**Digital Immortality Realism and Initiatives:**
– The National Science Foundation granted a substantial sum to explore AI, archiving, and computer imaging for creating digital versions of real individuals.
– The Digital Immortality Institute outlines essential factors for achieving digital immortality, including Internet accessibility for avatars and securing future representations.
– Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Initiative aims to clone personalities onto non-biological carriers for potential immortality.
– Various methods for digital immortality include mindfiles, semantic analysis, and AI integration.
– Experts propose archiving and digitizing people as the initial steps towards creating digital avatars.
**Archiving and Digitizing People for Digital Immortality:**
– Archiving conversations and social interactions is considered feasible with minimal storage requirements.
– Challenges in archiving include speech and text recognition technologies.
– Mindfiles involve collecting data like photos, social media interactions, and personal experiences to create comprehensive repositories.
– Digital immortality is defined as a repository containing a person’s life experiences, thoughts, and appearance integrated into an interactive avatar.
**Making Avatars Alive:**
– Defining avatars as ‘alive’ enables continuous learning, evolution, and interaction with individuals.
– Implementing AI systems into avatars allows for thinking and reacting based on archived data.
– The concept of ‘mindware’ is proposed to generate conscious AIs from a person’s mindfile.
– Calibration processes ensure synchronization between biological persons and their silicon avatars.
**Fictional Explorations of Digital Immortality:**
– Various works of fiction explore digital immortality themes, including consciousness uploading and mind cloning.
– Fictional narratives often delve into the ethical, philosophical, and technological implications of digital immortality.
– Works like ‘Black Mirror,’ ‘Transcendence,’ and ‘Chappie’ depict scenarios where consciousness is stored digitally.
– Fictional platforms like novels, TV series, and films explore the concept of digital immortality extensively.
**Technological Aspects and Implications of Digital Immortality:**
– Concepts such as mind uploading, artificial general intelligence, and the Blue Brain Project are integral to discussions on digital immortality.
– Various publications and research explore the practicalities and implications of digital immortality.
– The idea of creating virtualized ancestors and the preservation of social bonds in a postmortal society is discussed.
– Ethical considerations, technological advancements, and the potential for achieving digital immortality are central themes in these discussions.
Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality") is the hypothetical concept of storing (or cloning) a person's personality in digital substrate, i.e., a computer, robot or cyberspace (mind uploading). The result might look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive. After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and self-improve autonomously (possibly becoming seed AI).
A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.