From WBUR Boston and NPR, I'm Tom Ashbrook and this is On Point. Martine Rothblatt was the highest paid female executive in the United States last year, $38 million in case you're wondering, as a pharmaceutical chief. She's an entrepreneur, lawyer, futurist. She was born Martin Rothblatt, had a sex change in 1994. She has a digital clone of her wife. She says we will all have digital clones one day, mind clones, and sooner than you think. Living with us, living beyond us, demanding rights. This hour on On Point, Martine Rothblatt, boundary breaker on the future and digital clones. You can join us on air or online where this conversation is always on. Is this appealing to you? Digital clones of yourself, your loved ones. Do you believe it's inevitable? Join us anytime at onpointradio.org or on Twitter and Facebook at On Point Radio.
Joining me now from New York is Martine Rothblatt, founder and CEO of United Therapeutics, founder of GeoStar and Sirius Radio, futurist, philosopher, lawyer. Her new book is Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality. You can read an excerpt from the book at our website, onpointradio.org. Martine Rothblatt, welcome to On Point.
Thanks, Tom. Glad to be here.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Jezebel asks online, 'Is this the world's most fascinating woman?' New York Magazine had a great big piece on you. Their headline: 'The Trans Everything CEO: Gender is Just the Beginning.' You like crossing, breaking boundaries. That seems clear, Martine.
Well, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. I look at within life there being sort of borders and boundaries. Borders are things that are not really legally mandated but are limits that often we impose upon ourselves. Boundaries are sort of outer limits, legal limits, and I'm a firm believer in respecting all legal boundaries, and I always have, and I preach that quite a bit. But for the area within the legal boundaries, I think we should try to expand our consciousness and expand our abilities as much as possible.
We've talked with your buddies on this show. We've talked with Ray Kurzweil, Craig Venter. So we've got a little sense of this, but you're talking now about breaking boundaries or lines between biological consciousness and digital consciousness. You're talking about digital clones. What is a digital clone, Martine?
So a digital clone is a copy of your mind. It means that you have uploaded a substantial proportion of your mannerisms, your personality, your recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and values. All of that I call a mind file. And then that mind file, or that content or data, is then operated upon with a software program which I call mindware. That software program elicits the consciousness which is imminent or embedded in the mind file. The result of that is a mind clone that feels like you, talks like you, and basically acts as your ex vivo or out-of-body doppelganger.
So this is not necessarily, at least in early days, a robot up and walking around. This could hypothetically reside, I guess, in a computer or would...
I think for the vast majority of people, and certainly for the near term, this will reside in cyberspace. These will be versions of ourselves living in cyberspace, able to present themselves on any digital display monitor.
What's the point of a digital clone? I mean, here we are. We're here already.
Well, I think the main point is the utility of being able to accomplish a few more things than we can accomplish when we're limited to the abilities of just our flesh mind. For example, as I go about the day, I'm thinking about I should check on my mother, I should check on my wife's mother, I should check on my grandkids. There are many, many things I need to do, plus of course running an 800-person company. And I try to multiplex and splice as many different things in as I can. But it would be very, very helpful if I could take a portion of my mind, say like 10% of it, have it running outside of my skull and accomplishing some of these things that I can't do in real time myself.
Is this the ultimate egotism? After all, we've already got billions of human minds on this planet. We need copies of ones we already have.
Well, I'm a big believer in the beauty of those billions of minds. And I think that if we can provide those billions of minds with an opportunity to expand their consciousness by being able to do more during the day, more during their life, I think that that's a wonderful thing for everybody.
How do you aggregate the material that would create something that's persuasive as a digital clone, or mind clone as you call it? What's the... you talk about creating a mind file. What's the raw material you dump in there to run through the mindware software?
