Elon Musk's Neuralink Showcase Spurs Mind-Copying Discussion About AI And Self-Driving Cars

Will we be able to copy the human mind? Elon Musk recently presented the latest efforts of Neuralink, a company that he founded in 2016 and which has grand aspirations of developing an implantable Brain-Machine Interface or BMI (for my prior coverage on Neuralink see the link here, for my analysis of the potential future of BMI, see the link here). Despite some interesting show-and-tell, including pigs involved in the ongoing experiments, much of the discussion was rather speculative and spurred some to later ask where's the beef, likening the event as little more than neuroscience theatre and noting some internal angst about the way that the engineering and science is being conducted. In any case, the Q&A led to some fascinating postulations about the possibilities of being someday able to copy the human mind. Let's use that as a means to consider how copying the human mind can be related to AI, along with then using AI-based true self-driving cars as an example for exploring the mind-copying aspects. First of all, if you make a copy of something, is it the same as the original?