Undead Astronauts

mind uploading has been a staple of science fiction for decades. a precursor to that is a beta level sim, or a non-sentient version of yourself that can approximate some aspect of your personality and behavior. this too has been science fiction… until now.

a huntsville based firm called intellitar (intelligent avatar) is now offering what they call virtual eternity. their website features rather creepy looking asexual avatars with incandescent eyes (one would think they’d want to humanize rather than digitize the avatars). anyways, they claim to offer a digital avatar of yourself that will act the way you act based on your personalized input. it will simulate your appearance and voice in a real-time conversation and when faced with a question it cannot answer, it will ping the question back to the human source and use that answer the next time it gets that question.

i’m sure no one is super impressed at this very rudimentary attempt, which is basically an expensive parlor trick. but the point is that someone is actually attempting it now. if, in the future, we start carrying hardware around that will automatically record our responses to stimuli, i think we could start getting pretty sophisticated sims. imagine a sim that had an entire life’s worth of data as a source. even as a non-sentient sim, your descendants might be able to get a few nuggets of wisdom with tales from way before they were alive. this is just a small step towards the holy grail of uploading of course, but it is a step.