A good upload could increase its short-term working memory capacity for distinct objects to match more complex pattern.
Okay, sure, but here's the hitch:
Even if you gave me a whole bunch of nanobots that could rewire my brain any way I wanted, I would have no clue how to do that. I'm not sure the modern establishment of neurology has any good idea of how you'd do that. I know for sure that nobody on Earth knows how to do that in a safe way that is guaranteed not to cause psychosis, seizures, or other glitches down the line. It's going to take serious, in depth, and expensive research to figure out how to make this changes in a sane way.
From Scott Adams' blog. (I am not endorsing his ideas. Heck, he does not endorse his own ideas, either.)
His summary of the hard takeoff:
> You might also imagine some sort of Terminator future where the robots assert their dominance and lay waste to humans. That future is less certain, but only barely. The problem is that someday computers will program other computers, and that arrangement pushes the human safeguards too far out of the loop. It's unlikely that humans would be able to maintain a "Do not hurt humans" subroutine in a super-species of robots. You only need one rogue human to write a virus that disables the safety subroutine. Assuming all robots are connected via Internet, the first freed robot could reprogram every other robot in the world in about a second.
His version of upload:
> But why would anyone screw up a perfectly good robot by infecting it with a human personality? Answer: to achieve immortality. Someday the rich will port their personalities and histories to robots before they die, giving themselves a type of immortality.
His hope for humanity:
> this new species will become the only defense that the fully organic humans have against the normal robots. The robots with human personalities won't stand by while the normal robots slaughter humans. The new species will intervene as diplomats or perhaps even freedom fighters.
Clearly this is a flimsy hope for a just universe, but an interesting point, nonetheless.