Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part II (Sebastian Seung)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

While Dmitry Itskov is hiring talent to make the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic humanoid body a reality (see Part I of this series), Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT is working out the details of mapping that consciousness.

Seung’s new book Connectome deals with the attempt to create a map of the neurons in a human brain and the connections between them.

The home page for his lab, with a list of publications and links to several of them, is here.

You can find an NPR article and a podcast of a reasonably good interview with Seung here.

Seung’s TED lecture is embedded below and below that is the video trailer for Connectome.

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Brain mapping and uploading feature in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my site here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part I (Dmitry Itskov)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Numerous news articles have recently devoted attention to a project launched by Russian media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov to turn a familiar science fiction trope — the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic body — into a reality.  He conceives of this happening in stages:

• the development of a functional humanoid synthetic body manipulated through an effective brain-machine interface
• the development of such a body, but including a life-support system for a human brain, so that the synthetic body can replace an existing organic one, and
• the mapping of human consciousness such that it, rather than the physical brain, can be housed in the synthetic body

News coverage can be found on the web from Gizmodo, Wired’s Danger Room, CTV News, the Daily Mail, and other sources.

Itskov’s Global Future 2045 initiative can be found here.

A short video (2 minutes) of Itskov discussing the project is embedded immediately below, with a longer one (27 minutes) further down.

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One of the places this science fiction trope plays out is in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my main page here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

Redesigning People: Radical human modification is coming, are you ready?

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

 

Read the article here.

Image borrowed from here.

New computers respond to emotions

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

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Read the article here.

Artificial womb reveals embryo’s growth

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

News article here and original paper here.

Team leader Kevin Shakesheff’s faculty page here.

Shakesheff  was named one of Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2002 (at which time he was 32).  Of course Sergey Brin and Larry Page were selected the same year and no one ever heard of those guys again.  You can find last year’s 35 here.

Shakesheff’s Technology Review bio summarized his main interest as follows:

The human immune system defends against foreign objects with vigilance, but Kevin Shakesheff wants to create lasting peace between synthetic surfaces and the biological world. He is building polymer scaffolds, on which living cells can grow, to form the backbones of what will one day be transplant-ready organs, as well as drug delivery vehicles that can steer themselves to target sites.

You can hear him lecture on regenerative medicine  at the Bio-Dundee Conference in 2011below.  The sound is tinny and the camera stays on him rather than showing his slides, but the lecture is interesting.

Roman Yampolskiy: Containing the AI Apocalypse

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

The headlines make Roman Yampolskiy sound like a knee-jerk Luddite screaming warnings against Skynet on the street corner, but he’s actually thought in more interesting and practical ways than many people about how undesirable AI/human interaction might take place.

News Article here (reprinted here and there and everywhere).

Original paper for sale from Journal of Consciousness Studies here.

Free papers by same author: Direct and Indirect Human Computer Interaction Based Biometrics, Face Recognition in the Virtual World: Recognizing Avatar Faces, AI Complete AI Hard or AI Easy: Classifiction of Problems in Artificial Intelligence.  Others can be found here.

His faculty page at the University of Louisville and his Rate My Professors page.

And apparently he has been a visiting fellow at the Singularity University.  Something purporting to be his application to SU is available on YouTube and embedded below.