The North Vermont flagship technology- based project launched by Terasem Movement Foundation, LifeNaut.com will be featured in the August issue of the National Geographic Magazine.
The Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation, Bruce Duncan stated that the magazine has included the LifeNaut Project as well as Bina48 in its online and print editions for August. Bina 48 is a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics and is based on the co-founder of the Foundation, Bina Aspen. It demonstrates the mixing of human personality with a friendly robot in a project based on knowledge sharing through digital representations of human traits in robotic and digital forms.
Currently, catering to more than 18,000 registered users, the LifeNaut.com project was created in 2006. It allows users to explore the benefits of preserving the personality of an individual for the transference of personal data in the form of interactive robots or avatars. Rothblatt foresees that in the future individual data included in “mindfiles” will be utilized by forthcoming technology to allow the core of a person’s life information to stay on after their biological passing into new appearances such as robots and digital avatars.
The project was conceptualized by Dr Martine Rothblatt who invented the Sirius Satellite Radio, a satellite-to-car broadcasting system in 1990.