Why Worry About This Sci-Fi Stuff Now?

The term “mindclone” evokes a wide range of sci-fi images from the “Cylons” of Battlestar Galactica to the “Mr. Smiths” of The Matrix. While it is indisputable that we are creating large mindfiles, as described in Question 1, and surely there are geeks working hard on mindware, as reviewed in Question 2, how close could we be to an actual mindclone when computers can’t converse on their own much better than a two-year old kid?

Very close. Close enough to feel the bits and bytes of cyberbreath on our cheeks. To realize how close we are to cyberclone reality it is necessary to understand the exponential nature of advances in information technology.

Pattern recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has shown in his best-seller, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that information technology has been doubling its capabilities every one to two years since the early 1950s. For example, we have more computing power in our cellphones today, for about $200, than there was in the Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s at a cost of $30 billion. While voice recognition technology was non-existent in the 1990s, only ten years later it was a free feature in most laptops and PDAs, and a ubiquitous customer service front end for large companies. Ray Kurzweil and others have shown that based upon the doubling rate of information technology it is reasonable to expect mindclones for about $1000 by the end of the 2020s, and sooner than that for a higher price.

The following chart compares the number of information processing circuits available at various dates with biological lifeforms that have the equivalent number of neurons. Up through 2010 we see computer programs no smarter than a mouse or a bug, and are not impressed. However, this is most misleading in two ways.


First, there are a great many software packages that are already far smarter than even very clever humans. For example, the mapping software in your cellphone or PDA can best any of us at finding addresses in unknown neighborhoods. Gaming software, from grandmaster chess to the complex Asian game of go, and including all manner of virtual world environments, far outstrip the conceptual capabilities of ordinary humans. Hence, while no software package has “put it all together” the way a human mind does, programs are popping into existence with great competence in many of the areas to which we devote our mental skills. How long could it be until some software “puts it all together?” Per Kurzweil’s chart, no longer than the 2020 timeframe in which computers will have as many processors as the human brain has neurons.

There is a second reason, born of psychology, why we find it hard to realize how near-term the mindclones are when all we see on television are robots with the brains of a rodent or a bug. This reason relates to the difference between our natural way of perceiving things, which is linear, and the way in which information technology is advancing, which is exponential. Linear things proceed the way children grow, perhaps half-a-foot or so a year until they reach a plateau height. This is the “linear” way we have evolved to perceive the relationship between changing things and the time it takes them to change forms. Things that change like people grow, linearly, change about the same amount each year or so. Hence, if there is a billion-fold deficit between the processing capability of a computer today, and that of a human mind, it is natural for us to project the arrival of mindclones as equal in years to about one billion divided by the increase in processor speed we can get on our computers from one year to the next.

For example, my one year-old computer has about 1/100,000th of the capability of a human mind (its processing speed is about that fraction of the number of human brain neural connections, although its software is in some areas pretty advanced). In other words, it has only .001% of the capability of a human mind. It’s a rodent. I could go buy a new computer today that has 2/100,000th or .002% of the capability of a human mind. At this rate, with the way my linear mind works, I would expect to be able to buy a mindclone in 99,998 more years. What, me worry! Our linear minds take our most recent experience – such as going from a 1/100,000th of a human mind computer to a 2/100,000th of a human mind computer in one year – and extrapolate it forward such that we think it will take 998 more years to get 1% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 2% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 3% of a human mind, and so on.

In fact, though, information technology does not grow linearly, but exponentially. This means, according to “Moore’s Law”, information technology doubles each 1-2 years – something very different from growing linearly. Because computer capability doubles it means next year I will get not 3/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 4/100,000th of one. Exponential growth means the year after that I will get not 5/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 8/100,000th of one. With information technology, I can expect to reach mindclone computing as rapidly as this:

