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Progress toward Cyberimmortality
Wactlar created a system called Experience on Demand, for
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, unobtru-
sively capturing peoples experiences in a form that facilitates
sharing them. [13] At Microsoft, Gordon Bells team has
been developing ways to collect and organize the documents
and experiences of a lifetime in a project called MyLifeBits.
[14;15]
Many researchers are developing computer methods to
record how people perceive their environments. [16] Others
are developing the technology not only to record real environ-
ments but to make virtual copies of them, notably the effort at
Columbia University to duplicate electronically the Cathedral
of Amiens, the Virtual Vaudeville project at the University
of Georgia to recreate century-old performances like those
of acrobat Sandow the Magnificent, and the Monuments and
Dust project at the University of Virginia to recreate Victorian
London, beginning with the famous Crystal Palace.
Recordings of behavior include facial expressions, [17] per-
sonal conversations [18] and the subtle delays when a person
responds to challenging stimuli. [19;20] Lisa and Daniel
Barrett [21] have used pocket computers to conduct a random
sample of the things a person does or experiences, and we can
well imagine that within a few years many people will have
their wearable computers constantly switched on and sending
their words, deeds, and feelings over wireless Internet to be
recorded on a home digital library.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Once data about an individual personality have been ported
into an information system, some method is needed to revive
it. One common idea is that some form of artificial intelli-
gence (AI) will reanimate the persons mind, so it is worth