Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality, by Martine Rothblatt
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Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality, by Martine Rothblatt
PDF Ebook Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality, by Martine Rothblatt
A groundbreaking and compelling book that gives readers an in-depth understanding of the most thought-provoking and important technological innovation of the twenty-first centuryEvery day, social media is automatically uploading our thoughts, memories, preferences, beliefs, and history to a virtual existence, essentially creating a "mindfile" of ourselves. Thousands of software engineers across the globe are working on "mindware" to create from these mindfile personalities and humanlike consciousness in computer software, or cyberconsciousness. In the next decade or two, these efforts will result in the first digital copies of our identities, which will be our "mindclones."
In Virtually Human, Martine Rothblatt shares her insights into how cyberconsciousness will manifest in our lives, and what we need to consider when a new, high-tech population of mindclones awakens to the rights, privileges, and obligations humans take for granted.Virtually Human conveys a profound understanding of how close we are to achieving a full simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology in clear, positive language, and raises numerous ethical and moral questions we absolutely need to address now, before the technology becomes commercially viable and accessible to all of us. Virtually Human will be the essential companion book to the future of mankind.
Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality, by Martine Rothblatt- Amazon Sales Rank: #364699 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Released on: 2015-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.85" h x 1.00" w x 5.70" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
“A fascinating read that clearly brings Alan Turing into the twenty-first century.” ―J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., author of Life at the Speed of Light and creator of the first synthetic cell
“Martine Rothblatt has a knack for expanding our minds as well as our comfort zones beyond customary boundaries, be they of gender or substrate.” ―Ray Kurzweil
“Maybe the most fascinating woman on the planet” ―Jezebel
“Ingenious... a thoughtful philosophical exploration of the role of virtual humans in our future” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Exponential technologies are driving a new dimension of human evolution. In her compelling book, Virtually Human, Martine Rothblatt outlines how artificial consciousness is just around the corner, and explores the scientific and ethical ramifications. Science fiction is rapidly becoming science fact and the implications are breathtaking. Virtually Human is critical reading to anyone who plans to be around for the next couple of decades.” ―Peter H. Diamandis, MD, CEO, XPRIZE; Exec Chairman, Singularity University; New York Times bestselling author of Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think
“We are in the midst of a war between biological and electronic brains for dominance in our hybrid population. Bio-brains are, so far, ahead based on their inventiveness, energy-efficiency and exponential improvement rate. Will ethics asymmetrically restrict engineering humans or will it equally apply soon to 'virtually human' electronic brains? Martine's insights on these and many other topics are timely and welcome.” ―George Church, Harvard Professor, and author of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves
“In Virtually Human, Martine Rothblatt builds on the observation that "I think, therefore I am" in ways that Descartes could not have imagined. With the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, Rothblatt predicts that we soon will confront cyberconsciousness comparable to--indeed, indistinguishable from--the human mind. When we cross this technological Rubicon, we will be forced to reconsider the meaning of concepts as foundational as life and death, law and liberty, love and kinship. Bringing to bear the lessons of history, philosophy, psychology, law and science, Rothblatt makes abundantly clear that these unprecedented challenges will define the humanity not just of our technological doppelgangers but of ourselves.” ―Rachel F. Moran, Dean and Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, and author of Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance
“Martine Rothblatt delivers an engaging exploration of the pathway to the near-term realization of our digital clones, and through the many ethical, legal, and spiritual challenges their advent will pose. Even skeptics, like myself, will find Virtually Human an intriguing vision filled with profoundly challenging ideas.” ―Wendell Wallach, Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, co-author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong
“The social struggle over the moral status of uploaded personalities and machine minds will be as fraught and momentous as the struggles to end slavery and extend women's suffrage. In Virtually Human, Martine Rothblatt brings her remarkable intellect and profound ethical insight to this issue in a way that will make it essential reading.” ―James J. Hughes, Ph.D., Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
“Advances in cognitive and computer sciences render artificial humans possible, some duplicating natural individuals with increasing fidelity. When must we confront the ethical, legal, and social implications? Now, in Virtually Human!” ―William Sims Bainbridge, author of Personality Capture and Emulation and eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming
“A wide-ranging, very readable, and possibly prescient look at one of the future's most exciting -- and at the same time most disturbing -- possibilities. Martine Rothblatt has been investigating this field, which some call uploading, for as long as anyone and has many rewarding insights.” ―J. Storrs Hall, author of Beyond AI and Nanofuture
About the Author 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.
