Sorta weird, but I suppose some people are thinking of thought and mind transference into virtual avatars in Virtual Words like Second Life. I didn't hear anything about that last week, when I was at Virtual Worlds Hollywood, but the subject was brought up today in Social Media Today in a post titled Could we live forever in virtual worlds?
"... a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York successfully created an avatar called 'Eddie' who had the intelligence (if you want to call it that) of a four year old (or 'AI boffins create four year old loser' as the trade mag the Inquirer memorably put it), pointing to the day when the digital representations of ourselves could indeed have a kind of existence of their own."
I think there was an TV show from the 80's or early 90's about a dying scientist who's mind was kept alive in a computer - but the model for this kind of continuance of consciousness is more something I saw a while back in Star Trek.
Personally, I'd not want to see myself or anyone else captured that way, but I could see something more in the way of avatars that help us figure out problems, as intelligence, that lives in a virtual world. In other words, I don't think we should really ever get to the point where we want to keep someone alive, and we can transfer what they do to some kind of sentient form, in worlds, but we could put useful knowledge in some type of embedded avatar where it's easier to interact with.
Just a thought on this Sunday.
Link to original post