Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality

By Martine Rothblatt, PhD, Ralph Steadman and Ray Kurzweil

Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness—simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology—allows our consciousness to be present forever.

Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics. Bina48 is a nascent Mindclone of Martine's wife that can engage in conversation, answer questions, and even have spontaneous thoughts that are derived from multimedia data in a Mindfile created by the real Bina. If you're active on Twitter or Facebook, share photos through Instagram, or blogging regularly, you're already on your way to creating a Mindfile—a digital database of your thoughts, memories, feelings, and opinions that is essentially a back-up copy of your mind. Soon, this Mindfile can be made conscious with special software—Mindware—that mimics the way human brains organize information, create emotions and achieve self-awareness.

This may sound like science-fiction A.I. (artificial intelligence), but the nascent technology already exists. Thousands of software engineers across the globe are working to create cyberconsciousness based on human consciousness and the Obama administration recently announced plans to invest in a decade-long Brain Activity Map project. Virtually Human is the only book to examine the ethical issues relating to cyberconsciousness and Rothblatt, with a Ph.D. in medical ethics, is uniquely qualified to lead the dialogue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466847040

Martine Rothblatt, PhD

MARTINE ROTHBLATT, Ph.D., MBA, J.D. is a lawyer, entrepreneur, and medical ethicist. In 1990 she founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio (now Sirius XM). When her daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease, Martine left Sirius to search for a cure. She founded United Therapeutics in 1996 and has since served as Chairman and CEO. Martine is also a leading legal advocate for human rights and has led the IBA in presenting the UN with a draft treaty on the genome.

Book preview

[ONE]

THE ME IN THE MACHINE

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

The great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena toward a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine—even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar.

—ARTHUR KOESTLER¹

Recently I exchanged family photographs with a friend through email. Looking at the multiple generations represented in snapshots always tugs at my heart. Like any grandparent, I wonder about how my children’s and grandchildren’s lives will blossom and expand; I worry about the challenges they will face and how I might support them in getting over life’s humps. However, unlike grandparents of the past, I’m confident that my potential to stay connected to my family and subsequent generations of relatives will be available and nearly limitless.

Digital consciousness is about life and the living, because, as you will learn, digital consciousness is our consciousness. We cannot ignore the fact that thanks to strides in software and digital technology and the development of ever more sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence, you and I will be able to have an ongoing relationship with our families: exchange memories with them, talk about their hopes and dreams, and share in the delights of holidays, vacations, changing seasons, and everything else that goes with family life—both the good and the bad—long after our flesh and bones have turned to dust.

This blessing of emotional and intellectual continuity or immortality is being made possible through the development of digital clones, or mindclones: software versions of our minds, software-based alter egos, doppelgängers, mental twins. Mindclones are mindfiles used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind. A mindclone is created from the thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and values you have put into it. Mindclones will experience reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is run on. When the body of a person with a mindclone dies, the mindclone will not feel that they have personally died, although the body will be missed in the same ways amputees miss their limbs but acclimate when given an artificial replacement. In fact, the comparison suggests an apt metaphor: The mindclone is to the consciousness and spirit as the prosthetic is to an arm that has lost its hand.

Never mind about human cloning through genetic reproductive technology that supposedly creates a new baby us in a Petri dish, without the benefit of old-fashioned procreation techniques. Digital cloning will be here much faster and with few if any of the regulatory hindrances that currently prevent human genetic cloning from moving faster than a snail’s pace. Remember Dolly, the sheep created from genetic material in 1996, and the questions she raised about artificial genetic replication and humans? After Dolly, bans on similar reproductive cloning of humans were enacted in more than fifty countries. Since that time, the U.S. government has restricted federal funding of such projects. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics unanimously opposed cloning for reproductive purposes but were divided on whether cloning could be used for research; nothing has changed as of this writing. The United Nations tried to pass a global ban on human cloning in 2005, but was unsuccessful because disagreements over whether therapeutic cloning should be included in the moratorium left the matter in a stalemate.