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Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Intriguing- but hardly convincing By Michael J. Edelman Rothblatt is a believer- if that's not too strong a word- in Ray Kurzweill's notion of the "Singularity"- the point at which machine intelligence will surpass that of humans, and evolution and the destiny of mankind will be forever changed. Before we reach that point, Rothblatt believes we will reach a point in the very near future in which human minds can be embodied in artificial machines, creating "mind clones." This is a very clever notion, as it sidesteps one of the biggest problems in AI: How do you go from representing propositions in a machine (trivially easy) to embodying an actual conscious mind? Simple, says Rothblatt. You start with an already-existing mind and just transplant it into the machine! This is of course not a trivial thing, but Rothblatt believes that (1) it is possible to create a machine with consciousness (2) we are very close to being able to do that and (3) such a "mind clone" would have far reaching societal and legal implications. "Virtually Human" is therefore divided in to three sections, roughly speaking, each of which addresses one of Rothblatt's contentions.Rothblatt 's initial task is to argue that It is possible to embody a conscious intelligence in a machine. I am myself predisposed to the idea that AI is possible, but I am also critical of many of the arguments that have been made for AI in the past. Rothblatt tries to address some of the more well-known criticisms of AI, but I don't think she does a particularly convincing job. A major problem with the way she addresses the question is that she never actually defines consciousness, or sets a benchmark for what level of complexity and awareness would be necessary to call an entity conscious. She is sympathetic to the idea of consciousness as a continuum,and cites Douglas Hofsteader's admission that even a mosquito would have a "scintilla" of consciousness. But that's not what most people or researchers mean by consciousness. (One excellent definition I recall went like this: Every living thing has within it a model of the world with which it interacts that enables it to act purposively. When that model becomes complex enough to include the living thing itself, that thing can be said to be concious.)Rothblatt singles out Gerard Edelman (no relation) as a major critic of AI to be argued against, and to that end she presents a caricature of Edelman's argument but never addresses its core, which is rooted in the notion of experiential consciousness- that consciousness arises from the interaction of a mind with its environment. This idea can be traced back to Wittgenstein's notion of meaning, and the whole question of what philosophers of mind call qualia: How is it that physical sensations are translated into mental constructs? The AI critic most associated with these sorts of criticisms is Herbert Dreyfus, who has apparently escaped Rothblatt's notice. Dreyfus had four main objections, one of which was the ontological objection: Proponents of AI assume that the entirety of the world can be expressed (and is so in the mind) as a series of propositional statements, and the history of AI research since the 1970s suggests that human knowledge cannot be encapsulated in this manner.Never mind, says Rothblatt, that's only because computers aren't powerful enough yet, but they will be, extrapolating from the last few decades of advances in computer complexity. Once computers are fast enough and have enough memory, we can simply transfer someone's entire store of memories to a computer, creating a virtual duplicate of their mind. How will we do that? We already have, she argues, pointing to the huge repositories of information about self contained in Facebook entires, Tweets, and other social media, and rolls out "Bina48" as a sort of example of what could be done. Yes, Bina48 is not conscious, Rothblatt admits, but with enough memory, a fast enough processor, and a big enough database "she" could become an embodiment of the real Bina. But even if Dreyfus' ontological experiment doesn't hold, how could you transfer a lifetime of experiential knowledge to a machine? Rothblatt does a lot of hand waving here noting that "clearly" the mind clone doesn't have to have the same knowledge represented in the same order to become the same person, and act and react in the same way. Even if you buy that argument (I don't, for a number of reasons) it says nothing about whether the clone is actually self-aware.The bulk of this book is concerned with the legal and moral implications of mind clones, and it's certainly interesting reading, but it's not very focused. Rothblatt is obviously a very intelligent person with a lot of ideas and opinions, and she tries to squeeze as many as possible into the latter 200+ pages of this book. An index would be helpful, as would tighter organization and a more logical flow. Overall, reading Virtually Human is like listening to a lecture from someone who has a tremendous amount to say but hasn't spent enough time organizing their thoughts and listening to opposing points of view. Those interested in Kurweill notion of the Singularity would be better served by reading his book on the subject. For those interested in the issues of AI it's hard to recommend a beginner's book that looks at all the issues; the Wikipedia article on AI is a very good place to start.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. fascinating premise but highly speculative - for now By Knits in Tardis I'm dubious that humanity will achieve anything near to virtual immortality via artificial intelligence this century, let alone over the next decade or three. I'm not sure that being persuaded of its inevitability is really necessary, however, to be entertained and even a little informed by this book.The brief bio on the back of my advance copy was intriguing. This is the founder and CEO of Sirius Radio. She founded a pharmaceutical company to buy and produce a "shelved" medication for her daughter, potentially extending the lives also of other sufferers of a rare disease. She's either an undiscovered movie-of-the-week candidate, or a bit of a tall tale-teller. Hmm. Let's check her out on the internets!When I did some digging, the author's story resolved as even more impressive-slash-unlikely. I won't go into all of it, but this is a woman with multiple degrees and successes in several fields, and distinctions including being the highest paid female CEO in the U.S. Born genetically male, she married, had children, and then had gender reassignment surgery in the early 1990s. Her marriage and relationship with her children has survived and evidently thrived where many post-op transsexuals report very much the opposite experience. Did I mention the part where she became a pilot so that she could help expedite emergency medical deliveries? Rothblatt's story shares much with the bios of Sir Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagen....with maybe a little L. Ron Hubbard on the side. The parallels there are also a bit eerie. She's got a passionate interest in speculative science, and has actually started a "transhumanist" religion. There's a bit of eccentricity or "true believer" ethos that comes across in her writing, jarring perhaps as much as anything because this brand of futuristic topic is generally authored by someone well versed in the hard sciences. Dr. Rothblatt's Ph.D. is in medical ethics, and indeed her musings, although bolstered by sympathetic, forward-looking men and women of science, tend to gravitate to the softer side of the sciences - she hard-sells the (supposed) fait accompli of AI in our age early on in her book, and devotes much of the rest to her consideration of the sociological, ethical and spiritual ramifications of a future world where our personalities can live forever as sentient, incorporeal beings with feelings, rights, and responsibilities.You don't have to have avidly followed developments in A.I. over the years for all of this to have a familiar ring. From the eponymous movie starring Haley Joel Osmond to this summer's _Extant_ miniseries, exploration of the potential humanity of A.I.s or robots is a perennial favorite. There were a lot of times I stopped mid paragraph in this book to think about what _Star Trek: The Next Generation's_ Data would have to say about this or that aspect of the "rights" of mindclones or how their existence might change how we view the world. WILL change, if we are to believe the author.And in the end, it is the certainty on the part of the author that kept me wary and somewhat un-invested in her hypotheticals. Were it presented as a science fiction novel about real A.I.s who continue the lives of the deceased and yet are also somehow "alive" and "people" in their own right, I think I would be captivated. As it is presented, however, the material is subject to scrutiny in terms of the author's motivations for proposing her argument (furthering her religion? Starting a new "eternal life" company?) Science hypothesizes, zealots promise.For now, I am skeptical, but ask me again in 30 or 40 years.
