Martine Rothblatt

The author provides us with an expansive discourse on the exponential rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a virtual world of mind-clones and bemans that will compete with humans at every level. She valiantly marshalls her resources from the latest In AI but there are many unanswered questions. Materialistically one can create a robot but how does one crash the threshold of the real world to ensure consciousness or create soul into a given set of algorithms even if they match all my characteristics. Her book is worth reading for the background it covers and its many assumptions and futuristic speculations.… (mais)

Rothblatt strongly favors the advent, later in the current half-century, of "mindclones", a form of mind uploading by copying as opposed to what I would call uploading by transforming (which she does not mention). Certain that it will happen, she basically just assumes that machine-hosted consciousness is achievable in principle and will become so in practice. Today's beginnings of her envisioned path to it are, to my considerable skepticism and great dismay, privacy-discarding practices (careless use of social media, cloud computing, etc) that massively deposit personal information permanently into cyberspace. She mightily tries to finesse the apparent inadequacy of copying compared to transforming by arguing that flesh-person and mindclone would constitute a tightly unified (albeit two-platform) identity, in such a way that the indefinitely long existence of the mindclone would mean that immortality has been realized even though the flesh-person dies at some point. Much of the book deals with the various interesting implications that mindclones and society would have for each other. Apart from the annoying inclusion of a religion chapter, an important book to read.… (mais)