Years From Now Fraction of a Mindclone
Next Year 4/100,000th
Year After 8,100,000th
Third Year 16/100,000th
Fourth Year 32/100,000th
Fifth Year 64/100,000th
Sixth Year 128/100,000th
Seventh Year 256/100,000th
Eighth Year 512/100,000th
Ninth Year 1000/100,000th
Tenth Year 2000/100,000th
Eleventh Year 4000/100,000th
Twelfth Year 8000/100,000th
Thirteenth Year 16,000/100,000th
Fourteenth Year 32,000/100,000th
Fifteenth Year 64,000/100,000th
Sixteenth Year 128,000/100,000th = MINDCLONE

Four clarifying comments are in order. First, the rounding down from 1,024 to 1,000 in the ninth year is just to make the arithmetic easier to follow. Second, while Moore’s Law says that the doubling occurs every 1-2 years, in the example given above I showed the doubling every year. The effect of making it every two years would simply be to postpone mindclones to 32 years from now instead of 16, or to 24 years from now if we use a doubling period of every 18 months. The important point is that mindclones are around the corner – not in some other millennium, or even in some other generation. This is about our lives.

The third clarifying comment is that some people question for how long Moore’s Law can continue, noting that other exponential phenomena – such as the growth of bacteria in a Petri dish – end when the room for growth runs out. In fact, because knowledge (unlike bacteria) can grow without limit, the doubling of information technology is not limited. Knowledge is the only resource that the more you exploit it, the more you have to exploit. Engineers have already designed the pathways for Moore’s Law to continue for many decades. For example, when technology limits are reached with flat integrated circuits computers will shift to three-dimensional integrated circuits.

The fourth comment is that it takes more than brain-level hardware to create a mind -- it requires human-level software. My premise is that the software will arrive no later than the hardware. I cannot prove this premise because there are no "lines of code" equivalent to the mind that one could show exponential progress against (more code is not necessarily better). While it is true that we will be able to use the computational power of our hardware to "reverse engineer" the human brain, there may be more rapid approaches born of intuitive software design.

Let me share an analogy that reveals the fallacy underlying those who believe the software challenge of reverse engineering the brain puts us centuries away from mindware. I contend that the quest for artificial consciousness is analogous to the quest for artificial flight. The two broad approaches to these quests can be called “structural replication” and “functional replication.” Humans tend to fixate on structural replication as it seems apparent that “if we could but flap wings like a bird then we could fly like a bird.” Similarly, “if we could but reverse engineer the human brain, then we could be conscious like a human brain.” While structuralists are probably correct, theirs is not the more rapid approach. Instead, we have functionally replicated flight using non-bird approaches such as propellers and jet engines married to largely fixed wings.

We will also be able to functionally replicate human consciousness using non-brain approaches such as massively cross-correlated relational databases, virtualization software and iteratively modifiable natural language-based programs. We can copy what a brain does (make a mind) rather than copy what a brain is, just as we have copied what a bird does (make a flight) rather than copy what a bird is. Of course brains do many things besides make minds, and birds do many things besides flying. But, those other things are beyond the scope of our mindware (and others’ aerodynamics) projects.

So, in summary, we delude ourselves that mindclones are in the distant future because our linear minds have great difficulty projecting exponential phenomena. In fact mindclones are as close to us in time as the birth of punk rock and Apple Computer. The very same revolution that:

➢ brought cellphones from almost no one’s hands to almost everyone’s hands in under 20 years, and
➢ brought the internet from a military toy to a universal joy in under 15 years,
➢ will bring mindclones from chatbot infancy to human simulacra adulthood in the time it will take to get a kid through school or complete a first professional career.

Not everything sci-fi is far-off. I have a wristwatch communicator (thanks to SkyTel) and daily videophone conversations (thanks to iChat). My Oakley sunglasses magically deliver stereo music and phone calls directly to my ears, without wires (thanks to Bluetooth). My eyes are fixed by lasers, my teeth are cleaned by ultrasound and my food is cooked by microwaves. Weren’t all these things supposed to be sci-fi? I don’t see any of them in classic movies or early TV shows.

Nothing in our society is advancing faster than software, and mindclones are simply that: one part mindfile software and one part mindware software. True, some good processors are needed to run that software, but Moore’s law is delivering those processors right on schedule. We need to figure out this mindclone thing right now because this is one part of the future, one aspect of sci-fi, that is banging on the front door.

