Virtual Immortality
Rick Knight (rknight@platinum.com)
Mon, 30 Jun 97 10:59:37 CST
John Blanco-Losada wrote:
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University envision a huge multimedia
database that could store minute-by-minute details of your waking
life, all packed on a hard disk the size of a quarter.
Hara Ra responded:
Imagine searching though all that raw data for interesting stuff. Puts
home movies to shame. What about extra legal activities?? What about
stuff considered private, like excretion? As a cryonicist I might find
it useful though....
Rick Knight adds:
This reminds me of the tremendous amount of documents from the tobacco
industry that had to be sifted through to determine the level of
accountability by the tobacco industry on their cover-up and
conversion. Prior to scanning and locating technology, it would take
a team of individuals YEARS to pour through it all. Now, they scanned
all the docs into Adobe Acrobat and did programmed searches for
keywords and found substantial amounts of evidence. $368.5 billion
later (hopefully more...)...<G>
<Just had to get a dig in against one of he most vile empires on the
planet but back to the original thread>
Presumably, by the time we can achieve virtual immortality through
mass storage of a life's experiences, we will have also developed
intelligent agents to bookmark, condense or otherwise streamline the
experiences so that we got the most relevant stuff.
Of course, this also leads to some pretty (presently, in my view)
strange fetish practices if you could indeed chain all one's "potty"
moments into a digest.
The issue of privacy, the individual's decision as to what to and NOT
to include seems like it would factor in. If it were a ubiquitious
thing, I'd likely just (like Data shutting off his emotion chip in the
last Star Trek movie) flick off the recording with an intention and/or
flick of my head during a private moment. But boy would I love the
opportunity to observe my own boyhood and compare my perception with
the one I have today. Particularly, re-experiencing some of my
"firsts" would be quite illuminating.
Rick