ASIM Meetup @ the SFN Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, November 15, 2010

The ASIM face-to-face meetup took place on Monday, November 15, in San Diego.

The ASIM meetup at SFN was a continuation of the traditional Whole Brain Emulation socials / meet-ups at the annual neuroscience meeting, which have been going on since 2007. Some of those meetings were of a more formal nature, such as the one organized as an SFN satellite event in 2008, in cooperation with the InnerSpace Foundation.

While less formal, this year's meet-up was probably the most gratifying in terms of the obvious growth of interest! Compared with previous years, attendance doubled. We numbered between 14 and 15 at different parts of the evening, including two guests who were new to the concepts of ASIM, mind uploading and whole brain emulation.

Venues for the evening included The Strip Club (a Steak-house) for dinner, and the Altitude Sky Lounge on the roof of the Marriott hotel in the gaslamp district of San Diego.

The steak house was a good choice for the dinner, especially as it was not overrun by other SFN2010 attendees! Plenty of ambiance and good food. This was a time to get to know newcomers and regulars from the Whole Brain Emulation socials in small conversations all around the table. Although the whole brain emulation group continues to make a strong showing, attendees this year did manage to add some of the other components of ASIM. Max Hodak with a neural interfaces background, Bruce Klein and Luke Nosek with big-picture contributions, just to name a few.

Having to cook our own steaks (!) forced us to leave the table individually and to mingle with the subset at the grill.

The second phase of the evening took us high above San Diego in the Altitude Skylounge. A stunning view was complemented by the warmth of the roof-top fire and cocktails. The relative calm provided the perfect opportunity for discussion among the whole group.

I took this opportunity to ask everyone in the group to contribute their answers to three ASIM questions. Here I will present the questions and my own answers, and we will attempt to collect the responses given by other attendees over at the Facebook carboncopies group page. Unfortunately, this is necessary, because the other answers were not recorded at the time.

• 1. Why should one be interested in uploading as the ultimate goal? (As opposed, for example, being interested only in biological longevity.)

  2. Why should one invest resources and time into uploading now, even though it looks like a hard distant goal?

  3. What is a sensible path or are promising avenues to support now?

My answers were the following:

To 1: Why should one be interested in uploading as the ultimate goal?

• • If you ever plan to do enhancements, then you will always bump into the problem that the biological brain was not designed to be accessible and interpretable.

  • If you have information that you really value (e.g. bank documents, company documents), what do you do to protect that information? Do you keep maintaining it in the original 1960s mainframe it was stored on? No - you keep moving it to more hardware and above all you keep backup copies.

To 2: Why should one invest resources and time into uploading now?

• • If you want to affect the direction of something large (e.g. an asteroid), your best shot is to do it early so that the adjustment takes only a little push. You don't try to do this the instant before impact. Be involved early to have leverage.

  • Most of the interesting technology paths for uploading also have immediately implementable applications, e.g. personal avatars, BCI, virtual brain labs, diagnostics / pathology, etc.

To 3: What is a sensible path or are promising avenues to support now?

• • Sensible paths that deserve significant support immediately are those that are of immediate interest to the medical community (e.g. diagnostics, prosthetics).

  • Directions that allow very gradual steps toward uploading, but which still force us to address the same important problems that we face for full-scale uploading are of great immediate interest. E.g. BCI / enhancement and its need for access, health / status monitoring, perceptual immersion (VR).

The composition of the group varied a bit throughout the evening, and toward the end we were joined by Demis Hassabis for a delightful discussion in small circle.

More photos in the picture collection of our Facebook carboncopies group! (See the Facebook link in the navigation bar.)