Mind warp: Science fiction moves closer to fact

As people begin to upload more than their thoughts, mannerisms, photos and videos to cloud servers, entrepreneurs are developing software, dubbed “mindware,” to organize all of those thoughts into something that can experience a personality, according to Martine Rothblatt, founder of Sirius Satellite Radio and the biotech United Therapeutics (UTHR). Rothblatt, a futurist, says we are one to two decades away from the reality seen in the movie “Her,” where the main character has a relationship with an AI “person” in the form of an operating system. All virtual humans will do, she says, is take the portion of your mind that says things like, ‘I need to send a thank you note to this person; I need to call mom,’ and host it on software to do it for you.

Apple’s voice-activated assistant] Siri is just the leading edge of software having personality, desires, ultimately consciousness and wanting rights.

Martine Rothblatt

Meanwhile, Rothblatt who is an expert on the law of outer space, thinks the commercialization of it is “going to happen faster than any of us think.” With Tesla Founder, Elon Musk talking about colonizing Mars, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin wanting people to vacation in space, Rothblatt says “sci fi things are coming true.”

It’s sort of like creating a whole new world for ourselves but without having to get into colonialism and wars that effected the New World.

Martine Rothblatt