There is plenty of time to dream about flying cars. There’s a century to wait for a family trip to Mars. But mindclones are in a whole different category. They are riding a wave of exponential information technology that is real, here and now. Climb outside your linear mind and check out the latest avatars. If you do so, if you think exponentially, then it is impossible to not see the first, costly mindclones in 10-20 years, and then a mass-market explosion of them in 20-30 years.

Wait, and get caught by surprise, or read on, and be poised for the prize. The future is an opportunity that benefits the prepared. These 100 answers will make you mindclone savvy. So prepped, your mindclone will help make you happy. What a deal! Read on!

What Are Mindclones?

A mindclone is a software version of your mind. He or she is all of your thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, and is experiencing reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is running on. Mindclones are mindfiles being used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind. A mindclone is your software-based alter ego, doppelganger, or mental twin. If your body died, but you had a mindclone, you would not feel that you personally died, although the body would be missed more sorely than amputees miss their limbs .

We have absolutely no experience with mindclones. Never in history has there been anything like them. Hence, it is natural to find it difficult to understand the concept. From time immemorial we have thought of our identity as being limited to one instantiation, namely that contained within our body. To grasp mindcloning it is necessary to envision identity as being a unique pattern of thinking that can occur in two or more substrates or forms. If you can accept that a mind can be duplicated, with appropriate mindware and a rich enough mindfile, then you have accepted that a single identity can occur at least twice.

Now, it is certainly true that an easy distinction can be drawn between an original identity and that of its mindclone. Simply by virtue of being a copy, the mindclone is not the original, and hence it can be said that the mindclone does not have the same identity as the original. Yet, this is a distinction without significance. It is analogous to claiming that identity changes over time because people grow and acquire new experiences. While there is no doubt that our personality evolves, and our thoughts change, we are still the same person – the same identity.

So, why is it that we feel an uploaded version of our mind knows that it is an upload, and is thus not really us, whereas an aging version of our mind knows it is different from its youth, but is still definitely us? The reason is our deep-felt bias, based upon our entire human experience, that identity is substrate-specific. Some people take this so far as to believe that transplant recipients, especially of hearts, assume some of the identity of the organ donor.

With mindcloning we will have our first experience with the technological possibility of substrate-independent identity. It will take some time for society to adapt. Ultimately, though, most people will understand that just as a person’s voice can be in two places simultaneously via telephone, their identity can be in two places simultaneously via mindcloning.

When I have presented mindcloning in conferences there are usually one or two people who rush to the microphone after my talk. They are insistent that a mindclone cannot be the same person as the original because it is not the same person. The fault in this kind of reasoning is that it is a tautology, a circular form of argument that just restates itself. The “same person” is different from the “same body”, or substrate. While it is true that a mindclone is not the same body as the original person, it is the same mind. Hence, my questioners have difficulty because they think that a person is their body and I insist that a person is their mind.

Sometimes the questioners challenge me as follows: “If you created a mindclone, surely you would not agree to be killed in favor of your mindclone!” My reply is that I like my body quite a bit, and if my mindclone could be given one like mine or better (such as through some future medical technology), then I would not be any worse off, save for the trauma of the killing. The questioners are rarely satisfied; they simply do not accept that identity can remain constant across two or more substrates. Logically, however, they are in error. Assuming a mind can be replicated, such as with mindfiles and mindware, its identity would thereafter have in fact been altered to become a two-substrate version of the original one-substrate identity.

Another question that arises is for how long would a singular identity span two substrates? Each mind – the biological original and the mindclone – will surely have its own thoughts just as each of us has different thoughts from minute to minute. Indeed, this is sometimes used as an argument why mindclones do not share the identity of their original.

I believe a singular identity will always span the mindclone and its original. This is easier to appreciate when you consider that normally each of them will continuously synchronize their common mindfile, using high-speed links. Both parts of the single identity will take note of what the other has done. Perhaps fear of losing control over one’s life to a mindclone will dampen enthusiasm for creating them. As mindware gets ever better at making mindclones that are absolutely faithful psychological replicas this fear will dissipate. In any event, most people do not fail to get married out of fear that another person will have access to a joint bank account. And we will know our mindclones far better than we know our fiancées.

