A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal[7] by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell".
[8][9] The National Science Foundation has awarded a half-million-dollar grant to the universities of Central Florida at Orlando and Illinois at Chicago to explore how researchers might use artificial intelligence, archiving, and computer imaging to create convincing, digital versions of real people, a possible first step toward virtual immortality.
[11] The aim of Dmitry Itskov's 2045 Initiative is to "create technologies enabling the clone of an individual's personality to a non-biological carrier, and extending existence, including to the point of immortality".
According to Gordon Bell and Jim Gray from Microsoft Research, retaining every conversation that a person has ever heard is already realistic: it needs less than a terabyte of storage (for adequate quality).
Martine Rothblatt envisions the creation of "mindfiles" – collections of data from all kinds of sources, including the photos we upload to Facebook, the discussions and opinions we share on forums or blogs, and other social media interactions that reflect our life experiences and our unique self.
[19][4][20][17] Susanne Asche states: As a hopefully minimalistic definition then, digital immortality can be roughly considered as involving a person-centric repository containing a copy of everything that a person sees, hears, says, or engenders over his or her lifespan, including photographs, videos, audio recordings, movies, television shows, music albums/CDs, newspapers, documents, diaries and journals, interviews, meetings, love letters, notes, papers, art pieces, and so on, and so on; and if not everything, then at least as much as the person has and takes the time and trouble to include.
This avatar is placed in charge of (and perhaps "equated" with) the collected material in the repository so that the agent can present the illusion of having the factual memories, thoughts, and beliefs of the person him/herself.Rothblatt proposes the term "mindware" for software that is being developed with the goal of generating conscious AIs.
[4][17] According to Boston University's Magazine,[22] the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ushering humanity into a realm where the boundary between the living and the deceased is becoming increasingly blurred.
[28] According to Vinícius Ferreira Galvão,[24] their article, "Discussing human values in digital immortality: towards a value-oriented perspective", they had stated questions to how ethical issues are regarded after the death of an individual.
The article makes a claim stating that "Holograms, digital twins and chatbots are increasingly used to reproduce the likenesses, behaviours and emotions of the deceased.