it's not theoretical. we could probably do this in a few years, in theory. and, i have no doubt that we'll get there. but, the only thing that's important to me is whether or not we can get there in my lifetime.
and, i claim that we can't - but that the problem is not theoretical but computational.
i don't think you realize how much data your brain actually holds. it's going to be many orders of magnitude above petabytes. at our current storage abilities, we wouldn't be talking about data centres to store humans - we'd need a data center to store one human.
on top of that, the problem is going to be np. what that means is that transferring back and forth is going to be inconceivable with classical computers. so, we'll need to be able to compute non-linearly, first. and, despite some claims to the contrary, i don't think we're anywhere near this - and i'm not even convinced it's possible. the biological approaches to beating np strike me as more plausible, but they may be hard to scale, and it presents a different kind of threat for ai, when you start putting these bacteria colonies all over the place. that would no doubt wipe us out through disease.
the way i understand humans is that we have ridiculously fast processors and limitless hard drives but very small registers and almost no ram. so, there's this bottleneck in computation brought on by the insufficient amount of memory that we have to calculate in - and we end up dropping things from registers, because we just don't have the space for it. we're going to have to go through that bottleneck in extracting ourselves, too.
i looked into this quite seriously and, in the end, i made a bet with time. i might lose it. but, i'm usually right about these things.
this statement was not true when the record was released.
it might be today.
but, i don't think i made the cut.
we'll see, though.
jagmeet singh must cut his beard.