Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity
Mr. Bobker predicts computers as intelligent as humans in the next 100 years or so, and Mr. Nowack anticipates that this will lead to humans downloading their minds into computers and achieving digital immortality.
Dr. Chris Eliasmith, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience and director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, says yes and no to this prediction. Intelligent computers might be on the horizon, or, in fact, they may be here already, but part of our problem is deciding what we call intelligent. Is it what the computer can do? Is it how it does it? Since we don't really know how to define human intelligence, it's difficult to do it for a computer as well. Nevertheless, he's sure that increasing sophistication of computers will, at the very least, make this problem more difficult.
On the other hand, downloading the mind is not quite so easy to predict. The biggest problem is that we don't know how to capture the fabulously complex state of the human brain to do the transfer.
Related Links:
Dr. Chris Eliasmith
Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo
The Technological Singularity (Wikipedia)