Can software suffer? The complicated ethics of brain emulation

Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Scientists may be years away from successfully emulating a human or animal brain for research purposes, but the significant – and perhaps unexpected – ethical challenges such work presents have been outlined in a thought-provoking article in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.

“Whole brain emulation (WBE),” writes Anders Sandberg of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, “is an approach to achieve software intelligence by copying the functional structure of biological nervous systems into software.”

“The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail at some resolution, construct a software model of the physiology that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will have an internal causal structure that is essentially the same as the original brain. All relevant functions on some level of description are present, and higher level functions supervene from these.”

It is this similarity to a ‘real’ brain that triggers the substantial ethical concerns which Sandberg addresses in detail, including:

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