get ready for the singularity with a mind file

The Singularity isn’t a topic that’s typically ignored on this blog and as longtime readers know, when I see the kind of highly questionable promises and business models that rely on a magical technology that’ll turn you into an immortal creature by 2050, the systems analysis and snark come out to inject a much needed dose of skepticism into the subject. So imagine my amusement at this proposal from Lifenaut, a company offering you a promise to keep your biological data and a profile of our entire mind in a very Singularity friendly file. But don’t take my word for it, check out what their FAQ has to say…

The long-term goal is to test whether given a comprehensive database, saturated with the most relevant aspects of an individual’s personality, future intelligent software will be able to replicate an individual’s consciousness.

So, perhaps in the next 20 or 30 years technology will be developed to upload these files, together with futuristic software into a body of some sort — perhaps cellular, perhaps holographic, perhaps robotic. LifeNaut.com is funded by the Terasem Movement Foundation, Inc.

So in other words, give Terasem your most personal information to be archived for several decades, which is probably not a good idea if you listen to lawyers and neuroscientists, and you’ll get an immortal avatar able to fill in for you on a computer, in a robot body, or on an interstellar trip at the speed of light. And what exactly is this mysterious Terasem Foundation you ask? Why it’s on organization that believes you can duplicate the human consciousness just by gathering enough data about a person. Not only will you be giving Lifenaut, its members, and its financiers a reality-show styled glimpse into your life, you’ll also be a guinea pig in a bizarre experiment to create a virtual you out of an equivalent of a totally uncensored and unfiltered Facebook profile. I could try to explain why this idea wouldn’t work, but I’d rather not play Captain Obvious and let Terasem’s crew find out for themselves if they can ever track down a consciousness-creating app…