Digital Immortality Map: How to collect enough information about yourself for future resurrection by AI

There are people who have traumatic brain injuries who could benefit from this research not in a distant possible future but right now. Some people alive today have only limited and fractured access to their memories. Better external memory capture and retrieval might be of value to them. I do not suggest ignoring one group in favor of the other, but suggest applying these ideas now will improve their application later.

My first thoughts on any technology are 'how can this be of use to the disabled, and in search & rescue?' If it can of use to either or both, the benefits often roll out to general use. In this case, all the way to a future 1:1 model of myself.

Part of my motivation for creating YouTube econ educational videos is that it might someday help a superintelligence bring me back.

I question whether future society would be willing to bring someone back to life even if it was clear that the person wanted to be brought back and there was sufficient information stored to allow it to happen.

There might not be a moral reason to bring someone back to life, because if future agents value content agents, they presumably would be able to create far more content agents far more easily by engineering agents from scratch for maximum contentment with minimum resource use.

There might not be an economic reason to bring someone back to life, because future agents would be able to make far more efficient workers than a 21st century humans.

There might not be selfish reasons to bring someone back to life, because though having a 21st century person in a far more advanced world might be interesting, I think superintelligences could find far more interesting things to do.

Perhaps one way to increase the probability of being brought back to life is to set up a trust fund or something of the like to do so. Some cryonics organizations have trust funds for bringing back their preserved bodies, which is similar. What do you think of this?

Best known plan for implementing digital immortality:

Initial stage – 1 month

1. Install constant video recording program on your main computer, like evocam for mac and start record your self constantly, especially during social activity. Record in 1 hour intervals in lowest resolution in free cloud folder. It will be 60 MB for 1 hour.
2. Start to write down a memoir about your life. Or dictate it on voice recorder. Try to make it as long as possible, may be book size.
3. Send your sample of DNA to 23andMe.

I think it is a basis which could provide 90 per cent of needed information for Digital immortality. One can add other more sophisticated techniques later. Most of them are listed in the digital immortality map.

Second stage – 1 month

1. Scan everything you did before, starting from your mother’s letters and and your child drawings and finishing with coping of logs from social networks.
2. Record your EEG while watching movies
3. Create unique art which will express your personality. Drawings, poetry and songs may be the best options.

The third part should include all other techniques listed in the digital immortality map. Also investments in preservation of the information, like webarchives, youtube uploading, M-disks.

As seen in the first episode series Caprica, quoth Zoe Graystone:

"(...) the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life; medical scans, dna profiles, psych evaluations, school records, emails, recording, video, audio, cat scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, tv shows... even prescriptions for birth control."

I, for one, think that the meme-mix defining our identity in itself could capture (predict) our behavior in large parts, foregoing biographical minutiae. Bonesaw in Worm didn't need precise memories to recreate the Slaughterhouse Nine clones.

Many think we can zoom out from atoms to a connectome, why not zoom out from a connectome to the memes it implements?

I know at least in our specific community, that we'd rather be resurrected than not, and especially in a techno-utopian future, almost goes without saying, but it still worries me that you don't seem to mention consent. At least the top paragraph suggests a third party collecting information about someone else so that they can be resurrected after their death, and even if we skip over the more normal issues with doing that, resurrecting someone without their permission seems like a violation.

In the mix with the problems you've listed under 1. is whether this kind of resurrection is even necessary. Personally, I doubt those identity problems can be conclusively solved even in principle, at least to a level that people's intuitions don't dominate, although I'm inclined to give up on what's actually factual there and try to convince myself of the weakest notion of identity I can find believable. I can't do much pushing there, but the notion I default to using based on my intuitions (sleeping doesn't kill you, uploading does kill you) is hard to justify so I don't mind trying to push away from it. Should really be stepping up my DI efforts.

How can we solve the "heap paradox"?

Even if we assume that if you have access to all information about a person's every molecule and every signal in their brain allows you to resurrect the same person instead of creating a new person with the same memories (an assumption not everyone agrees with), where can we draw the threshold between resurrecting the person and creating a new person with some passing resemblance, if the amount of information becomes smaller and smaller? When does it stop being the same person and when can we speak about a completely different person with only a few similarities to the deceased one?

Scott Adams describes how he is already doing what you describe as "Cheapest way to immortality" here.

Yesterday I agreed to fund a small project that will, as a side benefit, end up putting most (but not all) of my personality into digital form. Add to that the extensive history of my writing that exists on the Internet,

Digital immortality seems much cheaper than cryonics and of similar effectiveness. Why isn't it more popular?

It is sufficient to define your self precisely and concisely, and preserve that definition.