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful. Amazing insight into the future of technology, from one of the best minds in the business By Amazon Customer I'd like to give six stars for the first half of this book, and four stars for the second, hence five stars. In general the book is quite incredible--it's like having a conversation with an off-the-charts smart friend, and watching in fascination as they tell you not only where technology is going, but also what the ramifications will be. And the ramifications of the ramifications. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky forecast, but "the first elements are already here" forecast, by someone who created Sirius radio and now works in robotics (with a forward written by the Google director of engineering--someone else who's ALL OVER current technological trends). Wow. The basic premise is that within 20 years, we'll have the technical capacity to copy your brain into a computer (and back), sort of like we do with artificial hearts today (e.g., something else pumping your blood while you get a heart transplant). And that once *that* technology is there (e.g., for people with Alzheimer's), it will be easy enough for other people to copy their brains and keep them around, for fun, for Alzheimer's protection, for "immortality" or contacts with friends and family after you die, etc. And the artificial brain will even be able to think and use logic and have judgement calls on ambiguous input, and ethics, all of which are also in their early (or less early) stages in software today--though they'll need the boost that hardware and software are on track to give them.The breadth of this book is vast, covering such thorny topics and side effects as:* Hardware/software capacity and limitations* Copyrights* Ethics (both of the robots / mind clones, and for the humans creating them / experimenting on them)* Eugenics* Mental illness (both mentally ill humans using this technology, and new bugs/viruses in the technology itself)* Government interests* Advertisers' interests* Legal rights and limitations* Spirituality and religionAnd if the topics themselves aren't enough, she brings a surprisingly broad understanding of all of the following as _background_ to explain how she reached the conclusions she did:* Game theory* Medical technology (e.g., heart transplants and prosthetics)* Medical ethics* History* Citizenship status and associated issues* Black markets* Philosophy* Religion (a slight judeochristian bias, though she also talks about the Tao, Quran, and a few others)* Ethics (wide range of perspectives, including Ten Commandments, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, Kant's Categorical imperative, Golden Rule, etc.)* Psychology* 3D printers (once we can print anything, it will be easy enough to give the artificial brain technologies a physical basis)* Self-driving cars* Robotics* Consciousness (there are a few pages in there that reminded me of reading textbooks on the nature of consciousness--a bit dense, and you're probably fine to just skim those pages)* Technology life cycles* Memory (including the importance of forgetting, and patterns of forgetting)I really can't do justice to the points she makes (although the forward does a good job of that), but it reminds me of how in the 90's, the internet had all the promise of everything we have today, but the technology simply wasn't there yet (and still wasn't after 5 years, when the dot-com-boom crashed). But it _is_ there today. This is similar, and with the same crowd-sourced push that will mean it will eventually happen... it will be the result of a million individual efforts more than the result of a single herculean push.The second half of the book does get a bit redundant, telling you the same basic points over again in slightly new contexts, but not triggering any more "wow" or "ahah!" moments on my part. So it was still decent, but not nearly as fun.So that's my review. Questions I'd love to ask the author if I could are:* She states that your mindclone really is a copy of "you," but can travel elsewhere and sync back with you. Would it still count as "you" if it goes somewhere and does things without your knowledge (analogous to sleepwalking, but to an extreme degree)? What if you and your mindclone bifurcate and never reconnect?* If you can't easily import things ("firsthand") from your mindclone into your brain, what if it has more broad, rich life experiences than you (via software) and becomes a different person than you as a result?* Will society need a cap on the number of mindclones you can make? Like a sperm bank caps the number of kids from any particular donor... especially since I'd imagine that fanatics would be the most likely to replicate themselves endlessly.
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