“Some 80 years ago, philanthropist Spencer Penrose amassed a fortune in Western gold, silver, and copper mines. After building a zoo and hospital, he decided to erect a monument to himself on a Colorado ridge,” Ben Kunz writes for Businessweek. “No, his friends warned, that would be egocentric. As a result, the glowing 80-foot spire on Cheyenne Mountain is known as the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, making Penrose, whose ashes are buried there, an afterthought.”
Kunz writes, “The good news is that soon, when you die, you won’t have to worry about people forgetting you — because your voice and face will live forever with the Eternity App.”
“No one has built an Eternity App yet, but I predict that it is coming: an application that will create the illusion of immortality, that will make your voice and thoughts carry on after you are dead, an artificially intelligent version of you,” Kunz writes. “Three technologies make it possible: Voice recognition, artificial intelligence simulation, and social media data sets of your personal nuances. With this app you could call home to check on your family, joke with friends over Twitter, even decide whom to elect President — all after you shuffle off this mortal coil.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
bring me Caprica’s world, and I’ll be ok with that
I was about to mention Caprica myself.
Oh. Hell. No.
I can see it now:
ring ring….
Dad: Hi Zoey, it’s Dad. I want you home before 10PM. Its a school night you know. I just don’t understand what you see in that boy, Lee.
Zoey: Screw off Dad. I am 90 and Lee has been dead for 27 years.
Heheheheheh!
LOLZ 😀
Grandma!,,
While I see the idea…
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of….
No thanks.
Strangely enough when Turing told his analyst a year or so before his death about his vision for artificial intelligence the analyst asked if this was his way of keeping his friend from school who he applied to Cambridge with but tragically died of TB before they could go, artificially alive. Turing said no but it would be a wonderful tribute to him as it was he who had inspired him to science and with whom he had originally devised much of his ideas.
Even more strangely I made a comment in another thread about our over blown view of our human intellectual superiority. I hadn’t realised that Turing himself was motivated to a degree to artificially reproduce intelligence because he too felt despair at such human arrogance (and what it had done to him in particular). He also claimed that the manner in which that artificial intelligence is formed structually is irrelevant, its the way it appears to the end user, the interface that counts, thus the format his famous test. If that doesn’t sound like siri I dont know what does, he certainly thought different. Too often we have thought intelligence has to take the form of a mimicked human brain, but as in creating flight copying the original is not always the best way to do it.
When i die i predict i wonn’t be worried about anything, esp not some artificial version of myself.
Me: Uh Dad, I know it’s been 20 years, how are you doing.
Dad: Server Error. Please check back later
Me: Dad, it’s my birthday today.
Dad: Fatal Error has occurred
Me: …
Dad: And Windows has shut down to prevent damage to me.
Me: :'(
Just what we need. More dead people voting for president! LOL!
They weren’t really dead.
GOP voters just look that way.
Anything to fight the Chicago machine!
Hey folks…it’s been 400 hundred years and there’s no hint of hell or heaven!!
I would love to be a Cylon! That would be great!
I can see some kind of science fiction novel in there somewhere.
“Your name is Kal-El. You are the only survivor of the planet Krypton. Even though you’ve been raised as a human, you are not one of them. You have great powers, only some of which you have as yet discovered.”
Am I the only one that thought of the Oracle of the Finn from Mona Lisa Overdrive? Some AI tucked in to a back alley that people come and talk to as some twisted form of immortality?