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Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality
Hugh Pickens writes "Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."
putting names against the people in those millions of digital photos
Folk will be foraging for themselves in a post-nuclear/bioweapon apocalyptic wasteland as the ice sets in for 100,000 years.
Maintaining family photos will not even enter their minds. Nor should it. They'll be about finding a way toward the equator if they're smart.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Add a couple pedestals with appropriate video clips of the deceased appropriately cued, and you have the basic setting for the Max Headroom classic episode, "Religion."
My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance, and who assumes that the massive amounts of this generated data will be taken care of indefinitely? Is this what a legacy amounts to these days and how much money can I charge for this service?
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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"D'Oh!"
This theme has been investigated extensively in the revelation space books by Alastair Reynolds, if anyone is curious about reading fiction about how it could look. Here, a full dump of a person is called an alpha-level simulation and is essential a living digital copy of a person, capable of continuing to "live", learn and having conversations with their descendants.
A lot of people have some minor interest in their ancestry. However, with few exceptions, our ancestors were people just like any other, with lives interesting only to themselves. Those few exceptions are people who will be in the historical record, and have no need of this kind of service.
And that's the point: my life is interesting to me, but I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.
The other point to take issue with is the idea that this is "healthy". As one gets older, there is a danger of living more and more in the past. The happiest and healthiest elderly people I have known are the ones who avoid this: they live in the present and have plans for the future. Spending your time producing a "life review" would seem to be exactly the opposite of a healthy activity!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
It's more likely than you think.
Microsoft formats are designed to be as hard to reverse engineer as possible and the way software licensing and forced upgrades is going nobody will be able to run today's Windows 100 years from now so it will be impossible to run today's Word on any combination of emulators.
This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud, but all those Word documents out there, 200 years from now? Not a chance.
No sig today...
None of this will necessarily mean history gets told any more accurately. It will just get revised differently. Since people are eager to "embellish" their resumes, these "life review" autobiographies will be chock full of all sorts of tall tales to make even Mark Twain grimace. What makes us think that behavior starts and stops with former Presidents? Facts have always been as malleable as Silly Putty in the hands of people with motives that make the raw facts inconvenient. That class of people just happens to include nearly every person that has ever lived.
Only good old "peer review" will straighten these Life Reviews out and make them truly worth preserving.
Yes lets move it too the cloud! Your life's history data will be as eternally accessible as your google reader data :)
This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud
Just make sure Zynga isn't in charge of the servers.
How about uploading one's personality into some kind of artificial neural structure, as in Peter Hamilton's Edenism? Now that would be much closer to 'virtual immortality'. Just sayin' ...
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment."
Woddy Allen
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Not even close to likely. :) Where did you get that idea?
We don't know what our own genetics mean; we can't manipulate them hardly at all. Or those of anything else, other than in the most crude, ham-handed ways. Our medical knowledge is at the scratch-the-surface level. We can't control aging yet. Chip tech is still at the 2D level... when it goes 3D, which will require lower power tech or some new means of heat transfer, chip complexity will leap from AxB to AxBxC. We don't have AI yet, but we will, and when we do, we'll also have a host of lesser technologies that will completely change the day to day workloads of every person living in a developed country. We're not yet off the planet except in the most baby-stepwise manner imaginable. Our crowd everything off the surface living habits could be revised to live well above the surface, turning the world back into jungle and productive farmland, no roads on the surface, no buildings, no transport. Just Lions and Tigers and Bears (and perhaps things thought long lost.) Our energy supplies are far more harmful than they eventually will become; our economic systems are based on scarcity, and scarcity is very likely to become a lost characteristic over time.
There's more change coming than any of us can reasonably anticipate, some of it purely social, but a lot of it based on technologies we don't have yet, because the underlying science isn't there yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually, I know from a very reliable source that data historians are looking to virtual machines to solve this specific issue. It is a viable way to store complete, working computing environments for the future including not only the files but the programs able to work with them.
A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of the first version of the mosaic web browser (the first that ever existed) and the first Macintosh. This last one by running it in a VM that run on a hardware emulator, that run in another VM that run in a VM. Don't ask me to remember the detailed chain of OS and such, but the point is that you are good as long as you can emulate a pretty recent version of something, and that version can emulate the previous one, and so on...
Related research about this is being done here: http://isr.cmu.edu/
"Yes lets move it too the cloud!"
Why not? Grandpa moves to the clouds, his data moves to the cloud.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
I've been working on some related stuff myself (the Pointrel system) -- but is is all free and open source, so no Bill Gates lifestyle. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.