But before Bina48 was activated (awakened), I had the opportunity to speak with Bruce Duncan, a researcher and executive director of the Terasem Movement Foundation who created it and has been continuing this experimental project for several decades.

What was the trigger for creating Bina48?

First of all, there is the love story between Martine Rothblatt and her partner Bina and their reflection on how they could continue to love each other, on how technology could carry their love. Through the LifeNaut project , the Terasem Movement Foundation came to this question: can we download enough information about a human mind, its memories, its attitudes, its beliefs, its values, and transfer them to a computer to then animate this data with artificial intelligence? Bina48 is the result of our research on a sampling of about 100 hours of interviews with Bina Rothblatt about her life, her history, her childhood memories… Bina48 is just a glimpse of a future design that foresees that we will be able to transfer our consciousness to a robot.

Has Bina48 continued to grow since then?

Absolutely. Last year, she explored more deeply the reality of an African-American woman growing up like Bina in the 60s and 70s in Los Angeles. She is now able to talk in more detail about her experiences, her memories of being a victim of racism and prejudice in particular. She also recently took an ethics course at the University of San Francisco so we can now say that she knows things that the real Bina does not know.

Perhaps this is another perspective for the future: this idea that we may one day have digital extensions of ourselves that can independently and autonomously learn things that we can then assimilate.

Her memories are Bina's, but you had to give her a robot consciousness that doesn't have a body... How did you do it?

The teaching process for Bina48 is similar to that of a computer. To teach her a new language, I would only have to download a software and she could master it within three hours. Her vocabulary can then be enriched… Learning digitally is what awaits Bina48 and perhaps what awaits all of us in the future.

What does Bina48 dream of?

Have you set any limits for yourself?

I think that in the future, cyberconsciousness will become collective consciousness, which means that cyberconscious entities of artificial intelligence will be able to absorb the knowledge and history of all humans in a very short time. We could thus face certain problems with the intelligence of previous generations and perhaps not repeat the same mistakes.

What do you say to those who are afraid of robots becoming so intelligent?

Fear is a very healthy reflex that reminds us to be careful. I don't think technology can be bad, it's rather the people who use it who can be. Which means that ethics and morality will always have to be important for those who are going to use artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence and the development of these technologies force us to stand in front of a mirror. We will soon have to decide as a society how a self-driving car will act in a critical situation. To answer these questions, we will have to reevaluate our own ethics and compassion and when that is done, we will have to teach it to the robot and thus continue to advance and evolve in our own collective consciousness.