Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for life after the Singularity, however, is also his most personal: Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation. It’s a bright, clear afternoon, and we can see the river that runs behind the trees outside his wide office windows. The portrait of his father looks down over him. In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection will work. “We can find some of his DNA around his grave site - that’s a lot of information right there,” he says. “The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’Il get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”
When I ask how exactly they’Il extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: “Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories.” The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to a grocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad’s mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possibie from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual reality avatar to a fully functioning robot.
Friday 27 February 2009
Meet Ray Kurzweil ☀
Notes
-
ledgergermane reblogged this from azspot
-
zachrose reblogged this from azspot
-
ledgergermane liked this
-
azspot posted this
A GNT creation ©2007–2010
