HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
Furby, you don’t have million
years of Furby expectation,
you’re just a Furby. That’s
probably why this whole uncanny valley will remain pretty
hard to navigate.”
THE LIFENAUT PROJECT.
The best-selling author and
futurist Ray Kurzweil famously
pins 2045 as the year of “Singularity,” when computers
fully gain human intelligence,
and we begin to overlap. After
that he thinks computers will
surpass us. After all, they can
already compose concertos,
compete on jeopardy, help cure
diseases and teach classes —
things we once reserved for the
intelligent class of our time.
As further proof that this
is not some wacky theory on
the outskirts of major scientific thoughts, it’s worth noting Kurzweil is a renowned
thinker, the recipient of countless grants and patents and
the 1999 National Medal of
Technology from President Bill
Clinton. His recently established “Singularity University”
was sponsored by Google and is
housed at NASA Research Park.
Kurzweil seems to acknowl-
edge that after the Singularity
occurs, things could either get
real ugly, or save the planet —
one or the other. But he also
wants to live long enough to see
it happen, and to see his father,
who died from Diabetes complications, come back to life
through the magic of computers.
Terasem, which hopes “future intelligent software will
be able to replicate an individual’s consciousness,” according to its website, wants to
help with that process. Rothblatt, like Kurzweil, believes
we’ll soon be able to take all
the stuff that makes us human
and place it into something
else that is more permanent
— a robot, perhaps, or another
machine. Then, as the Terasem
faithful predict, we will all interact together forever in “joyful immortality.”
Terasem also currently runs
the LifeNaut project, which already has over 20,000 users
through its website. LifeNaut
allows you to create a mindfile
for yourself, or your mother, or
anybody else close to you, using photos and online data and
other “digital reflections” you
deem worthy of collecting and