Building on detailed and extensive research into the structure of the human brain, IBM announced today they have accurately modeled Ray Kurzweil's brain in silicon. Using a DNA sample and approximations of his upbringing, childhood diet and environment, real time brain scans, and by ingesting all of the known written, audio, and video output from Kurzweil's life, researchers claim they have produced a 95% faithful reproduction of the real thing.
Silicon Kurzweil knows what real Kurzweil knows and behaves how he behaves. Digital Ray's response to stimulus is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. It is an actual mind built in a patent pending 3-dimensional silicon structure supported by a rack of commodity DataBlade servers.
Ray's dream of silicon-hosted immortality is finally here.
Well, sort of. That last bit about identical stimulus response turns out to be the important part because Ray's facsdigily (TM) has already been sold to Facebook where it will be used to serve super effective ads for body preservation services to the Singularity University founder via his Facebook account.
According to Mark Zuckerburg Facebook is planning a broad rollout of the technology. Eager early participants can enroll in the beta program and go through the still-lengthy facsdigily generation process (don't call it a birth, they are creating an adult you!). Once a virtual is live, its human counterpart can expect to only receive ads for things they are certain to buy.
Some pundits are already asking, "if Facebook knows you are going to buy it, why don't they just buy it for you on your account?" But for now Congress is requiring that Facebook "keep the man in the loop", at least until suitable new regulation dealing with deeply technical issues like "post-generation facsdigily / live state drift" can be drafted.
One note. Don't bother applying for the beta unless your klout is over 50. Only real influencers need apply at this stage. Facebook and IBM are currently in talks with Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga for next. Charlie's will mostly tell Facebook when to prompt him to call his dealer. When the cost of facsdigilies inevitably comes down there will plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to generate our own digital doppelgangers.
Oddly, Real Ray has been unavailable for comment but his facsdigily is thrilled to be here. fRay does ask if perhaps the temperature in his datacenter might be raised a bit.
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