| Uploading human minds will happen faster than medically maintained immortality. For the latter you need to solve against any kind of failure for all organs. For the first you only need to be able to recover the important subset of brain state. People don't appreciate the amount of traces events, things or creatures leave behind. From footprints, to DNA, to ... Most of the brain state is actually for maintaining the brain tissue cells, and general cellular homeostasis. A frequently used synapse will have multiple characteristic differences with a less frequently used synapse. To transport this specific facet, there will be multiple markers, but we only need to be able to record one of them, then the rest become redundant. The same can be done for other facets: signal speed and delay for a specific axon/dendrite for example, they will all have multiple correlated measurable quantities, from RNA molecules, to protein concentrations. You only need one of many indicators to collect that facet of brain state. Knowledge transfer will be a testable hypothesis: how do putatively uploaded mice respond to mazes they know from meatspace life exposure (walk without detours to prize) versus mazes they don't (walk exploratorily before finding prize). Once this becomes possible higher ranking prisoners of war may be uploaded for extracting the episodic memory, training locations, training contents, organizational structure, evidence of foreign support in equipment or manpower, observation of war crimes, and if ICC doesn't accept such evidence, PoW observation of PoW-friendly soldiers commiting war crimes, to blackmail these soldiers, potentially during active combat, turning active enemy soldiers behind enemy lines into your agents, many war crime observations will be war-criminal-instructions from superiors, so now you can blackmail them... The list goes on and on... Also domestically: conspiracies against a fraction of death row inmates, some will consent to uploading their brain if it means potential continued existence when deemed innocent after investigating episodic memory. If the inmate is aware of some identities throwing them under the bus, those can immediately be questioned, with those discovered not cooperating being uploaded against their will. Quickly undiscovered conspiracy rings will lobby against uploading for discovery, or killing those who know to much, potentially incriminating themselves further. Imagine the elimination of unpunished willful transgressions. The evaporation of plausible deniability. |