Q&A with Patty Jansen discussion

Greta asked in another thread (the one on my novella Charlotte's Army) if we would ever develop artificial minds.

In Charlotte's Army, I use the concept of artificial humans. Charlotte is a specialist in neuro-informatics. Before she signed up with the International Space Force, she worked on restoring the menatl capabilities of dementia patients by reconstructing their memories and re-loading them in their brains.

I did a fair bit of reading on this subject, and found out that we're quite close to doing things like this on a very small scale. For example, scientists have been able to reconstruct an image from pulses measured in the brain of a cat.

I wrote a blog post about all the things I found out that we can already do, or are close to doing:
http://pattyjansen.com/?p=823

I am writing a novel in that same world which explores the concept further.

I don't see why we shouldn't eventually develop artificial minds. There's a lot of work being done in this area. Time and again humans have proved they don't need to understand something in order to make use of it.

I think there are a couple of aspects. Complete artificial minds will probably remain a subject for nothing more than academic study for the time being, but I can see great strides being made in medicine in order to 'fix' people's minds, some revolving only around responses to bodily functions, such as being able to move artifical limbs.