In fact, most of the aliens do not go to Mars, the least senior members of the team are sent, since tracing such signals is core to their mission. Everyone else wanted to stay on Earth taking in the vast herds of wilder-beasts, the insects and plant life, the remarkable coral reefs.

The junior members of the team lament being back in space suits on a cold dead planet-- but such is the lot of a new explorer. They make their way to Olympus Mons where the signal originates. 2/

@alexis

That's part of it. But, I think it's also likely that the first experiments with "uploading" will focus on the brain-- not the entire body. But we aren't just brains-- our nervous system is integrated into our entire body, our heart, our lungs, our gut--

I don't think a brain focused upload could even be called a full clone. It's a new version of you without a body. That will change how they think.

The only path seems a multi-year process of integration. If that's even possible.

@alexis

But more to the theme of the story I suspect the first people to try to "upload their mind" in an attempt to become immortal will make a lot of mistakes we can't even anticipate. Our understanding of the brain is very shallow. The complexity is immense. It may not even be possible to simulate minds efficiently on digital computers.

We may need totally novel hardware. I think there is a lot of hubris and nonsense floating around of late.

@alexis

I loved how many things this little story left open for the reader to interpret.

Makes you think, like great stories always do!

@alexis
The first superwealthy pioneers will experiment with new mind-cloning technology

They will complain about safety culture slowing innovation, and fire any scientist or engineer warning of the dangers

And once they've cultivated their compliant teams of young inexperienced but absolutely loyal technology soldiers, they will convince themselves to take the plunge

and their brains will catastrophically implode under the weight of their folly

@alexis also there is the point of stagnation - with immortal hierarchies, a social/cultural/technological mistake might not just die and become a dead end

death is the reprojection onto humanity as an organism

100,000 years is not enough to restore the loss of species diversity completely, or for the most pernicious poisons to dissipate. But, it's more than enough time to erase all obvious traces of human built environment. Nature is powerful. Shocking how quickly a forest can gobble roads and buildings.

I'm certain the aliens in the story will find traces of humanity eventually- but, if you discovered earth wouldn't you be so distracted by the biodiversity that you might not get to that right away?

Great and fascinating story! Mind talking a bit more about the truth about uploading?

BTW: As far as we know, Mars is the only known planet inhabited only by robots.

@alexis “I’m not really me” has always bothered me least about teleporting/uploading b/c it’s the same as aging or even healing.

Nonetheless, developing a whole person artificially would generate a whole person, even if they’re different as a child. The Martian techbros might be as far as the technology got before humanity sputtered out, but an alien that can traverse the stars is SOMEHOW operating on orders-of-magnitude greater timescale than any chemical life we know.

@JoshuaACNewman @alexis

The aliens could be not that advanced and on a generation ship that took forever to reach this promising planet they discovered (Earth) I think it's clear that they are very compatible with Earth's environment. Who knows how far they have come to find a thriving, geologically active, watery, radiation shielded, ecologically diverse world?

They could also be advanced, using tech we don't know about.

I don't think it changes the story much either way.

@alexis By the time were talking about a generation ship, they could be delighted to discover the rich biodiversity of their-life-compatible Earth because it’s where their ancestors are from! They could be the civilization spreading from Proxima Centauri who have lost the knowledge that their ancestors (and it’s ecosystem) came from here!

So the techbros were so excited about their 1.0 release that they missed going to the stars because they couldn’t Move Fast & Break Things.

@JoshuaACNewman

"I'm not really me" in the sense that some "uploading" process would result in a kind of ... fake?

I think first attempts at "uploading" may focus on the machine doing a convincing imitation of the subject. It might involve wearing recording devices for a year, using the data to create a system that responds probabilistically like the subject.

Impressive to see-- but, not immortality (probably not even a 2nd conscious instance)We are more than the sum of our "outputs"

It's hard for me to imagine anything more precious than this world we have evolved to fit into-- and a world that has evolved to fit around us.

I'm just so dispirited that so many of the great and mighty men who claim they want to save the world don't seem to care about the world at all.

@JoshuaACNewman

I think a software emulation of my entire brain and body, right down to the atomic level, could reasonably be said to be "me." On this, I agree with the techbro futurists.

Where I disagree with them is whether this is a plausible option, at least within the foreseeable future. The technology just doesn't exist, and may in fact be outside the bounds of physics as we understand it.

I’m not convinced of the existence of consciousness anyway. If it means having a model of the self with proprioceptive feedback, we’re at best c-grade. We hold inaccurate models (sometimes wildly) of what we’re like all the time.

The kicker for me would be an inability to change (which is why I think humans struggle to be conscious). These robots, despite working for a length of time comparable to all humanity, haven’t evolved despite reproducing.

@sphinx @JoshuaACNewman

Totally agree with this. And the kind of model you describe poses big problems for computing as we know it. So, they are looking for short cuts.

We might not be able to model every neuron... but sphinxGPT has identical responses to sphinx 94% of the time! It's basically the same person! (Please, step into the pod and pay your upload fee.)

@JoshuaACNewman

Exactly! And this gets into the fuzzy and dangerous area between actual personhood and mere convincing facsimiles of personhood. In other words, the Turing test is bollocks.

A sufficiently-trained LLM might be able to mimic my words well enough to fool even my loved ones, at least most of the time. But it still doesn't THINK or FEEL, any more than a photograph of me thinks or feels.

@JoshuaACNewman

What happens when you feed LLM output to a LLM as training data?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf

@sphinx Yeah, the question of practicability, even in principle, is substantial. Nonetheless, if you could be close, it could still be a person. No one has ever been the same person before, though, so I’m not sure that’s the bar to choose.

The Techbrobots obviously think that what could continue forward was their egos. I think their failure in the story is a generous interpretation of where they would get to.

@JoshuaACNewman @Linkshaender

Why do they think that being able to remember death is a way to escape it?