Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, March 04, 2013

Lick My Stamp! Or, Possibly More Legal, Certainly More Delusional

"JimF" has directed my attention to a bit of futurological fluff from a few years back I managed to miss.

While it isn't exactly a sophisticated mistake to confuse yourself with a picture of you, few would mistake techno-immortalist Robot Cultists of the cyberangels-in-holodeck-heaven variety with the sophisticated, now, would they? It would seem that his high holy pontifex of the "Cosmic Engineering" sect of the Robot Cult, Giulio Prisco (he's the founder, president, secretary, marketing specialist, chief bottle-washer, and sole member of the Cosmic Engineers as far as I can tell... cosmic!), has provided some pseudo-legalistic futurological boilerplate to facilitate his pseudo-scientific expectation of eventual "resurrection" as an eternal digi-soul by means of aggregations of loving grace of all of his disseminated info-traces in the cyberspatial sprawl to be undertaken by a sooper-intelligent sooper-parental Robot God in The Future. I chuckle as I quote:
To whom it may concern:

I am writing this in 2010. My Gmail account has more than 5GB of data, which contain some information about me and also some information about the persons I have exchanged email with, including some personal and private information.

I am assuming that in 2060 (50 years from now), my Gmail account will have hundreds or thousands of TB of data, which will contain a lot of information about me and the persons I exchanged email with, including a lot of personal and private information. I am also assuming that, in 2060:
1) The data in the accounts of all Gmail users since 2004 is available.
2) AI-based mindware technology able to reconstruct individual mindfiles by analyzing the information in their aggregate Gmail accounts and other available information, with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction, is available.
3) The technology to crack Gmail passwords is available, but illegal without the consent of the account owners (or their heirs).
4) Many of today's Gmail users, including myself, are already dead and cannot give permission to use the data in their accounts.
If all assumptions above are correct, I hereby give permission to Google and/or other parties to read all data in my Gmail account and use them together with other available information to reconstruct my mindfile with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction, and express my wish that they do so.

Signed by Giulio Prisco on September 28, 2010, and witnessed by readers.

NOTE: The accuracy of the process outlined above increases with the number of persons who give their permission to do the same. You can give your permission in comments, Twitter or other public spaces.
It's the open source that makes it more sciency and progressy and groovy for the kids! I must say, proviso two, the whole "assuming magic becomes real" part, is definitely my personal fave.

Another notable (as it were) Robot Cultist, Ben Goertzel, apparently repeated Prisco's gesture (I've anthologized some of my more enjoyable tangles with both Prisco and Goertzel under their names in my Superlative Summary for you to do enjoy), and so I am assuming several transhumanoid and singularitarian sub-muckety-mucks followed or will follow suit as well.

Like their participation in futurological discussion groups and their signing on to futurological manifestos and so on, I daresay the copying and then pasting and then signing of this little magic spell should be seen less as a serious deliberative act or the taking of a sensible precaution but as a ritual performance the collective participation in which and witnessing of which functions to substantiate, at least for a moment, the material "plausibility" of a future that never actually materially arrives and the "promise" of a denial of vulnerability, contingency, error, frustration, mortality that never actually materially departs.

Just so's y'all know, I, Dale Carrico, mere human, hereby give my permission to the representatives or functionaries of any future governmental entity who want to reproduce my likeness on a postage stamp -- should snail mail among mere humans survive the robo-godly techno-transcendence of all such things, as well as the randroidal libertopian looting of all such things (profitability and innovationability and accelerating acceleration of acceleration accelerationability being, you know, what it is and stuff) -- so that in The Future, even after I am long dead, hot guys will occasionally lick my stamp and I, even being long dead, somehow, nonetheless, will surely come.

6 comments:

jimf said...

They're not the only ones, either.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-20/the-ray-kurzweil-show-now-at-the-googleplex
-----------------
Among the stranger things Ray Kurzweil will say to
your face is that he intends to bring his father
back to life. The famed inventor has a storage locker
full of memorabilia—family photographs, letters,
even utility bills—tied to his father, Fredric, who
died in 1970. Someday, Kurzweil hopes to feed this
data trove into a computer that will reconstruct a
virtual rendering of dear old Dad. “There is a lot
of suffering in the world,” Kurzweil once explained.
“Some of it can be overcome if we have the right solutions.”

jimf said...

> [I]n The Future, even after I am long dead, hot guys
> will occasionally lick my stamp and I, even being long dead,
> somehow, nonetheless, will surely come.

Hm. That makes me wonder. I wonder if I could be
reconstructed from my porn collection.

Speaking of which, Prisco wrote "I am writing this in 2010.
My Gmail account has more than 5GB of data. . ."

That reminds me of the exchange I had in June, 2007 with
Mr. Prisco on the WTA-Talk list (shortly before I was
banned ;-> ) that went something like:

------------
> It may be relevant or not, but you have just added some more useless
> kilobites to my mailbox.

Interesting characterization. How can kilobites, or trilobites,
be relevant (as in "pertinent") and "useless" at the same time?

> The correct and respectful way to point readers to long texts is
> to give a URL.

Not necessarily. The correct and respectful way to maintain long
texts in the context of an archived discussion is to reproduce
the text. Then there are no URLs to go stale.

Curious that you're making such a fuss about a few kbytes of **text**,
in this day and age. This isn't 1987, in case you hadn't noticed.
How many gig is **your** porn collection, I wonder?

> I will propose banning you at the next long post with
> useless quotes.
====

I wonder if part of me will survive when Prisco is resurrected
from his e-mail collection. Probably not. I guess my
kilobites will have been deleted by then. Too bad. ;->

Anonymous said...

Sounds like the premise of the first episode of the second series of Black Mirror, "Be Right Back". Did that reach your side of the Atlantic (well, Pacific I guess)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)

Again, robo cultism being little better than Nth rate fiction. Give me quality SF ahead of futurology, any day of the week.

Chad Lott said...

Dear future, you can read my diary if you wanna.

jimf said...

> I, Dale Carrico, mere human, hereby give my permission
> to the representatives or functionaries of any future
> governmental entity who want to reproduce my likeness
> on a postage stamp. . .

Nah, advertising is where it's at.

Too bad you were never a Mouseketeer.

(Uncanny Audrey:
http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/06/another-legend-brought-back-to-life-with-technology-this-time-its-audrey-hepburn/ )

Black guy from the future past said...

This relates to the blogpost. Basically some disgruntled transhumanist trying his best to sane-wash transhumanism:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/stolyarovii20130306