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Digital Immortality
Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality") is the hypothetical concept of storing (or cloning) a person's personality in digital substrate, i.e., a computer, robot or cyberspace (mind uploading). The result might look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive. After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and self-improve autonomously (possibly becoming seed AI). A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise. Realism The National Science Foundation has awarded a half-million-dollar grant to the universities of Central Florida at Orlando and Illinois at Chicago to explore how researche ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Substrate (materials Science)
Substrate is a term used in materials science and engineering to describe the base material on which processing is conducted. Surfaces have different uses, including producing new film or layers of material and being a base to which another substance is bonded. Description In materials science and engineering, a substrate refers to a base material on which processing is conducted. This surface could be used to produce new film or layers of material such as deposited coatings. It could be the base to which paint, adhesives, or adhesive tape is bonded. A typical substrate might be rigid such as metal, concrete, or glass, onto which a coating might be deposited. Flexible substrates are also used. Some substrates are anisotropic with surface properties being different depending on the direction: examples include wood and paper products. Coatings With all coating processes, the condition of the surface of the substrate can strongly affect the bond of subsequent layers. This c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gordon Bell
Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972–1983, overseeing development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career included roles as an entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research from 1995–2015. Early life and education Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes. Bell received a BS (1956), and MS (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1957–58, where he ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Permutation City
''Permutation City'' is a 1994 science-fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, through various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. Sections of the story were adapted from Egan's 1992 short story "Dust", which dealt with many of the same philosophical themes. ''Permutation City'' won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award the same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 ''Scientific American'' article on multiverses by Max Tegmark. Themes and setting ''Permutation City'' asks whether there is a difference between a computer simulation of a person and a "real" person. It focuses on a model of consciousness and reality, the ''Dust Theory'', similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark. It uses the assumption that human consciousness is Turing-computable: that consciousness ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greg Egan
Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award. Life and work Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Western Australia. He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology. He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His early stories feature strong ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caprica (TV Series)
''Caprica'' is a 2010 American science fiction drama television series, which is a prequel spin-off of the 2004–2009 series ''Battlestar Galactica''. ''Caprica'' is set 58 years before the main series, and shows how humanity first created the Cylon androids who would later turn against their human masters. Among ''Caprica'' main characters are the father and uncle of William Adama, the man who becomes the senior surviving military leader of the fleet which represents the remnants of the Twelve Colonies in ''Battlestar Galactica''. An extended version of the pilot premiered exclusively on DVD and digital download on April 21, 2009. The first season debuted on television on January 22, 2010, on Syfy in the U.S., Space in Canada, and Sky1 in the UK. It ran for nine episodes, including the two-hour pilot, before going on a mid-season hiatus. The second half of the first season (Season 1.5) began airing on October 5, 2010, on Syfy and Space. On October 27, 2010, Syfy canceled ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison (May 27, 1934 – June 28, 2018) was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave science fiction, New Wave speculative fiction and for his outspoken, combative personality. His published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic-book scripts, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. Some of his best-known works include the 1967 ''Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek'' episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", considered by some to be the single greatest episode of the ''Star Trek'' franchise (he subsequently wrote a book about the experience that includes his original teleplay), his ''A Boy and His Dog'' cycle (which was made into A Boy and His Dog (1975 film), a film), and his short stories "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (later adapted by Ellison into I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (video game), a video game) and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transhumanism
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the human enhancement, enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the technoethics, ethics of using such technologies. Some transhumanists speculate that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings of such vastly greater abilities as to merit the label of posthuman#Transhumanism, posthuman beings. Another topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential risks from Existential risk from artificial general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, asteroid impact, gray goo, high-energy particle collision experiments, natural or synthetic pandemic, and nuclear warfare. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Pearce (philosopher)
David Pearce (born April 1959) is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a negative utilitarian perspective. Based in Brighton, England, Pearce maintains a series of websites devoted to transhumanist topics and what he calls the "hedonistic imperative", a moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His self-published internet manifesto, ''The Hedonistic Imperative'' (1995), outlines how pharmacology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurosurgery could converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience from human and non-human life, replacing suffering with "information-sensitive gradients of bliss".Bostrom (2005) 15. Pearce call ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office in New York City and an operations center in Piscataway, New Jersey. The IEEE was formed in 1963 as an amalgamation of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers. History The IEEE traces its founding to 1884 and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In 1912, the rival Institute of Radio Engineers was formed. Although the AIEE was initially larger, the IRE attracted more students and was larger by the mid-1950s. The AIEE and IRE merged in 1963. The IEEE is headquartered in New York City, but most business is done at the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey, opened in 1975. The Australian Section of the IEEE existed between 1972 and 1985, after which it s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optical Character Recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronics, electronic or machine, mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example: from a television broadcast). Widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data recordswhether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printed data, or any suitable documentationit is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed online, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, (extracted) text-to-speech, key data and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech-to-text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis. Some speech recognition systems require "training" (also called "enrollment") where an individual speaker reads text or isolated vocabulary into the system. The system analyzes the person's specific voice and uses it to fine-tune the recognition of that person's speech, resulting in increased accuracy. Systems that do not use training are called "speaker-independent" systems. Systems that use training are called "speaker dependent". Speech recognition applications include voice user interfaces ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Data Storage
Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is what manipulates data by performing computations. In practice, almost all computers use a storage hierarchy, which puts fast but expensive and small storage options close to the CPU and slower but less expensive and larger options further away. Generally, the fast technologies are referred to as "memory", while slower persistent technologies are referred to as "storage". Even the first computer designs, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and Percy Ludgate's Analytical Machine, clearly distinguished between processing and memory (Babbage stored numbers as rotations of gears, while Ludgate stored numbers as displacements of rods in shuttles). This distinction was extended in the Von Neumann archite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
