Heaven in a Chip

Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age

De: Bart Kosko

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Would you still be you if a chip replaced your brain? Who draws the line in the digital age? Those with the most power? Does the digital age even have black-and-white parameters? Where does one country's Internet jurisdiction end and another's begin? Who owns the ocean or the moon -- or your genome blueprint? Bart Kosko sheds new insight on these questions and shows how a revolutionary way of thinking will affect every aspect of life from politics and genetics to warfare, technology, art, privacy, and even mortality itself.

Editorial Reviews
“Very readable. A provocative final chapter promotes the idea that digital networks will be able to hold our own (still-fuzzy) consciousnesses, putting an end to human death"
--Publishers Weekly

"The mind-boggling epic that is Heaven in a Chip"
--Techweek

“Highly recommended"
--Library Journal


"Kosko is the quintessential scientific cyber-punk—a street-smart prophet of the information age"
--Los Angeles Times Magazine

"Bart Kosko is a wonderful futurist with a polymathic combination of talents"
MIT Professor Marvin Minsky

"Polymath"
--Wired

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Bart Kosko is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and law, at the University of Southern California, and 2023 winner of the Hebb Award in neural learning from the International Neural Network Society. He holds degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and law, holds several patents on AI and machine learning, and has published numerous scientific articles and textbooks. He is an international bestselling author whose books include Fuzzy Thinking, Noise, the cyber-thriller WWIII novel Nanotime, and the global-warming-thriller novel Cool Earth.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Must you die when your brain dies?

Today the answer is yes: Your mind dies when your brain dies. Your mind dies much as the second hand on a clock stops moving when the clock stops working.

That will start to change as computer chips graft into brains.

In time chips and chip networks will backup brains themselves. Then the music of your mind will play on a superfast digital instrument that runs millions or billions of times faster than your current brain runs. Right now the music of your mind plays slowly as neural electrical sparks move through three pounds of wet and decaying tissue.

It all changes in a chip: Your mind can live as long as it gets enough power or until someone or something turns it off.

Your subjective sense of time also changes in a chip.

A few minutes or seconds of your subjective brain time today may give you years if not centuries in what I call the nanotime of a chip consciousness. That was why I gave the title Nanotime to this book’s earlier companion cyberthriller novel that still carries that title and that introduced the term. Today we think slowly in subjective neural time where the burning of a wooden match or the falling of an apple from a tree seem like normal events that unfold in real time. Someday we will think in nanotime. Then the same falling apple will appear frozen in mid-air for days or even years.

Such is the digital fix to the greatest design flaw of hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution. That design flaw condemns us now to neural and synaptic oblivion. It also smacks of amateur engineering: Brains have no backup. Society will change in profound ways once that digital fix to the backup problem becomes commonplace and once enough minds cross this digital threshold.

Alas the changes may not all be for the better.