A wild computer engineer who is a specialist at artificial intelligence appears!
Well, yeah, all this stuff looks so bright, but we had the same discourse 15 years ago as we were starting to use the Intarwebz. And we didn't even have /b/.
You can map the human brain, right, but that doesn't mean you can build a machine that works like the human brain. Well, it might appear like a human brain, but this doesn't mean it works the same.
We already know that reason is not the mark of the human race. We know how neural networks work: we can model them and build them, and we can even give them capabilities real neural networks lack. Basically they work as "pattern recognition" mechanisms, so that we are able to make a difference between red and orange, letter A and letter B, or between good and evil or fair and unfair. This is France and this is Belgium. Our brain is a machine which is amazing at adapting to any kind of input you give it, detecting patterns in them, then operating with those patterns to take the best survival decissions.
As you might already suspect, all those classifications we force upon patterns are unreal. France and Belgium are only in our heads, as red and orange. There is no red and orange in nature, just photons vibrating at different wavelengths: and the real enigma is how do our brains transform data about wavelengths into those amazing colors we see.
Now the real problem we face in Artificial Intelligence is that we do not know what to do with the very experience of things. That is to say, we know how to make a system which classifies light into shades of color, we even know how to make it so that it trains itself to do so. However we do not have the slightest idea on how does the "phenomenal" level of reality arise. The fact that you are actually seeing something as orange or red doesn't make any sense. There is nothing in photon wavelengths that would lead us to even suspect there is anything as colors if it wasn't for the fact that we are actually experiencing them.
So, if we could code our minds and store them in an electronic support, it still would be worth nothing. Even in the best peak of our technology in some decades. In the best scenario it would still be a machine which would "think rationally", but the phenomenic level wouldn't exist. There would be no "ghost in the shell", no phenomenic scenario at all.
Our ability to build machines able to do this still requires a revolution probably both in physics (and the involvement of consciousness in the creation of reality) and in artificial intelligence. Now it is interesting to look into the past, because science is very good dealing with the "how" but magick is very good dealing with the "what". And the phenomenal level we now need to understand is more of a "what" thing. This might mean the understanding of the "what" from the phenomenal level could even need a redefinition of what we understand as science.
So... give it at least a century, I'm afraid. Its more easy you become inmortal from amazing health techniques than from any electronic codification from the contents of your brain. Artificial Intelligence is still a baby science which needs great steps.
