MINDCLONES in 4 Easy Pieces

1.    Undeniable:  Most people in the world are compiling mindfiles, knowingly or not, through their unavoidable interface with digital communications systems. (Eg, Facebook timeline, Google glass, cloud auto-backups)

2.    Undeniable:  Thousands of smart people are developing mindware (eg neuromorphic engineers, US BRAIN & EU HBP projects, Silicon Valley startups, hackers) to make the creation and use of mindfiles easier, with the ultimate goal, generally unintended, of giving them so many trappings of consciousness that some will seem to be (eg Siri), & some will claim to be (eg Bina48), humanly conscious.

3.    Extrapolation:  Humanly cyberconscious mindclones of us will arise from mindware operating on our mindfiles, and new cyberconscious beings who value human rights, which I call bemans, will arise from de novo or blended mindfiles and generalized human mindware.  The extrapolation is warranted even if the brain cannot be replicated in software because brain is to mind as birds are to flight.

4.    Implications: (i) Ethics will dictate that cyberconsciousness with human values and morality be accorded human rights and obligations – lack of a body is differently abled, not sub-human, (ii) Techno-immortality will result from the human rights of our mindclones – concepts of identity will change,  (iii) the next demographic transition is toward majority cyberconscious societies – 10 billion is not the ultimate human cyberconscious population, and (iv) two of the most popular professions in the near future will be cyber-psychology and cyberconsciousness law as they will be on the frontlines of society’s effort to separate cyberconscious beings into human and non-human categories, with differential privileges to each.