A bit of me, online, 24/7.

Have you been wondering what the hell this crazy post meant?

I've been slowly working towards cyborg technology which will enhance my memory, knowledge, and intelligence. I call this project "Upgrade." One of the longer-term goals of that project has been to achieve multi-presence, the quality of being in multiple places at once. This is different from tele-presence, which is using technology to interact with a location physically separated from your body. Multi-presence requires having multiple bodies under the control of one mind.

To accomplish this goal, I need to be able to expand my mind such that parts of it exist in multiple places but still have a shared memory and intercommunicate as if they were one. I believe I have come up with a way to begin pursuing this goal, in a very limited sense.

I'm going to combine several AI technologies to create an online virtual self. I'm then going to allow it access to my memory base from my neural prosthesis. It will not only closely match my personality but will also know what I know, within certain limits. If you an I were to have a conversation one day, you could go talk to my virtual self the next and it would know about our previous talk.

The memory augmentation system I'm developing for my neural prosthesis should allow knowledge to go the other way, as well, although not quite as elegantly. I should be able to "remember" a conversation you had with my virtual self.

Eventually, real-time communication will take place so that my virtual self will know where I am and what I'm doing while I will be able to know who it's chatting with and what it's saying. Once I get to this point, it would be fair to say that I will cease to be simply human any my bot will cease to be simply a pile of data and computer programs. We will become a merged entity, more capable than either of us separately.

Although I don't expect to have this system working fully until sometime around 2010, I did start a simple version of my virtual self with pandorabots.com. I haven't taught it much about being me yet, but it's better than eliza. Check it out: Alex Online