Eric Steinhart
Abstract
You can survive after death in various kinds of artifacts. You can survive in diaries, photographs, sound recordings, and movies. But these artifacts record only superficial features of yourself. We are already close to the construction of programs that partially and approximately replicate entire human lives (by storing their memories and duplicating their personalities). A digital ghost is an artificially intelligent program that knows all about your life. It is an animated auto-biography. It replicates your patterns of belief and desire. You can survive after death in a digital ghost. We discuss a series of digital ghosts over the next 50 years. As time goes by and technology advances, they are progressively more perfect replicas of the lives of their original authors.
- Bainbridge, W. S. (2003). Massive questionnaires for personality capture. Social Science Computer Review, 21(3), 267-280. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108 (July).Google Scholar
- Church, G. (2006). Genomes for all. Scientific American 294(1) (January).Google Scholar
- Freeman, E., & Gelernter, D. (1996). Lifestreams: A storage model for personal data. ACM SIGMOD Bulletin, 25(1), 80-86. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gemmell, J., Bell, G., Lueder, R., Drucker, S., & Wong, C. (2002). MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the memex vision. ACM Multimedia '02, December 1-6, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France, 235-238. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gemmell, J., Lueder, R., & Bell, G. (2003a). The MyLifeBits lifetime store. ACM SIGMM 2003 Workshop on Experiential Telepresence (ETP 2003), November 7, 2003, Berkeley, CA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gemmell, J., Lueder, R., & Bell, G. (2003b). Living with a lifetime store. ATR Workshop on Ubiquitous Experience Media (UEM 2003), Sept. 9-10, 2003, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan.Google Scholar
- Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: ACE Books.Google Scholar
- Gibson, W. (1988). Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
- Krause, C. (2000). The virtual human project. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, 33(1), 10-13.Google Scholar
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking. Google Scholar
- Landay, J., Newman, M., & Hong, J. (1998). The shadow: A personal experience capture system. In Proceedings of 1998 DARPA/NIST Smart Spaces Workshop, 7-82 - 7-85.Google Scholar
- Markram, H. (2006). The blue brain project. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 153-159.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Norman, D. (1992). Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles. New York: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
- Steinhart, E. (1999). Emergent values for automatons. Ethics and Information Processing, 1(2), 1-6. Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Survival as a Digital Ghost
Comments