Avatar’s Tree of Life, Ghost PC and lifelogging

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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The soul transfer depicted in Avatar when the tree of life is mediating the transfer of information from one body to the other is quite similar to the idea of continuing your life (like an uninterrupted record of events) in another (newer, better, more maintainable) body.

One of my old laptops died just before Xmass and I’ve just ordered an HDD to USB tool to get the data from its hard drive. I learned as well that there is some chance to even boot from a USB drive and theoretically I can try to boot the operating system from that drive on one of my new and more capable PCs. I see this like an invocation of a defunct spirit. With some luck, (as XP was not designed specifically for this) I should be able to run the applications, access data and enjoy older system settings from my defunct laptop on a new hardware body.

What’s the diference between the 2 scenarios above? In Avatar likely was a huge transfer of data from one biological info processor to another one while the Laptop / Desktop hard disk exchange may resemble as a very basic data transfer. However both processes can be interpreted by humans or other intelligent beings as a soul transfer as we’ll recognize the traits and memories from a past individual in a new one.

There are similar processes happening to some extent today. For example a good percentage of traits from parents are passed to the kids both genetically and through sharing common experiences and life environment. Here will come the advantage of life logging which can enable, improve and make ore efficient such soul transfer process.

So if you want to give yourself the option of a second life retaining the memories of the current one, start life logging today.

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Total Recall – the book

(8 votes, average: 4.63 out of 5)

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It’s not about the Schwarzenegger’s movie, as a colleague questioned me when he saw me reading the book, although Arnold had another movie coming relatively close to the idea.

It’s the book written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell as part of their MyLifeBits research project at Microsoft. I mentioned a few years ago their work in one of the posts and I was excited to learn a month or two ago about the launch of their book. I ordered the book 2 weeks ago and was able to finish reading Friday.

This is the book I wished to write in the past year, without finding the time and I am glad now to have the idea of life logging promoted by two Microsoft well known researchers. I started myself life logging in 2003, maybe not at the level Gordon Bell described it in the book,and I got mixed reactions from family, friends and colleagues, which made me feel alone in promoting such a futuristic idea. The book is now for me a good reference tool in my own efforts in enrolling others on the Total Recall journey. Not to mention the foreword by Bill Gates.

Sure, when reading the book I had always in mind my own experience and vision, and I can say they maps pretty close to those expressed by Mr. Bell in Total Recall. I missed the Sensecam, which unfortunately is not yet a commercial product and likely a number of software applications and browser add ons which the Microsoft research team used. I find Wordpress as a good alternative to organizing and tagging memories and I agree with Gordon that public sharing should be done with caution. I enjoy now with my whole family reviewing pics and videos on a number of screen slide shows in our house.

There are differences too in our views, mainly on the way I reached the subject, from a religious and philosophical perspective in my case (I thought initially that one has to ensure memories will be preserved for heaven, as I didn’t notice any long term effort of church doing that for believers) and the future of life logging. On my side, I’d argue that if one counts on Moore’s low of technological progress, then long term archiving will enable virtually everything imaginable by technologists. Hence a second digital life (or more lives) should be as fulfilling as the biologic one even if one will have to wait decades on centuries for the proper technology to be in place.

In fact I think this will be the killer app for Total Recall – at the time when some public, well known characters will be resurrected and recognized by family, friends and colleagues as true impersonations of the persona. When this will seam feasible and your neighbor will do it, you’ll want to do it as well for your family and yourself.

Happy Total Recall!

Steve

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Artificial brains to host eSouls 10 years away

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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After artificial limbs, heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, skin, muscle, bone, and promising artificial retina and eyeballs, were heralded in the health news already for several good decades (see msnbc / LiveScience.com article bellow)

Humans 2.0: Replacing the mind and body – Scientists edge closer to building many body parts from scratch in the lab

finally, the artificial brain is announcing its arrival in 10 years as we learn from Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project in BBC article by Jonathan Fildes:

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed

Markram’s promise is to send in 10 years a hologram powered by an artificial brain to talk to a TED Global Conference.

But even if Markram won’t meet his target, considering for example the difficulties and costs of bringing together hundreds of millions (if not billions processors), the future still looks bright as the way is open for a sooner or later availability of artificial brains. We should easily add easily add one or 2 more decades to have artificial human brains accessible to the mass market and ready for purchase at a nearby FutureShop. Obviously, if you are concerned being too old and missing the date, we strongly recommend to carefully archive your memories and make the required arrangements with family and friends (and lawyers and bankers) to upload your personality to an artificial brain. You should be able to resume life with only one artificial brain (which likely will be a cloud computing service) and keep valuable processing time for your own cerished thoughts, family events and hobbies although you should better plan to conduct some lucrative activities in order to ensure you’ll get the funds to pay for the computing and IT maintenace services. Or if you get bored or want to skip politics and economic crises you can take arhiving naps and wake-up only when life is good and computing power is cheap. (if you trust somebody loves you enough to wake you up)

I guess half a century from now TED conferences will never end as our multiple artificial brains will debate endless options and questions around the most fascinating ideas and just from time to time we’ll have some parties to invite our wearing bodies which brought our souls into existence.

Politics, economics and generally life on earth will be quite different, do you dare imagine that?

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Technology, digital life, economy, services, society |  Email This Post |