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    Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality
    Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality
    Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality
    Audiobook12 hours

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

    Written by Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D. and Ray Kurzweil

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness—simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology—becomes part of our daily lives. 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, 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 audiobook to examine the ethical issues relating to cyberconsciousness and Rothblatt, with a Ph.D. in medical ethics, is uniquely qualified to lead the dialogue.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781491532867
    Author

    Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D.

    Martine Rothblatt is a lawyer, technologist, and medical ethicist. In 1990 she created and served as chair and CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio. When her youngest child was diagnosed with a rare disease, Martine left Sirius to search for a cure. She started the biotechnology company United Therapeutics in 1996 and is its chair and CEO. Martine is also a leading legal advocate for human rights and has led the International Bar Association in presenting the United Nations with a draft treaty on the human genome.

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    • 4/5
      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.