[Preprint for commenting] Digital Immortality: Theory and Protocol for Indirect Mind Uploading
I would like to get useful input for the following text :
“Digital Immortality: Theory and Protocol for Indirect Mind Uploading”
Abstract. Future superintelligent AI will be able to reconstruct a model of the personality of a person who lived in the past based on informational traces. This could be regarded as some form of immortality if this AI also solves the problem of personal identity in a copy-friendly way. A person who is currently alive could invest now in passive self-recording and active self-description to facilitate such reconstruction. In this article, we analyze informational-theoretical relationships between the human mind, its traces, and its future model; based on this analysis, we suggest the instruments to most cost-effectively collect quality data about a person for future resurrection. These guidelines form a “digital immortality protocol”. Digital immortality is plan C for achieving immortality, after plan A, life extension, and plan B, cryonics.
Keywords: Digital immortality – superintelligence – effective altruism – life extension – mind uploading.
Highlights:
· Future superintelligent AI will be able to simulate past people.
· To help AI improve its simulations, we can collect data about a living person now.
· Passive data collection is constant recording.
· Active data collection is running tests and recording self-description.
· The best way to collect information is to create art, as it is unique, valuable, and predictive.
Full text is open for commenting: https://goo.gl/QkDfdU
I was going to say “hey, this reminds me a lot of Terasem” and then sure enough you reference them right away!
I’m pretty sympathetic to this idea, to the point that at one time I was working our writing a story where a key feature would be what I called “book people” who are dead people kept “alive” by a team of a dozen or so people who collectively simulate them with the aid of books to serve as long term memory. Similar ideas have popped up elsewhere in science fiction.
I unfortunately don’t have time to look at this closely right now, but skimming through I see you cover a lot of ground in one place, and I don’t think these ideas have been pulled together in one place before in this way, so thank you for doing that!
Thanks! It seems that the opportunity to revive a person’s mind via “viral autobiography” seems to be under-explored, but your idea is something like this :)
Really good job overall!
See comments on article—I had a number of critiques, but most were addressed later. I think that just means you need to caveat the earlier statements a bit more, and reference the fact that you will address them. (But I tend to foreshadow too much in my writing, so maybe your level of structure is sufficient.)
Thank you! I see your comments and later will manually transfer them into the main text. Some ideas may seems too obvious to me, but surely caveats will help.
I’m somewhat, but not very, familiar with the ideas. Depending on your audience, you may already be sufficiently clear, but for a broad audience it seems likely that more clarification is ideal.