Aside from ethical and legal obstacles, successful genetic cloning via reproductive science is also exorbitantly expensive, and prone to colossal and possibly heart-wrenching failure. Furthermore, a genetic clone of a person is not the person, just a copy of the DNA of a person. Genetic cloning does not create any part of a person’s consciousness, as, for example, identical twins do not have identical minds. Furthermore, a genetic clone of a person is not the person, just a copy of the DNA of a person. Genetic cloning does not create any part of a person’s consciousness, and, for example, identical twins do not have identical minds. Digital cloning of our own minds is an entirely different matter, albeit accompanied by considerable legal and social consideration, which I discuss in depth in this book. It is also being developed in the free market, and on the fast track. It’s not surprising. There are great financial rewards available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Vast wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness and obsequiousness of a utopian worker.

As uncomfortable as it makes some—a discomfort we have to deal with—the mass marketing of a relatively simple, accessible, and affordable means for Grandma, through her mindclone, to stick around for graduations that will happen several decades from now represents the real money. There is no doubt that once digital cloning technology is fully developed, widely available, and economically accessible to average consumers mindclone creation will happen at the speed of our intentionality—as fast as we want it to.

Consciousness Is Key

It is in the mind that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

—OSCAR WILDE

Before we delve further into the world of mindclones, it’s essential that we come to an agreement on the definition of the thing that will make these beings our clones, and that is their ability to attain and demonstrate human consciousness. Determining a working definition of human consciousness is crucial on this journey. It is our consciousness that makes us us. The same qualities that constitute our consciousness—our memories, reasoning abilities, experiences, evolving opinions and perspectives, and emotional engagement with the world—will give rise to the digital consciousness of our mindclones, or what I will refer to as cyberconsciousness.

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At birth and in early infancy there is no I and therefore no self.… The baby has instinctive urges but no sense that these urges belong to anyone.… Earliest experience, circumscribed by instinct and fear, takes on the human characteristics of I and me when an awareness of agency emerges from the fog of infant consciousness.… I have a self when I realize that I am me.… The self is comparable to painting a portrait of oneself painting a self-portrait.

—PETER WHITE, THE ECOLOGY OF BEING

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The problem is, everyone—scientist and layman alike—has a slightly different concept of consciousness. Marvin Minsky, American cognitive scientist, author of The Emotion Machine, and cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, calls consciousness a suitcase word² in that it carries multiple legitimate meanings. Others in the field bemoan the great variety of technical synonyms for consciousness, and that this perfusion of terms tends to hide underlying similarities.³ Given the graduated fashion in which human brains have evolved and do evolve, it is likely that there are also gradations of consciousness. One common meaning of consciousness is self-awareness. But does it adequately describe the true nature of the condition?

Surely a baby’s self-awareness is different from an adolescent’s self-awareness, which is quite different from the self-awareness of a middle-aged person with their faculties intact and a quite elderly person who has lost some of their cognitive abilities. How self-conscious is a newborn versus an adult? I think of family photos—pictures of my parents when they were children or even of myself as a tiny boy—as evidence of loved ones who no longer exist and who, when they did, certainly had very different states of consciousness than the final or the most current version of the flesh-and-blood people the pictures represent.

While self-awareness is clearly an important facet of a conscious person, it’s not the only qualification. It certainly would not hold water as a definition of cyberconsciousness. In fact, a programmer can write a concise piece of self-aware software, one that examines, reports on, and even modifies itself.⁴ Software running a self-driving vehicle, for example, could be written to define objects in its real world including terrain (navigate it using sensors), programmers (follow any orders coming in), and the vehicle itself (I am a robot vehicle that navigates terrain in response to programming orders). A Google Car does these things right now, and few people would define the code it runs on, or the vehicle itself, as conscious.

Self-aware software and robotic machines don’t feel physical or emotional pain or pleasure either—they are not sentient. Most people require mental subjectivity to include emotions, that is, sentience, in order to qualify as consciousness, because recognition of how we feel is integral to human consciousness—to the human condition. Yet sentience still doesn’t get us where we want to be in defining consciousness, because we expect conscious beings to be independent thinkers as well as

Reviews for Virtually Human

[mcdenis-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[MissDM Divine · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this via Audible. Very intelligent and thought provoking.