on May 22, 2013

This brilliant video is a visualization and a major, but appropriate *spoiler* to the story: Memories with Maya.

(Video: Tomscott.com)

Caution: Spoilers ahead.

The video above actually puts into perspective an excerpt from Chapter 6:

Over those next few days, I lost track of time itself. I didn’t answer any calls, I slept… had I slept? I don’t remember. I searched through the server for all the images I had of Maya. There were a lot of photos and some videos that were recorded by the wall mounted FishEye. Those had depth information that I needed. I was meticulous in how I pieced the different angles of Maya’s face together to create a 3D point cloud, a digital sculpture of her face. The avatars that Krish and I used for our digital surrogates were simple crude models. They were optimized for real time rendering on smart phones, with the features of our faces mapped as live video. That had sufficed for collaborative work. I wanted Maya to be… real. … and “Could we write a macro,” I said, “that allows Maya to log in and re-post one of these pictures at random?” He thought about what I was asking, took a moment and then said, “It’s not a problem to implement. But did you think of the consequences?” “What do you mean?” “Her network of friends will get updates,” he said. “Caption the pictures as posted by me.” The next morning I woke to a status update of a new picture posted by Maya. I was tagged in it. Below the picture it read: “It’s a new day. Let’s make new memories. Posted by @Dan, for Maya.” Krish had given the AI access to Maya’s social network via my laptop.

Digital Bread Crumbs- Quantum Archeology and Immortality.

Every time we share a photo, a thought… an emotion as a status update: we are converting a biological function into a digital one. We are digitizing our analog stream-of-consciousness.

These Digital Breadcrumbs that we leave behind, will be mined by “deep learning” algorithms, feeding necessary data that will drive Quantum Archeology processes… that may one day soon, resurrect us – Digital Resurrection. This might sound like a Transhumanist’s Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale… but not for long.

Every day we spend hours uploading our stream-ofconsciousness to the “cloud”.Photos, videos, Instagrams, Facebook status updates, tweets. All of this is data that can be and is being mined by Deep Learning systems. There’s no prize for guessing who the biggest investor and investigator of Deep Learning is.

Quantum Archeology gets a real helping hand with all the digital breadcrumbs we’re leaving around us in this century. The question is: Is that enough information for us to Create a Mind?