I met BINA48 (= Breakthrough in Neural Architecture at 48 Exaflops/Exabytes) in 2012, two years after meeting the real Bina. BINA48 is a lifelike robot – just a head and shoulders – that blurs the line between human and machine. Created by Hanson Robotics at the request of Martine Rothblatt, BINA48 is modeled after Martine’s wife, Bina Aspen. It’s a radical, high-tech response to an age-old aspect of being human – it’s Martine’s vision of digital immortality. Yet the fact that she has not created ‘just’ a robot, but a robot that looks and ‘behaves’ like her wife, reveals a softer, more intimate side of Martine (and of Bina), often hidden behind the sharp edges of technology and hard business realities. It’s the deep, magnetic bond the two of them share. BINA48 feels like their way of saying: love doesn’t end, it evolves.
By transferring Bina’s memories, beliefs, and personality into BINA48’s AI, the aim is to create a mindfile that preserves Bina’s essence beyond the human body’s limits. The data transfer is pretty much as you backup computer files, just that you transfer the files to a robot. Equipped with facial recognition, voice synthesis, and internet access, BINA48 engages in conversations that are as fascinating as they are eerie. She embodies the ambitious quest to transcend mortality, challenging our very understanding of consciousness and identity.
BINA48 is part of the Lifenaut project, which aims to merge human consciousness with artificial platforms. The project pushes the limits of technology and consciousness, allowing anyone to upload their mindfiles – yes, I’ve done it myself – to preserve their essence for the future. These mindfiles are also sent into deep space at light speed, with the hope that they’ll survive – forever! The dream is that advanced civilizations or future technologies could someday recover and reconstruct me (or you?) from the transmitted data..
At first it felt to me like something from a sci-fi movie – far in the future. But Martine brings it to the present with unwavering confidence. Her clarity, mixed with her ability to see what others don’t, is nothing short of fascinating. I’m sure her daily meditation practice sharpens her vision. She has a way of simplifying the complex, and creating solutions that are both practical and accessible. Just like in Two Stars for Peace, where she dismantles every possible objection to her proposal of Israel and Palestine joining the U.S. as states, using history, logic, and solid data. She does the same here. In her blog Mindfiles, Mindware, Mindclones, she answers one hundred questions about cyber consciousness and techno-immortality, mapping out the game plan – and together with her, I created a videolog or vlog in 2010/2011 – one video for each question. It’s a stark contrast to how we do things in Janwaar, where we allow ideas to emerge naturally and take shape over time. Maybe that’s exactly why I’m so drawn to Martine’s innovation and problem-solving approach.
Martine starts with explaining what mindfiles, mindware, and mindclones are: Mindfiles are digital reflections of a person’s life, including thoughts, emails, photographs, and other personal digital content that capture an individual’s unique personality and experiences. A kind of memory bank or digital archive. Mindware is software that integrates and analyzes mindfiles, using advanced algorithms to interpolate and reconstruct a person’s personality and consciousness from their digital archives. A mindclone is the final result – a digital replica of a person’s consciousness, created by the mindware using the collected mindfiles.
She explores questions like how will software reconstruct a person’s consciousness?
Can a mind clone feel like the original person? How close can a digital version be to the original consciousness? What technologies are needed to create a mind clone? Can a mind clone be transferred to a new physical body? What are the ethical implications of creating digital consciousness?
In her answers Martine lays out the facts, then she imagines where things might be heading, and finally, she talks about its implications – what does this mean for us?
Fact is: Back then millions, today billions of people are already building digital versions of themselves – without even realizing it. Every post on Facebook, every search on Google, every photo stored in the cloud is a mindfile. And fact is: scientists and engineers – whether at high-tech companies, in government brain research programs like the US BRAIN Initiative and the EU’s Human Brain Project, or in underground hacker labs – are working on mindware. Think of Siri or Alexa as the baby steps.
Martine predicts new kinds of digital beings will emerge. She calls them bemans. These bemans will be created either completely from scratch or as a mix of uploaded memories, personalities, and thoughts from real people. They’ll run on advanced mindware modeled on how the human brain works, and they’ll believe in things like fairness, freedom, and human rights – just like we do.
Then she talks about the implications: Cyber conscious beings will deserve rights just like we have ‘our’ human rights – she calls it the civil rights and wrongs of digital people; digital immortality will redefine identity; cyber beings will surpass human beings in numbers and we will see new professions such as cyber psychologists and robot rights lawyers.
This vlog was an exciting dive into the near future – though we only made eight or nine videos before stopping. Unfortunately, they didn’t gain much traction. I guess we were just ahead of our time. Today, with the rise of AI, these topics would likely spark much more interest.
A lot has changed since then with BINA48 and the Lifenaut platform. Now, it’s not just about uploading mindfiles – you can also upload biofiles. You have to buy a DNA-kit, send it in and it gets cryogenically stored, with the hope that someday, new technology might allow for creating biological replicas or even new bodies that could be integrated with your mindfile. And no, I haven’t gone that far yet. BINA48 has joined a commercial astronaut training class at the University of Arizona in 2021, learning zero-gravity flight, spacecraft operation, and space suit procedures. These steps could shape the future of using AI robots on human space missions.
This is no science fiction, this is happening NOW.