Xeroxing the Brain
Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, have published an in-depth roadmap for “whole brain emulation”–in other words, the replication of a fully functional human brain inside a computer. “The basic idea” for whole brain emulation, they write, “is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain.” It’s virtualization, applied to our noggins.



