Retorts

Artificial Life -- NOT!

In your last issue, Shaun Burnett comments "By year 2099 experts agree, only a few will still inhabit a biological body" [Retorts, Feb] implying that people's personalities will inhabit machines rather than those messy leather bags of fluids called bodies. He neglects to specify which "experts" or indeed what it is that they are expert in.

Possibly there will be ways of replicating someone's mind/brain functions in a machine, but I don't think it will be any easier than Artificial Intelligence, and my reading suggests that the "experts" don't even agree about whether true AI is even possible, let alone how long it will take us.

Then we move on to the question of identity. If you copy my mind, my thoughts and mental processes into a computer -- even a very good copy -- is it really me? What if my body is still moving around and thinking, so there are two entities, (one biological, one machine) that think they are me; are they really both me? How can you convince the biological me to be euthanised because "I'm safe on computer so it doesn't matter"?

I think there are far too many philosophical questions that need to be solved, that it may not be possible to solve, before the pseudo-immortality that Shaun describes is a viable alternative. I don't think it will be that easy.

Steve Rennell
Christchurch

PS: Shaun describes standing at the dawn of a new century "never more educated", yet the new century hasn't started yet, and children 20 years ago could spell better than a lot of university students today. That's progress that is.