There will be instances in which the mindclone and the original do not update each other. Instead, the single identity decides, in conversation with itself (we biological originals do talk to ourselves, weighing pros and cons in our heads), to experience life separately. Like being dealt two 8s in a blackjack game, and deciding to split, some people and their mindclones will go separate ways. Even in such cases I believe we are speaking of a single identity. We must remember that both the biological original and the mindclone share a unique psychological profile based upon a mountain of mindfile data. They are the same person. The fact that they subsequently have many unique, perhaps life-changing experiences does not change either of their individual identities, and hence cannot have changed their common identity.

While the original and the mindclone will be very different after years of unique experiences, they will still be the same person. It will be as if you visited a close friend after first living ten years in Ethiopia, and then again after living ten years in China. On the first visit your friend would remark on how the Ethiopian experiences changed you, but would still recognize you as his friend. On the second visit your friend would see yet another version of you, this time changed by life in China. Once again, though, your friend would surely recognize you as the same person who first left for Ethiopia twenty years earlier. This is the power of an established set of mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Whatever changes will not be able to entirely mask the starting set of conditions. It is all but impossible to completely crawl out of an established mind.

Perhaps deciding to have a mindclone is analogous to having a child. Once the child is born, you will always be a parent. Similarly, once a mindclone is created, you will always be a dual-substrate identity. Many parents have little or nothing to do with their offspring, but neither the parent nor the offspring can get the parental relationship out of their mind. Their identity has permanently been altered to include the fact that they are part of a (good or bad) parent-offspring relationship. Analogously, even if a mindclone parts ways with their original, neither will ever be able to forget the fact that someone else with their same mind exists. The creation of a cognitive doppelganger is an identity-altering experience.

In summary, a mindclone is a fully functional, software-based copy of your mind, residing on computer substrate. You and your mindclone will think the same thoughts, and feel the same feelings, as well as having unique ones. In most instances the two of you will be wirelessly linked to a common mindfile so there will be a constant synchronization of cognition and experiences. When mindclones arise in the next few years, as a consequence of our burgeoning mindfiles and rapidly developing mindware, we will get used to the idea that identity is replicable. A person will be able to be in two places at the same time.

How will we really know that our mindclone is conscious, actually feeling the same fears, and dreaming the same dreams, as are we? It is easy to imagine a mindclone just doing an amazing job of mimicking our consciousness, like some chatbots today mimic human conversational behavior. Is the mindclone my real life, or a compelling, tear-jerking “movie” of my real life? These questions of consciousness, and of cyberconsciousness, are answered next.

WHAT IS MINDWARE?

Mindware is operating system software that (a) thinks and feels the way a human mind does, and (b) sets its thinking and feeling parameters to match those discernable from a mindfile. Mindware relies upon an underlying mindfile the way Microsoft Word relies upon a textfile. When appropriate parameters are set for mindware it becomes aware of itself and a cyberconscious entity is created.

The richness of the cyberconscious entity’s thoughts and feelings are a function of its source mindfile. In the extreme case of no mindfile, the mindware thinks and feels as little as a newborn baby. If the mindware’s parameters are set haphazardly, or shallowly, a severely dysfunctional cyberconsciousness will result. In the normal case, however, of mindware having access to a real person’s mindfile, the resultant cyberconsciousness will be a mindclone of that person. It will think and feel the same, have the same memories, and be differentiated only by its knowledge that it is a mindclone and its substrate-based different abilities.

Is mindware achievable? Yes, because our human thoughts and emotions are patterns amongst symbols. These patterns can be the same whether the symbols are encoded in our brains or in our mindfiles. The patterns are so complex that today only certain threads are available as software. For example, software that thinks how to get from our house to a new restaurant is now common, but didn’t exist just a decade ago. Every year the range of symbol association achievable by software leaps forward. It is merely a matter of decades before symbol association software achieves the complexity of human thought and emotion.



