HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
ways we don’t always see — and
posting ads and creepy messages along the side of our pages. (“Wait, how did Facebook
know I liked beagles?”). Microsoft Research also has its own
Terasem-esque project in the
works: a new piece of software
called Lifebrowser that can take
your photos, emails, search history, documents and events
on your personal calendar and
then infer “memory landmarks”
about your life — events and activities “that people would find
important and memorable.” It
could organize those landmarks
into a sort of timeline for your
life, which you can play around
with, sculpted to your liking.
“What we think will happen
very soon is artificial intelligence software, algorithm based
software, will be able to look
at your photograph and make
sense of it,” Duncan says. “It
will look at your photo and say,
‘there’s a dog, or there’s a cat.’
It will be able to look at it and
absorb it and use it.”
A machine that can analyze,
that can simulate or perhaps
even replicate human thought.
Depending on how you look at
it, it might raise a few ethical
questions or set off a few red
flags. But Martine Rothblatt, the
founder of Terasem, thinks those
will all fade away with time.
“I think, practically speaking,
the benefits of having a mind
clone will be so enticing that
any ethical dilemma will find
a resolution,” Rothblatt wrote
on her blog in April of last
year. “We are offering people
the opportunity to cram twice
as much life into each day, absorb twice as many interesting
things and continue living beyond the days of their bodies.”
Rothblatt has always been
fascinated with technology and
its futurist capabilities. Though
she is extremely shy of the
press and declined an interview
for this piece, quite a few things
are known about her complicated, lucrative life. She founded
Sirius Satellite Radio — one
of the centerpieces of its field
— and is currently the CEO of
United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company which focuses
on curing infectious diseases. In
2008, according to the Washington Post, she was “the second-most highly compensated
leader of a public company” in