Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom. Technical Report #2008‐3, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
Whole brain emulation (WBE), the possible future one-to-one modelling of the function of the human brain, is academically interesting and important for several reasons. It represents a formidable engineering and research problem, yet one which appears to have a well-defined goal and could, it would seem, be achieved by extrapolations of current technology. This is unlike many other suggested radically transformative technologies like artificial intelligence where we do not have any clear metric of how far we are from success.
This document aims at providing a preliminary roadmap for WBE, sketching out key technologies that would need to be developed or refined, and identifying key problems or uncertainties. This would mean not only sketching how a brain emulator would work if it could be built and a roadmap of technologies needed to implement it, but also a list of the main uncertainties in how it would function and proposed experiments to reduce these uncertainties.
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