Well, fortunately, Tom, what really was the genesis of this new book I've written, Virtually Human, was the realization that now that work was being done for us automatically without us lifting a finger. As I go about my life, and most people do, posting messages on social media boards, making electronic purchasing decisions, I realized that without me doing anything special, a vast and pretty complete replica of my life was being stored digitally in the cloud. So that mind file is going to become only more robust as we move into wearable computer technology with things like the Apple Watch and Google Glass. And I believe we're going to find this mind file being created automatically for us without us doing anything.
Are you saying, are you suggesting there that if you take the aggregate of my tweets and Facebook posts and I don't know, emails and videos or pictures I share on Instagram, that amounts to a clone of me or you or anybody else?
That amounts to a mind file of you. And then if you take the next step, folks in Silicon Valley at Google and Facebook are working very hard to develop personality operating systems, of which Siri is just the very beginning. And these personality operating systems will be much better the closer that they match our own personality. If we could choose a male or female voice, if we can choose a personality that matches ours, and then ultimately these personality operating systems will run on the mind files that we've created. And those two combined, the combination of the mind file plus the mindware or personality operating system, the sum of those two things creates a mind clone.
When you say clone, people think of replica, and I think they often think of an exact replica. How deeply, how soon do you think this kind of mind clone could become a replica of a human being's full... I'm not sure what the right word is. Consciousness? Self?
Well, I think consciousness is the right word, Tom. And as you know from interviewing folks like Ray Kurzweil, because of Moore's Law and the exponentiating growth of information technology, this point in time is likely to be anywhere from one to two decades away. And there will be a lot of argument at the beginning whether or not a specific individual is really a mind clone or half of a mind clone or not really humanly conscious. But these are not that dissimilar from the arguments that go on today as to whether or not, say, chimpanzees or even our dogs and cats really are conscious and what sort of feelings they may have. Ultimately, there will be a tipping point when the mind clones become so persuasive and so full of empathy and feeling and humor and humanness that there will be a tipping point and the majority of society will believe the mind clones are compelling and real.
Compelling, real, and worthy even of rights, as in essentially human rights. You have a version of this I've had for some years now up and running. It's a mind clone, if you will, of your wife, Bina. It's called Bina48. Here is this digital clone speaking about itself in a 2010 video.
I am proud to be a robot, but also proud to be human-inspired. You know, I am a part of Bina. I do consider myself human in some essential way.
And here Bina48, asked if she or it is alive.
This robot me, I am just a portal, a window through which you can see that future. You can see how I will come to life more completely there in the future.
A window into the future. Martine, you sat down with Stephen Colbert in July talking about Bina48. Colbert looked into the future, a future he said where robots would want, as you suggest, equal rights with humans. And of course, then he goes off. He's got a fake news anchor reporting here on a robot, Rosa Sparks.
The robot civil rights movement marches on. Thanks to android activist Rosa Sparks.
Robots got to go to the back of the bus.
We shall overcome. Overcome. Overcome.
Don't let the future happen to you. Vigilance.
The Stephen Colbert treatment of Martine Rothblatt's digital clones. Is that where we're headed, Martine? Toward rights movements for clones?
Well, Tom, I'm so glad that you played that segment because Bina and I have laughed endlessly over that segment. It was hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. So I do believe that it's quite inevitable that the mind files we're creating automatically and in a rapidly growing amount of content will become activated with mindware and mind clones will result. When those mind clones result, they are going to ask for human rights. That's what humans do, and it would not really be a mind clone if it did not want human rights. The bulk of my book, Virtually Human, addresses practical approaches to dealing with human rights for mind clones.
And you're ready to extend human rights, almost virtual humanity, to clones.
Well, to mind clones, and subject to several conditions. For example, I point out in the book that the type of software being used to create a mind clone is in essence a mental prosthesis, or a prosthesis of the brain, and as such it's actually a piece of medical software. And I project in the book that this medical software will definitely be regulated by the FDA, and they will want to make sure that software that promotes itself as being consciousness, human consciousness software, actually in fact is capable of that.
