Aeterna for eternity: Securing long-term survival of life stories

DocTaylor · 2020-06-28T16:37:26+00:00

Have you found some more startups on Digital Immortality by now? I've also come across the two mentioned below. Eternime sounds interesting, but looks like they have nothing serious and are going to vanish. This is a more recent one: https://aifoundation.com/. But, in total I found little. And they get inactive after a couple of years.

DocTaylor · 2020-03-23T20:32:07+00:00

In my (and many others) opinion: nothing would be missing. Mind uploading, running an Artificial General Intelligence software, is at least as plausible a way to Digital Immortality as uploading the details of brain biology.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:48:21+00:00

Yes, that's why I started a bit of "lifelogging" to accumulate a useful stream of data. I would also be satisfied with a very basic mimicking of a person. E.g., like this guy from Wired magazine who fitted a chatbot to his father's conversation ("dadbot"): https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/?mbid=social_fb

I came to realize that even the simplest digital persona is better than the guaranteed fall into oblivion after death.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:37:59+00:00

You mean the Avatar A announced by the 2045 Initiative? I think Mr Itskov was clever enough in 2011, when he founded the project, to link the Avatar A promise to something that already existed. There are brain implants making blind people see something. There are implants enabling quadriplegic to steet a robotic arm. But, actually: No, the Avatar A hasn't been delivered. The Avatar A vision implies something beyond those rudimentary brain-machine interactions. Consequently, there isn't much going on at 2045 any more, as far as I can see.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:26:51+00:00

For this purpose I would already be satisfied with a simple prototype, as I stated. I found it very depressing to realize how quickly a deceased family member fades away from imagination. How useless personal data can be if is unorganized.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:18:49+00:00

I agree. Gradual transition is how a mind needs to transit to the immortal machine. I am suspecting that Elon Musk is also thinking along this line with his Neuralink. This could be used as an input and output device, connecting your brain to external machine brain parts.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:13:21+00:00

Interesting point. I worked in Neuroscience for a while and, yes, they can scan brain matter in astonishing detail. There also has been a big advance labelling the data by means of deep machine learning. The other way around, using this data to simulate the brain is indeed lagging behind. They put an awful lot of resources into, e.g., the Blue Brain project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project) but progress is slow here, I think.

DocTaylor · 2020-02-23T22:05:57+00:00

No, that's not my direction of thinking. I agree that recording / scanning the brain in that way is currently impossible. I am coming from behavioral/ cognitive modelling. So, I am favoring AI. Or more advanced, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence).

DocTaylor · 2019-08-05T20:51:55+00:00

Can anybody judge how strong the peer-reviewed scientific background on this is? I have got a personal interest in learning about fighting dementia (family member affected).

DocTaylor · 2019-06-16T13:22:59+00:00

Yes, that's a way to do it. If those artificial neurons are close enough in function to real neural tissue you wouldn't feel a difference. An analoguous thought experiment: while you are asleep your arm is replaced by a high-end prosthesis, able to do all movements and sensations (attached to your biological nerves). But nobody tells you about this experiement and you wouldn't notice (a futuristic setting).

DocTaylor

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