The preceding paragraph makes two claims deserving of expanded attention: that our mental states are merely a matter of patterns amongst symbols, and that such patterns could be replicated in software. Let’s turn first to how the mind works, and then to its possible replication in mindware.

Consider what might be our psychology if it were not patterns among symbols? What else is there? One idea, associated with the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, is that there is some sort of a metaphysical spirit that animates our thoughts and feelings. Another idea, propounded by the British mathematician Roger Penrose, is that our consciousness arises from quantum physical transitions deep within sub-microscopic intra-neural structures. In neither case, nor in many variants of each case, is it possible to disprove the claim because they are based upon essentially invisible, non-testable phenomena. Similarly, it cannot be disproved, at this time, that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex patterns among symbols. These patterns are too complex to either be sorted out in the brain or replicated in software.

You, the reader, need to take a position or to remain agnostic on the source of consciousness. I’m sure that many people will try to create consciousness by replicating in software the mental associations that are a hallmark of our thoughts and feelings. From there philosophers will argue over whether cyberconsciousness is real or not, as they argue over the consciousness of cats and dogs. But just as most humans believe their pets think, plan and feel, most humans will see consciousness in mindware if it resembles closely enough the same consciousness they see in themselves.

Computer scientist Marvin Minsky is convinced that emotions are just another form of thought. He believes feelings, no less than ideas, are based upon complex associations amongst mental symbols, each of which are ultimately rooted in a bunch of phonetically or visually specific neurons. It is today impossible to prove him right or wrong. The question is whether we believe that entertainment companies and customer service providers will persistently pursue the creation of emotion-capable software products – interfaces with feelings. I am convinced that the answer is yes, because there will be a large market for human-like software. Whether software-based emotions are real emotions is a question for philosophers, such as whether emotions arise from patterns of symbols or from metaphysical spirits or from quantum physical sub-atomic particle states. Everyday people will feel the software-based emotions are real if they seem as real as those of their relatives, neighbors and friends.

The second question to be answered is if thoughts and feelings are based upon complex patterns amongst symbols, how exactly can those patterns be discerned and replicated with mindware? Every symbol in our mind – such as the phoneme-specific neurons that, strung together, we learned very young sounded like “apple” – is linked to many other symbols. For “apple” those other symbols are its various images and generalized image, its taste, and its various appearances in our life (orchards, produce departments, pictures in books). Some of those associations are positive, some negative and some neutral. Each of these associations can be replicated in software, along with positive or negative values and probability weightings. Mindware is software that creates a cyberconscious version of you with the same associations, values and weightings to every symbol within your mindfile that you evidence having based upon your saved data. Where data is missing, mindware interpolates answers, makes reasoned guesses and imports general cultural information relevant to your socio-cultural niche. When the mindware converses with someone, the symbol apple will be triggered if it would have been triggered in your own mind, and it will enter into the discussion no differently than how it would have entered into your discussion. In this regard, the mindware gives rise to your mindclone.

Mindware is a kind of operating system that can be saved into billions of unique states, or combinations of preferences, based upon the unique ways of thinking and feeling that are discernable from your mindfile. Dozens of personality types, traits and/or factors, and gradations amongst these, yield more unique combinations than there are living people. Similarly, dozens of alphabet letters and ways to arrange them can create more unique names than there are people on the planet.

For example, people can be of several different personality orientations – introvert, extrovert, aggressive, nurturing and so on. Most psychologists say there are just five basic flavors or “factors”, but others say there are more. Nevertheless, virtually all agree on some finite, relatively small number of basic psychological forms taken to greater or lesser degrees by human minds. Multiplying out these possibilities would provide mindware with a vast number of different personality frameworks from which to choose a best fit – based upon a rigorous analysis of the person’s mindfiles -- for grafting mannerisms, recollections and feelings onto.

