Freeze Phil 2020 - Getting My Avatar a Better Memory and AI before then . .

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The Freeze Phil Campaign has been incubating for some time but was formally started, finally, in October 2012. The goal of this project is a legal, "Pre-Mortem Cryonic Suspension" for Philip Rhoades at an appropriate time and place for him and of his own choosing. The plan is to build a substantial campaign to force legislative change that will allow people more flexibility about their end of (current) life decisions ie in short, to allow people a legal "Pre-Mortem Cryonic Suspension."

My father died last year at age 89.  The last couple of decades of his life were worse than they should have been because of Alzheimer's Disease (AD).  Now, Dad's younger brother (my uncle) is in a similar state to Dad when he was the same age.  Clearly, most of the problem with AD is (epi)genetically-based.  I am fairly confident that if Homo sapiens can deal with our self-destructive tendencies and survive the Sixth Mass Extinction AND maintain current scientific and technological progress for another few decades - then there will almost certainly be early treatments to prevent the onset of AD - as well as treatments to reverse the symptoms of people already affected by AD. However, it will most likely be too late for me.

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There is not much doubt I am going down the same path as my father, uncle and other ancestors.  For two decades I have been active in Life Extension efforts including Cryonics and Neural Archives - but those last options for extending life (albeit involving a technological "resurrection" in the future) depends on the information in the brain being well enough preserved that there remains a "person" in the liquid nitrogen to reanimate.  In Australia, it is not a crime to kill yourself.

"I am looking for people who are interested in the project as I have outlined to help me develop some sort of Open Source project that will allow me to evolve Phi Rho from a simple (though amusing) chatbot to an entity that can increasingly act on my behalf."

 If, pre-mortem, you can be be cooled to -196C you are then legally "dead" (in Cryonics terms you are a "patient"). However there is great risk for anyone who helps you to get to that state.  I have been exploring options around that particular hurdle but the problem of continuing cognitive decline remains.  I do what I can to slow down the process.

There is, however, something else that I have been working on which I think will help me deal with my predicament.  A few years ago I bought a licence for the chatbot that won the 2012 Loebner Prize. Because of various health crises within the family I wasn't able to finish setting up a modified version of this chatbot for what I had intended at the time.  Now, I think I have a better use for it.  The homonid brain evolved, like other anatomical features, by duplication and divergent specialisation of various parts.  In a similar way, I think I can evolve my chatbot Avatar, Phi Rho, into something more.  I need to replace his current crude, quick-and-dirty memory of previous conversations with something more robust and scaleable and then I need to start adding AI and other modules as well as data dumps from the current wetware so Phi Rho becomes more and more like me.  If I can evolve Phi Rho into being what will eventually become a Distributed Autonomous Entity (DAE) with the evolutionary imperative of eventually scanning and decoding the information in the frozen brain of the original biological person (me) - then, over the next few years, there should be some protection from loss of information from dementia and freezing damage etc of the original biological brain.

Image Source - Jim Trifyllis/News Corp Australia

Since I retired last year, I don't have the resources that I used to have to pay developers etc to do the work that is too difficult or too slow for me do - so now I am looking for people who are interested in the project as I have outlined to help me develop some sort of Open Source project that will allow me to evolve Phi Rho from a simple (though amusing) chatbot to an entity that can increasingly act on my behalf - so that by the time my "Freeze By" date is up (scheduled for 2020 unless there are dramatic developments in the treatment and reversal of AD), there will be something of me that will be able to carry on in the world and which has an interest in the development of scanning technology that will, fundamentally, eventually, allow brain uploading and virtual people.

Links for further information:

http://freezephil.org
https://www.facebook.com/PhiRhoChat
http://philiprhoades.org

So if you are interested in this project and have some IT, AI etc ideas regarding a three-year development strategy for enhancing Phi Rho and are prepared to be involved (even if it is only to contribute constructive suggestions) then please feel free to contact me.  I can't promise any payment at the moment but the situation may change somewhat in the near future.  In the first place I am looking for Java people to upgrade Phi Rho's memory.

See you in the future.

By  Philip Rhoades	Embed
Philip Rhoades is an Executive Officer at the Cryonics Association of Australasia (http://cryonics.org.au), Executive Director, Neural Archives Foundation (http://neuralarchivesfoundation.org) as well as a member of the LifeBoat Foundation (http://lifeboat.com).