden control a robotic hand with their brain. How can they do that? Not a scientist, but I’m pretty sure it’s because we figured out how the brain works and how thinking this or that leads to firing off some kind of signal to the body. In essence, something is reading our thoughts and creating an output. Bend this finger or pick up that fork.
But the brain does more than just tell our bodies what to do. Our brains think. Our brains remember. They store memories. It’s why I haven’t fished out at my grandma’s since I backed into an electric fence and almost fell in the pond — not going down that road again. Anyway, if a device now, in the mid-2020s, can click in to our elbow and give us our arm back, then I’d put good money down that in the next decade (or less, most likely) AI will be able to access memories or new thoughts. AI is a machine. Machines have memory and they store that memory in the cloud. The cloud is a warehouse of blinking lights, progressively smaller computer chips, and some big ass fans to cool the whole place down.
This isn’t a Terminator post. I don’t think it is, at least.
We can use this technology to help fix issues that we have in the brain. And we’re already doing this. In my job, we’re working with a company called Neuroanimation. They’re helping people with diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia. They’re using technology to stimulate the brain in a way that could help us understand and eliminate these diseases.
Take it one step further. Imagine having some kind of scan where they can access your entire brain. They send that brain to the cloud and consider every angle in the known universe in a matter of seconds, diagnose the slightest imperfections and every conceivable issue, even ones that aren’t currently known in medicine, and create a cocktail that you could take like a little shot in your arm. It would work it’s way through the bloodstream into your brain, and make it literally perfect. Anxiety, guilt, lust, addiction… they all stem from places in the brain and I bet we’ll be able to isolate those areas and find a way to adjust them so that we don’t have to experience those feelings anymore.
…and it could do that with more than your brain. It could repair damages within the body. It could replace dying cells with new cells. I would say it’s harder to imagine a world where this isn’t the case than it is to think that this, or some version of this, is both likely and likely to happen sooner than later.
It’s the fountain of youth! We will reverse aging. Imagine a world where you can stay your peak age forever! Imagine a world where you and I are biologically the same age (I’d still be able to beat you in a footrace, by the way).
Now I want to know what your answer was to the boat paradox. Was that first boat that got all it’s parts replaced the original boat? Or did it stop being that boat somewhere along the way?
Consider you.
Consider who you are if medicine and technology allow us to choose to whether we wanted to complete fix our brains, or our bodies for that matter. Are we still ourselves. What if we could replace all the bad parts in our bodies with good parts? It wouldn’t happen all at once, but slowly, over time… just little changes. I’d likely regrow some hair and lose some weight. I’d probably dial myself in a growth spurt, too.
So is that you? Or is it You2?
Are we the sum of our parts, or are we something more? What does it mean to be human and would we still be human if we continue to go down this road?
It’s something to think about for sure. Anyway, enough existential thinking for me for today.
Love you boys,
Dad
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