Internet Afterlife: Virtual Salvation in the 21st Century by O'Neill Kevin;

Author:O'Neill, Kevin; [O'Neill, Kevin;]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ROTHBLATT’S CINEMATIC REPLY TO DYSTOPIAN VISIONS

The overwhelmingly dystopian character of films about the marriage of minds and machines—the Terminator films and 2001: A Space Odyssey—is noted above. Others are discussed in chapter ten. Martine Rothblatt has responded to these by producing two movies of her own. The Singularity Is Near was released in 2010 by a company called Terasem Motion Infoculture, with Rothblatt listed as executive producer. Ray Kurzweil, listed as a co-director and writer, also interviews Rothblatt in the film. The second film, 2B: The Era of Flesh Is Over, was released in 2009 by Transformer Films, “in association with Terasem Media and Films,” and also lists Rothblatt as executive producer. A note at the end of the film reveals that the script was based on an original idea proposed by Martine Rothblatt.

Both of these films promote the ideas noted in Rothblatt’s work. One is that we are on the verge of fundamental changes in the meaning of human identity and that there is no point in denying this or even resisting it. Another is that these fundamental changes will flow naturally from scientific progress and especially from progress in the fields of computer science and nanotechnology. Finally, science very soon will bring us new forms of human life—forms that eventually will allow us to assimilate with machines and become both immortal and superintelligent. These new life forms will not arrive and be accepted without resistance, however, and each of the two films sketches out a different scenario for dealing with this resistance.

2B, the film based directly on Rothblatt’s idea, presents a much darker vision of the near future both literally and figuratively. The plot revolves around the activities of two figures, the brilliant billionaire recluse Tom Mortlake and the cynical investigative reporter Cris Konroy. Mortlake, alone in his dark castle which is filled with shadowy stone corridors, has created what the movie calls a “transbeman.” This is a neologism even for Rothblatt. We have already met her “beman,” a fully human entity created entirely from the patterned memories of other minds. Such entities have no biological history; they never had a “meat body”; they were not conceived in a womb; and, if they so choose, they need never inhabit any sort of body in the three-dimensional world. The film’s transbeman—the lovely young Asian woman named Mia—is a creature compiled from a collection of the DNA of different people. She is a biological being, but one cloned from many sources and one equipped with enhanced genetic materials that allow her, for example, to grow from a zygote to a fully developed adult human in a special amniotic tank in a matter of weeks.

“Transbeman” means a bio-electric being that is a step away from a purely biological being toward a purely electric or non-biological being. This type of entity never appears in either Virtually Human or in The Truths of Terasem. The issues Mia faces are consistent with those that the first fully artificial beings, the bemans, will encounter, as well as those with which the first post-mortem mindclones will have to cope.

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