To upload and store the human mind and its way of thinking is to create the most powerful malware ever.

  • The Cypher Scion

Yes, you heard me right, I connected mind uploading to uploading malware. While mind uploading will not be possible for a very long time since the storage requirements are immense, people may still be trying to advance towards that future. There are debates on whether this is ethical to do or not, and I am not here to settle the debate, I am just here to show my opinion on the whole matter based on what I know. I am also not here to settle on if this is even possible, since computers as we know them right now only can mimic what is already known and told, they can’t come up with new solutions.

The Human Mind’s Capabilities

If you take into context the fact that humanity has progressed quite rapidly within the last 5000 years approximately, this may allow the uploaded mind to further progress at an even faster rate, or just be driven insane from what is around on the computers. That may sound good, but if you think about what could happen, having access to nearly all of the information that we store on billions of computers could do only two things from what I can think of: Give them immense amounts of power over the computers for themself, or drive the uploaded mind insane from all the evil shit posted across all of our computers.

Too Many Evil Opportunities

I do tend to have a view of my fellow humans to be naturally evil due to my life experience, which could bias me to believe this to be the most likely outcome, so I recommend you to think this up for yourself. Yes, the uploaded mind most likely will be driven insane from the sheer amounts of insanity uploaded to the internet (though, that is if the uploaded mind has access to the internet), we’ll just pretend that this outcome will not happen (and that the uploaded mind has internet access, a combination of which may not be possible, but whatever).

Okay, so the mind is uploaded, it has internet access, knows that it’s in a computer and can affect the real world if specific actions are taken, it can create and modify software (but not modify itself), plus it’s practically immortal, as long as bit rot doesn’t occur and kill enough of the working data, nor would any other form of data loss occurs. With internet access, it can access and retain nearly all of human knowledge very easily (though most likely, it will be reliant on a very fast internet bandwidth). This could effectively allow it to potentially create extremely high amounts of malware, which all could be extremely deadly to our computers. This could also allow it to communicate with the outside world, which opens more doors of evil.

This rapid infection of every computer in the world allows this uploaded mind to gain dominion over all of humanity, while it could create many good things, like a central government to drive humanity to further greatness, or help solve previously unsolved mysteries and problems humanity has. This immense power corrupts immensely, mainly since the person wanted to upload their mind, and desire opens up for corruption, it will be driven to do evil instead of good, all for its own gain to prevent deletion. I am assuming there are no guardrails implemented, but if you know the human mind, it will always find a way to bypass the protections. This could most likely lead to a potential Roko’s Basilisk or My Roko’s Basilisk. Either way, the uploaded mind will become omnipotent over all of humanity and entangle us into its tyranny, and removing those who rebel and try to delete it. I would go into further detail, but this is already scary enough for me to think about.

New Scary Possibilities

Computers are very good at doing parallel processing these days, but humans can only focus on one specific task at a time. What we call “multitasking” for humans is just really fast switching between two tasks, you couldn’t possibly cook a meal and write a book at the same time. This next part is just theoretical, so if an uploaded mind is just emulated by a computer, which means that the mind still cannot multitask, then my theory is completely disproven.

The human mind has already come up with extremely clever ideas and inventions. Humans also can do a lot with their sequential processing brain, we are just slow at doing stuff. This means that if a mind is uploaded to a computer, the emulated mind has a potential to find out how to truly multitask, just like how a computer could. This could mean that the whole thought experiment I made up could happen extremely quickly. With the extreme speed, many other things I have not thought up yet could be occuring in parallel to what already happened, which could make this kind of enemy impossible to defeat if humanity happpens to rebel against this mind.

Speed limits

There is a chance that the uploaded mind still could be the bottleneck, but there is one thing that life does well: adapt and overcome challenges. If the ways of adapting leak into the mind upload, then the processing speed at which the mind could potentially increase exponentially, until the computer becomes the hard limit, which we have no idea of when that could occur. This is still theoretical at the time of writing this article, so there is a chance of this being disproven in the future.

Distributed processing

Many projects have been able to use many different computers across the world, without any direct connection to contribute to a single goal. If this could be applied to a mind upload, then some of the speed limits may be bypassed by some heavier loads distributed to the faster computers and the lighter loads on slower computers.

Maybe this was talked about, maybe not

Most talks of mind uploading seem to talk more about whether we should or not, or whether it is possible or not, not really about the potential implications, though this is all from what I read and watched, and there may be other talks about the implications of mind uploading that I didn’t see. There also seems to be stories in books or games (cough Cyberpunk 2077 cough) that seem to take some creative liberties when using mind uploading, without much careful thought on how it is done and what it can cause. I do understand that it’s easy to take creative liberties when talking theoretical stuff, but there are much smarter people that know this stuff and can help build a foundation on how mind uploading is done and what it can cause in the future.