To be a little quantitative, imagine mindware adopts the currently popular view that there are five basic personality traits, each of which remain quite stable in one’s adult life: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extrovertedness, Agreeability and Neuroticism. Literally thousands of English words have been associated with each of these five traits, but suppose for sake of example we say that each person would be scored by mindware only from -100 to +100 on each of these traits (from an analysis of their mindfile). For example, an individual who was definitely prone to impulsive decisions, but no more than average among millions of analyzed mindfiles, might be assigned a Neuroticism personality trait score of +50. The formula for the number of unique personality frameworks available to mindware, known as a “repeating combination”, would be ST, where S = the number of possible personality trait scores and T = the number of possible personality traits. For our example, ST = 2015 = 328,080,401,001. These 328 billion personality frameworks are enough to ensure personality uniqueness, which also means they are likely to ensure a very good fit for each person. The more sizes a pair of jeans comes in, the more likely it is that everyone will find a pair that fits them just right!

The point here is not that there are precisely five personality traits, or exactly 201 discernable degrees of possessing each such trait. Instead, what is being shown is that a relatively easy problem for mindware to solve can result in a practically unlimited amount of individualized personality frameworks. Specifically, mapping the words, images and mannerisms from a lifetime mindfile into a matrix of personality trait buckets and associated positive or negative strengths for such bucket will produce more than enough unique personality templates to assure a very good fit to the original personality.


Mindware works like a police sketch artist. They are trained to know that there are a limited number of basic forms the human face can take. Based upon inputs from eye witnesses (analogous to processing a mindfile) the artist first chooses a best fit basic facial form, and then proceeds to graft upon it unique details. Often there is an iterative, back-and-forth process of sketching and erasing as additional details from eyewitnesses refine an initial choice of basic facial form. In the same way mindware will be written to iteratively reevaluate its best-fit personality structure based upon additional details from continued analyses of a mindfile.

Mindware will have settings that instruct the duration of its iterative process. After much iteration the mindware will determine that an asymptotic limit has been reached. It will do this by running thousands of “mock” conversations with tentative versions of a replicated mind, and comparing these with actual conversations or conversational fragments from an original’s mindfile. The iterative process will end once the mind it has replicated from the mindfiles it has been fed has reached what is called “Turing-equivalence” with the original mind. This means that the test established by the early 20th century software pioneer Alan Turing has been satisfied. That test says that if it is not possible to tell whether a conversant is a computer or a person, then the computer is psychologically equivalent to a person. It would be as if the police sketch artist produced a drawing that was as good as a photograph.

The rapid ferreting out of mindware settings from a mindfile has recently been made more feasible thanks to pattern recognition, voice recognition and video search software. It is now possible on Google Video to search videos by typing in desired words. Mindware will build upon this capability. It will analyze mindfile video for all words, phrases and indications of feeling. These will be placed into associational database arrays, best-matched to personality traits and strengths, and then used to best-fit a personality profile to the peculiar characteristics evidenced in the analyzed mindfile. Keep in mind we humans have just a half-dozen basic expressions, only a dozen or two emotions, a facial recognition limit in the low hundreds and an inability to remember more than 10% of what we heard or saw the previous day. Furthermore, the personality template that mindware puts together for us is blanketed with all of the factual specifics from our mindfile. While this is rocket science, it is rocket science that we can, and soon will, do. Mindware is a moon landing, and we did that in the sixties.

Just because we are unique does not mean that we cannot be replicated. An original essay can still be copied. Mindware is a kind of duplicating machine for the mind. Because the mind is vastly more complex and less accessible than a document it is not something that can simply be optically scanned to replicate. Instead, to scan a mind one must scan and analyze the digital output of that mind – its mindfile – while iteratively generating a duplicate of that mind relying on associated databases of human universals and socio-cultural contexts. It does sound like an amazing piece of software, but no more amazing to us than would be our photocopying machines to Abraham Lincoln or our jumbo jets to the Wright Brothers. And software technology is advancing much more quickly today than machine technology was back then.

Operating system software with mindware’s number of settings commonly run on laptop computers. The challenge is to write mindware so that it makes associations and interacts as does the human brain. This is not a challenge of possibility, but a challenge of practice, design and iterative improvement of approximations. Mindware is just really good software written for the purpose of replicating human thoughts and feelings.