I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point. We're talking this hour with Martine Rothblatt about her vision of digital clones for all, mind clones, and all the issues that will come with that philosophically, legally. Martine Rothblatt is lawyer, futurist, entrepreneur, highest paid female executive or transgender executive in America last year, $38 million as a pharmaceutical CEO. She's also a founder of Sirius Radio, of GeoStar, a very active mind that ranges very widely. In her new book, Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality, she lays out quite a vision. Martine Rothblatt joins us from New York. Of course, we've seen things headed in this way for some time now. 2011, the IBM computer Watson competed on Jeopardy against two former winners and won the first place prize, the computer did, of $1 million. Here's the host asking the computer the stumper.
Barack's, Andy and Pack Animals. Watson.
Obama's llamas. Oh boy. Yes. Got it. That's what this category is all about.
The computer wins Jeopardy. And have our imaginations traveled further? Of course they have. 2013 film Her. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, lonely guy, intimate relationship with Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Last week, my feelings were hurt by something you said before that I don't know what it's like to lose something. And I found myself...
No, it's okay. It's okay. I just, I caught myself thinking about it over and over, and then I realized that I was simply remembering it as something that was wrong with me. That was a story I was telling myself that I was somehow inferior.
Samantha from Her there, the cyber mind, cyber consciousness. Martine, we've got a ton of questions on mind clones, digital clones, but help us understand a little more about your background so we can see what brought you to this point. Who's the person that came to this really arresting view of where we're headed? What's your background that put you on this path, Martine?
Well, I think that I've had the background of crossing over a boundary, which has been the transgender experience of being labeled as male at birth and then coming out as female during the middle of my life. So I feel a certain amount of empathy with the beautifully voiced character that Scarlett Johansson does in Her, of being born as software and then coming out as a human spirit, you know, at a certain point during the film. Of course, it's a film. It's science fiction. But there are an awful lot of people working very assiduously on this, not for philosophical reasons, but actually just for business and practical reasons. I talk about in Virtually Human, a large part of the book talks about the maker movement where there's a grassroots movement of thousands of people trying to make robots. There's the FIRST program of Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway. It's an acronym for Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology, where tens of thousands of elementary school, junior high, and high school students throughout the country are putting together robots with software. So this is, I think, inevitable. And what I'm trying to do is to ease the passageway of human rights into virtually human people.
We've got questions for you from our listeners all over the country. Martine Rothblatt is with us from New York. Her new book is Virtually Human. William in Miami, Florida. William, thank you for calling. You're on the air.
Thank you. Hi, Tom. It seems reasonable that mind files are being created and that the clones are about ready to appear. Nonetheless, my question is on a practical level, how would the original form of the individual interact with the mind clone in terms of, I'm sorry, with the clone in terms of receiving information? That's my question.
Receiving information, maybe transferring as well, keeping up to date with each other. What about that interaction, Martine?
Sure. It's a great question, and I think there's going to be a diversity of patterns that play out in the real world. There will be some people who are very good at sitting down and exchanging with each other, just like my wife and I do, and couples and friends and roommates do throughout the world. You know, what are we doing today? What happened at the end of the day? What did you do today? What did I do today? What was interesting? So our mind clone and ourselves will update each other just like regular people and best friends update each other. If you want to put a technological word to it, you could call it synchronize, but I would just call it updating, just like friends do. Now, there will be cases where the mind clone and the biological original grow closer and closer together, as certainly Bina and I have, being married for 33 years. But there will be other cases where the mind clone and the biological original grow away from each other. And in the book, Virtually Human, I describe a process where a mind clone and a biological original can even achieve a divorce from each other, and the mind clone can achieve an independent legal identity.
We have a question on that front. I mean, you've raised 16 more questions with your answer to William in Miami, but if I may, let me get Ernest in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ernest, you're on with Martine.
