“Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap” is a 2008 technical report by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, published as Technical Report 2008-3 of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. It grew out of a 2007 workshop that gathered experts from computational neuroscience, brain-scanning, computing, nanotechnology, and neurobiology. The report asks a concrete engineering question: what would it actually take to scan a particular brain and run a software model faithful enough that it behaves like the original mind.
The report defines whole brain emulation - sometimes called mind uploading - as the process of capturing the structure of a brain in enough detail, then simulating it computationally so that the emulation reproduces the original’s behavior. It breaks the problem into pieces: scanning a brain at sufficient resolution, translating the scan into a structural model, and running that model on adequate computing hardware. For each piece it surveys the state of the relevant technology and estimates the scale of improvement required, treating the question as a matter of degree rather than of impossibility.
The roadmap does not claim emulation is near; it is careful to lay out uncertainties about how much detail is necessary, since the required level of fidelity is itself unknown. Its lasting influence is as the reference document for taking brain emulation seriously as a possible route to advanced machine intelligence - one that copies an existing human mind rather than engineering intelligence from first principles. It underlies later analyses, including Robin Hanson’s economic forecast in “The Age of Em” and debates over which path to superhuman capability might come first.