AUSTIN, TEXASYou've seen Her. You've heard about the upcoming Ex Machina movie. Now, meet Martine Rothblatt, a transgender, transhumanist who wants to help you live forever by creating your own personal mind clone. If that sounds like science fiction, it is a fiction the board of her company, United Therapeutics, is sold onlast year she was the highest paid female CEO in the nation, earning $38 million.

Siri is just the beginning, she told the crowd at this year's SXSW conference here in Austin.

"There will be continued advances in software that we see throughout our lives. Eventually, these advances in software will rise to the level of consciousness," Rothblatt said, predicting that at that point, there will be no reason why the human consciousness can't live on indefinitely.

The core idea of transhumanism is that technology will someday free us of our mortal coil. The first step is creating what she calls a mind file. A mind file is a digital record that encapsulates your thoughts, mannerisms, relationships, and morebasically, it's a digital record of your entire self. And if you have a Facebook profile, according to Rothblatt, your mind file is well underway.

"We are living in a world where all of your life is captured," she said. "There is work going on at Amazon, Google, and Apple that is Mindware. It is software designed to process and recreate all of these inputs to create a consciousness."

Once the Mindware has its inputs, it just needs a robot to host it, Rothblatt said. Trust her, she's already done it.

Rothblatt hired a team of roboticists to create a "mind clone" of her wife, Bina Aspen. The mind clone, named Bina48, is a head and torso, albeit one that looks eerily like the real Bina Aspen. Bina48 is remarkably sophisticated for a home-built mind clone: she carries on a conversation, she tweets, and she expresses novel ideas. Rothblatt says soon everyone will be able to have a mind clone like Bina48.

Mind Clone/Credit: Advanced Therapeutics

"If I can do this as one person with a robotics team, what happens when we have 100 million makers in the world?" Rothblatt challenged the crowd. "What happens when open-source mindware gets put up on the Web for anyone to download?"

Extending human life isn't just a software problem for Rothblatt; she is also at the forefront of organ transplant technology. One of her current projects involves breeding genetically modified pigs to reduce the rates of organ transplant rejection.

"When we started doing this, the longest a genetically-modified pig organ could survive was two hours, and now we are up to over eight days. It's mind-blowing," she said.

She is also working on a project where a 3D printer is used to create cologne frames that could be filled with your own pluripotent stem cells. If it works, it would allow you to grow your own organs.

Clearly Rothblatt is used to pushing boundaries, but she isn't afraid to address the difficult ethical issues her work brings up. For example, assuming your mind clone does achieve some kind of consciousness, what are the rules for turning it off? The answer for Rothblatt is very close to the golden rule.

"People should be valued the way they value themselves," Rothblatt said. By definition, a mind clone is capable of communication, so we will have to ask them.

"If a cyber-conscious being values their life, it is wrong to kill them," she concluded.

Whatever the fate of artificial mind clones in the future, it seems possible that many of us will live longer thanks to the advances born of Martine Rothblatt's inability to accept limitations.

"We are a species that keeps pushing further and further and further," she said. "There is no line in the sand at which point human consciousness has to end."