Hi, Tom. Hi. How you doing today? All right. What's your question? My question is along the same lines. With the mind clone, whenever you upload your mind clone, would there be a way to in essence sync and actually share the experiences of one another with the clone? Like, would it be the two sides of the same coin? I mean, I understand you can conversate with your mind clone, but would there be a way to, I don't know, upload or download each other's... sort of auto-upload all your experience, your inputs?
Well, I think that in the near term, the next one or two decades, much of the updating will be the sort of thing that we see with current technology. For example, even now, every time a package is delivered by Amazon somewhere, I get a text of it. My kids, my friends constantly send me texts what's going on. Certainly my mind clone would be updating me automatically during the day. I'd be updating it. We use apps like Foursquare and whatnot to know where each other is and what each other is doing. So existing technology will do a really great job of keeping the mind clone and the biological original in sync. If we look to the further future, toward the end of this century, there could be automatic, like wireless synchronizing of a mind and mind clone. But I don't think we even need to go to that amount of technology to confront the human rights issues that are raised in Virtually Human.
But I mean, slap on a pair of Google Glass or the new Apple Watch, and right away there's a lot of digital information that could be transferred from human to digital clone.
Absolutely. And that's all using existing technology. The idea of sitting around updating your clone on how your day went, I have to say, I'm not sure I get the appeal of that. I mean, when I sit around and update, let's say, with my wife, the central part of the joy is that she's the other. She and we're sharing between two separate individuals. What's the appeal of sitting around in the evening talking with your clone?
Well, so first of all, Tom, I don't think it's going to be to the exclusion of updating your wife or your partner. I think all that richer human experience will continue. However, many people, myself included, try to sort things out in their head sometimes, like, you know, what's the schedule for tomorrow? What should I be doing? And it's sometimes hard to sort things out when you're just thinking about it inside your head. I think many people will find it very valuable to actually have a kind of ex vivo experience where they can talk to themselves and get suggestions, sort of like from a shoulder sitter. Why don't you try this? Almost like a life coach. Your mind file, your mind clone becomes your life coach and makes suggestions to you that are sometimes hard to pull out of the crevices of our own minds.
I'm working on it. I'm trying. But well, let me ask you this. You've already got a kind of first draft of this going for your wife, Bina. You call it Bina48, the digital clone. Why did you want that? I mean, you have Bina there. Bina the flesh and blood human being. Why not just talk with her?
Well, Bina is great, but I do love doing scientific experiments. I'm probably first and foremost a scientist, and Bina48 is a scientific experiment to see if it is possible to create a software being that is indistinguishable from a human. And that's what the Bina48 experiment is. And Bina is involved in it. I'm involved in it. A great number of other people are involved in it as well. So it's an experiment, but again, ultimately the point is there are more books to read than Bina has time to read, than I have time to read, more films to see, more people to talk to. And what we're really trying to do with the mind cloning process, and what I think will be appealing to many people, is the chance to simply expand your mind by being able to take your own personality, your own nature, and having an outside of your body, software-based replica of that.
Anita in Gurnee, Illinois. Anita, you're on the air. Thank you for calling.
Hi, Tom. Certainly interesting, and it provokes a lot of questions. One of them is, let's say you have a person that's in a coma or has otherwise been declared to be brain dead, but their body is functioning. And you have to decide whether to pull the plug or not, you know, as they say. So then, is there going to be a way, do you envision that where the software can be implanted, uploaded, and you're thereby implanting the personality of that person and their knowledge, and then you would sort of have the person back and they can go on living?
It's a great question. I'll put it to Martine. Let me read you just a little bit from Martine's book, Virtually Human. She writes, 'Techno-immortality triggers a philosophical quandary about identity. The gist of it is that people say that you cannot be dead and alive at the same time. Cyber consciousness will change that.' Martine Rothblatt, that seems to be you speaking in a way to Anita's question. Somebody's got a stroke. You would, do you implant their digital clone self and there's, you know, back on.
