She describes herself as a "happy promoter of futurist concepts," who enjoys technology, astronomy and geopolitics, along with the band Santana. Both Star Trek and The Dick Van Dyke shows are favorites. So is Kurzweil; he's listed under "Heroes" alongside Carl Sagan and Frederick Douglass, among others.
She's blogged about her aunt's death, team solidarity at work and Barack Obama, whom she says makes her "so happy" because he "gives so much hope for the world."
These are the memories she's working to preserve, the details that would make up her mindfile and her digital being in the future.
It seems to be something that's more for the survivors than those who die, though. You won't experience the new experiences of your cyber consciousness. In fact, Kurzweil and Rothblatt believe the cyber-you should be considered a separate individual with its own set of civil rights.
"It's a deeply philosophical issue," Kurzweil said.
Terasemfaith.org, the Internet home base for Terasem Movement Transreligion Inc., describes Rothblatt's religion as one that believes "God emerges as technology becomes increasingly omnipresent, omniscient, omnificient and omnipotent," and that "technology will soon enable joyful immortality."
Selmer Bringsjord is skeptical. He's the director of Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
Such concepts have "been around a long time," he said, though they weren't seriously talked about among engineers, more by philosophers. But as global warming worries grow, biological threats mount and weapons become more sophisticated, the idea has taken on a new urgency, Bringsjord says. "At any moment, all consciousness could be extinguished," Rothblatt said in the 2006 video. "Through an asteroidal collision, a cometary collision, a supernova collision, a gamma ray burst, a mega nuclear holocaust that could wipe out life, a biologically engineered virus that wipes out life, a mega volcano," she said. "We live in a dangerous universe."
Exploring these issues is fair, Bringsjord said, though he hasn't seen any evidence that anything meaningful can ever be achieved.
"The benefit is that it's raising big issues or what is life and people and so forth," he said. "At least it raises the issues and allows us to talk about things."
DIGITAL REBIRTH
