Artificial intelligence doppelgangers and life in outer space closer than you think
Artificial intelligence doppelgangers and living in outer space may be closer than you think.
Those are a few takeaways from talking to Martine Rothblatt. Rothblatt was a founder of Sirius Satellite Radio before going on to found the biotech United Therapeutics (UTHR) and becoming the highest paid female CEO in the U.S. On top of that, she's a futurist, who has commissioned an A.I. (artificial intelligence) robot of her wife Bina, called Bina48, and is out with a new book Virtually Human: The Promise--and the Peril--of Digital Immortality.
Rothblatt tells us that as people begin to upload more than their thoughts, mannerisms, photos and videos to cloud servers, entrepreneurs are developing software, which she calls "mindware," to organize all of those thoughts into something that can experience a personality.
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"[Apple's (AAPL) voice-activated assistant] Siri is just the leading edge of software having personality, desires, ultimately consciousness and wanting rights," she says. Rothblatt says we are one to two decades away from the reality seen in the movie "Her," where the main character has a relationship with an AI "person" in the form of an operating system.
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Rothblatt, who also as a PhD in medical ethics, says this development is ethical, and the way to think about it sounds more like how you would envision a personal assistant.
All virtual humans will do, she says, is take the portion of your mind that says things like, 'I need to send a thank you note to this person; I need to call mom,' and host it on software to do it for you.
Meanwhile, Rothblatt who is an expert on the law of outer space, thinks the commercialization of it is "going to happen faster than any of us think." With Tesla (TSLA) Founder, Elon Musk talking about colonizing Mars, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin wanting people to vacation in space, Rothblatt says "sci fi things are coming true."
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Legally, "space is considered common heritage of all humanity," Rothblatt explains. "It's sort of like creating a whole new world for ourselves but without having to get into colonialism and wars that effected the New World. It's a fresh world and I believe it's the future for our next generation."
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