What Are Mindfiles?

A mindfile is the sum of saved digital reflections about you. All of the stored emails, chats, texts, IMs and blogs that you write are part of your mindfile. All of the uploaded photos, slide shows and movies that involve you are part of your mindfile. Your search histories, clicked selections and online purchases, if saved, are part of your mindfile. Your digital life is your mindfile.

Gordon Bell, a computer pioneer, has been digitally documenting every aspect of his life for years. He wears a device around his neck that photographs his surroundings every time there is a change, logs his GPS coordinates and records his voice and certain medical parameters. His entire mindfile is accreting at the rate of about one gigabyte per month. In 2010 a gigabyte of memory costs less than a dollar, so an entire lifetime mindfile costs less than a month’s rent in most apartments.

Most people do not want all of their life going into a mindfile. But virtually everyone wants some of their life mindfiled. Common sense says to safely store your precious photos in a server elsewhere rather than risk their loss in a plastic photo album. Lists of friends and dates are so much more convenient stored digitally than on scraps of paper. So long as the digital reflections of our lives cannot be used against us or to annoy us – such as by the government or advertisers -- we are happy to let an ever-larger mindfile of us accumulate.



Your mindfile is accumulating regardless of your awareness of it. A reasonable estimate is that people send or answer a few hundred emails a month, excluding spam. In addition, we all regularly make at least a dozen or so online searches, purchases, and banking transactions. Some of us share a photo a day; others of us perhaps five a month. Over the course of a decade, these thousands of emails and other digital samples of your behavior create a mindfile more detailed than the most researched biography. An expert team would know you almost as well as you know yourself if they had this mindfile to peruse. They could predict what you would probably do, how you would likely react and whom you might be thinking about. From your mindfile, they would have your profile.

Your mindfile leads to your profile in large part because we all live in a cultural context. We all share a large body of common knowledge with those who live in our same place, or have our same job, or are part of one of our social networks. If you live in LA, you know what freeways are, and you hate getting stuck on them. This is true for you even if you never mentioned it in your blog. But if you liked freeways, there would be evidence of that oddity in your uploads into your mindfile, such as a text or twitter message. Hence, piggy-backed onto our mindfiles are vast assemblages of common cultural information.

Now it is certainly the case that much of the information that would be in our mindfile is continually erased. Text messages are rarely stored, search engine companies have been pressured to erase identifiable information, and some people declare email bankruptcy by simply deleting all their messages in exchange for a fresh start. On the other hand, much more information is accreting to our mindfile than is being erased. We store lifetimes of information on flashdrives, memory sticks, laptops, external hard drives and distant “cloud” computer server farms. Our mindfiles may be as scattered as our brains, but they are there just the same. Were we motivated, we could merge into a master mindfile the digital reflections of our lives scattered across dozens of devices and websites.

Organizations are now forming to hoover-up our dispersed digitalia. Numerous photo-sharing and video-sharing sites provide us the opportunity to upload, organize and comment upon our imagery. Social networking sites enable more photo and video uploading, as well as running conversations with friends and connections to different sub-networks of interests that define our life. Blogging companies have digitally immortalized the ‘dear diary’ journal that is so essential to biographers’ efforts to determine the personality and motivations of their subjects. Companies such as Apple and Google offer us the option to co-locate or back-up all of the above mindfiles in their safe ‘computing cloud’ – a mindfile on a magic carpet ride.

Finally, there are organizations specifically devoted to helping people create a single coherent digital back-up of their mind. These purposeful mindfiles, at websites such as glogger.net, lifenaut.com and cyberev.org, handle not only photos, video, friends, and journals, but also psychological tests, lists of favorites and other personality profile tools. Why would anyone want to back-up their entire mind, as opposed to simply saving their favorite pictures, movies and conversations? There are at least five different kinds of motivations.

