Can We Copy the Brain?
The best analogy to this field and the many, many problems it might run into is biotech. This is actually
quite funny because in the early days the main analogy to biotech was the computer / state-machine.For some background, biotech has undergone many booms and busts in the last half century; unlike the last tech bubble, these booms and busts have flown somewhat under the radar.In fact, Jurassic Park, written in 1990, is actually
a book /about/ the late 80’s biotech bubble. There is a really fun part in the book where they are talking about making miniature dinosaurs that will only eat Ingen-brand dinosaur pet food (Ingen was the company behind Jurassic Park).Anyway, with biotech, the problem has been, again and again, the assumption that a system is radically simpler than it. Biology is so incredibly complicated that it puts the largest engineering book I have, a 1500 TCP/IP protocol book (No Starch) to shame. I mean at least we know how TCP/IP works. With biology, the manual might be closer to 900,000 pages and we only have 40% of the table of contents and maybe 800 pages (out of order) so far.BEST EXAMPLE: In the 70’s, once large portions of the genome started to be identified and linked to specific genes that were known to cause traits or diseases, it was widely assumed that creating/reading/updating/deleting genes on DNA would be relatively straightforward, particularly as more of the genome was uncovered. However, as was later discovered, many traits or diseases might be the result of 200+ genes that are also used elsewhere. Turn off just 1 gene for a disease, and 1). it won’t do anything because you didn’t turn off the other 199, and 2). oh wow that gene was actually used for something else and now you’ve lost the ability to form eyeballs / are born without anything in your eye sockets.