For some the reason is to create a kind of living memorial of themselves, for the benefit of children, grandchildren, and friends. These purposeful mindfile websites offer a customizable avatar (animated image), combined with a “chatbot” (conversational software program), that uses all of the information uploaded about a person to chat online the way the creator would chat if he or she were online. The customizable avatars even give the same kind of facial expressions and mannerisms as would their human creator. These mindfile websites allow someone to say “I was here” with the best tools that consumer technology has to offer.

A second reason people use mindfile websites is that they simply enjoy the creative process of making a digital replica of themselves. Rather like scrapbooking on steroids, mindfile creation is an artistic hobby centered on your own life. The goal of the endeavor is for your mindfile-based avatar or chatbot to be the most realistic one about, the one able to win praise from other mindfile aficionados and perhaps even contest awards. The mindfile websites offer an array of personality tests, conversational learning tools and memory repositories so that the mindfile hobbyist can create an ever-more realistic cybernetic portrait.

Third, mindfile websites are being marketed to busy people as email screening, web crawling and online shopping tools. Once you create your mindfile on these sites, and set its parameters, it can begin screening and even answering your email, very much as you would personally. In a similar fashion your mindfile can handle other virtual tasks for you without anyone being aware (or caring) that they are dealing with your cyberspace agent rather than your self. The more time you spend building up your mindfile agent, the more useful it will be to you.

Fourth, there are the gloggers. These are committed believers in sousveillance, the practice of streaming the video of one’s every waking moment to a massive social networking site for gloggers everywhere. Sousveillance entails everyone watching everything, a horizontal and thus democratic form of digital monitoring. It is quite unlike surveillance, which involves “Big Brother” watching everyone else, as is the case with most CCTV and security monitoring systems. Gloggers generally wear souped-up glasses (or goggles) with built-in audio-video recording capability that sends whatever it is you see and hear to your mobile phone or a hard drive, from which it is transmitted onward to the glogger.mobi website.

It is argued that everyone will be safer, and freer, in a sousveillance society. Unfortunately, one of its pioneers, Prof. Steven Mann of the University of Toronto, has faced numerous legal challenges to his insistence on keeping his goggle-based video running in public lavatories, police stations and other camera-unfriendly spaces. In his view this amounts to discrimination against the differently abled, which in his case is being wedded to a cybernetic appendage. Clearly, though, gloggers have the most extensive mindfiles.

Finally, geek futurists are motivated to use mindfile websites. These (mostly) guys realize that intelligent avatars are the next wave. They are early-adopters who want to be among the first people to sport a software agent that looks, acts and even thinks just like they do. They realize that software which actually thinks like a human – known as mindware – is not yet available. However, geeks can tell by the trends in software capability that mindware will be here soon. Mindfile development and testing is as close as we can get to the real thing today. It is like toying with personal computer building kits in the 1970s before Apple and other companies sold consumer desktops in the 1980s.

It should be noted that it takes no more effort than a daily hour in the gym to create a purposeful mindfile more reflective of you than the best biography. For example, in one hour a day, over a period of five years, you would have 2000 hours of your life on video or 100,000 uploaded and described photos. A leading social scientist, William Sims Bainbridge, has created over 100,000 online questions, and associated psychometric analytical software, that he believes represents a person’s entire general set of feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Each question asks how positively or negatively you feel about a topic, and how important that topic is to you. Completing just 50 of these a day – about an hour’s effort at most – would complete them all in five years. A daily mindfile workout might consist of a short video, a few uploaded photos and a few Bainbridge questions. After a decade or so, your mindfile would be quite complete. Alternatively, you will get to pretty much the same place if you are a regular online social networker. Its just like the difference between people who stay fit with a machine-driven routine and others who do so with regular pick-up games.

So, we are all creating voluminous mindfiles, albeit haphazardly, unintentionally and dispersed among IT companies. Some of us are centralizing our mindfiles, such as with a single provider of cloud computing services. A few of us are focusing on making our mindfiles as true to our minds as possible. This can be done with online personality profile and avatar training tools. It is a revolutionary development that much of the content of most people’s minds is being saved outside of their bodies. Even more fundamental is the prospect that these mindfiles can, with mindware under development, be used as the basis for recreating the mind from which they came.