Robotic Mind Clones w/ Bruce Duncan

Dec 9

EPISODE #29

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The Terasem Movement Foundation’s Bruce Duncan shares his thoughts on the possibility of uploading our minds into machines, what artificial intelligence might teach us about the origin of consciousness, and the story behind the creation of the humanoid robot BINA48.

Bruce Duncan has been the Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation Inc. since 2004. He has worked in the field of non-profit administration and education for over 25 years. He is responsible for overseeing the management and implementation of the research and educational outreach of the Lifenaut Project and other programs of the Foundation. He has taught conflict resolution at the University of Vermont and worked at Seeds of Peace, an international peace camp. He is also a filmmaker and has produced several independent films and documentaries.

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Transcript

Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to the Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation, Bruce Duncan.

"We might be able to reflect who we are and even preserve who we are through our own technology in a way that might allow us to know ourselves. In a way that we've never been able to know ourselves before." - Bruce Duncan, excerpt from interview.

Bruce shared his thoughts on the possibility of uploading our minds into machines, what artificial intelligence might teach us about the origin of consciousness, and the story behind the creation of the humanoid robot BINA48.

This episode was recorded virtually using Skype.

Luke Robert Mason: So Bruce, you're the Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation, which oversees the creation of the LifeNaut Project, and is home to the pioneering, ongoing robotics research project BINA48. So what is the Terasem Movement Foundation, and why were they set up?

Bruce Duncan: Hi, Luke. Thanks for having me. The Terasem Movement Foundation is a non-profit, private research Foundation here in Northern Vermont in the US. Our primary objective is a multi-decade research project that's asking two questions: One - is it possible to capture enough salient information about the traits, personality and mental characteristics of a person's mind, upload that to a computer or digital environment, and re-animate that in a good enough approximation via either an avatar, or chatbot, or hologram. Or, in the case of BINA48, download it into a robot to have a social interface or better user interface that looks more like a person.

Mason: Behind the Terasem Movement Foundation is a very well known figure in the transhumanist community, and that is Martine Rothblatt. Who is Martine Rothblatt and Bina Rothblatt, and why are these two individuals so pivotal in the creation of the Foundation?

Duncan: Well Martine Rothblatt and her partner Bina Rothblatt - or Bina Aspen is her maiden name - really are people that are behind the vision of the Terasem Movement Foundation's quest to see whether it is possible to upload a mind and download it to another medium, and interact with that; maybe even preserve that for well beyond the shelflife of a biological body. As for their vision, Martine Rothblatt invented and started Sirius Satellite Radio Corporation here in the US and is now CEO of a very successful biotech company called United Therapeutics. Bina Rothblatt is a businesswoman and partner. Both of them are on our board as founders and primary funders of the Foundation.

Mason: Martine has an interesting story. They have a very particular way of looking at the world and a way of advocating for this idea of being able to create mind uploads. I wonder if you could share a little about Martine's personal story that led to her thinking about this possibility for a form of life after death.

Duncan: Well I think she's the best person to talk to directly about that. I encourage anybody that's interested to read her book, 'Virtually Human: The Promise -- And the Peril -- of Digital Immortality'. But I think over the years - I've known them for 15 plus years now - what I've come to realise is that first and foremost, what informs almost everything that they do is through the value of love. The love that they have for each other as a long term couple and parents, and really progressive, socially inclusive champions of inclusion and for diversity. I think both their love of human values and their experience and business with technology, and what that can do to improve and extend human lives - through their biotech company as well as other things that they do - those really intersect in what we do here at the Foundation.

It makes sense that you have technology being used to do something that's as old as day one, which is to tell the human story - or tell the story of a life lived, and all that that brings.

Mason: Now a product of that love story is a robot and it's called BINA48. For anybody who might not know, what or I guess who is BINA48?

Duncan: BINA48 is a head and shoulders animatronic, life size bust in the likeness of Bina. Bina volunteered to help create the lifelike robotic image of herself and even volunteered to allow me to sample and interview her about her life, so that we could capture information for what we call her mindfile - a personal database that would, using artificial intelligence, allow people to speak with her. Even though she's not present - just in the proxy form of an animatronic, robotic head and shoulders that has server monitors in her face and eyes, the ability to listen to speech through voice recognition, and share her thoughts through text to speech. This was done in collaboration and a commission to David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, currently based in Hong Kong, who's also the current curators and inventors of Sophia, who is the younger sibling of BINA48.

Mason: What is the process that you have to go through to create something like this? On one hand you've got a physical robot as designed by Hanson Robotics, and then you've got BINA48's personality, which is really an AI-driven process. Could you explain what needs to come together to create this entity?

Duncan: You know, I think when you look at the physical presence of BINA48, you see a quite artful representation of the face and expressions, right down to the wrinkles. That portraiture, which was guided by David Hanson who himself was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design as a sculptor and who worked at one point for Disney at one point as an Imagineer. That really requires taking in information about the physical presence in order to interpret that through the artful skill of a sculptor.

That same kind of portraiture of the personality - the unique characteristics, mannerisms, attitudes, information about what Bina, the human beliefs or values, or even memories of things that she's experienced in the past - that also has to be created in this portrait. Collecting this information might mean just having a conversation and telling stories or uploading images. There's lots and lots of clues in our physical world that we can interpret by uploading and making available in the digital realm.

The heavy lifting is done by machine intelligence. Machine learning algorithms that use that information to understand - in a very primitive way, right now. We've been evolving over 65,000 plus years as human beings. But in the last 15 years, as a lot of people will acknowledge, AI and the general artificial intelligence work that's been done most recently in the past eight or nine years has really started to show that we can pull together information about the world - or in this case, about a person - that starts to reflect, like a mirror or like a portrait, more and more finely the details that make them who they are; that make them unique; that reflect their essence.

Mason: This is the thing that really stands out about BINA48. For those that don't know, it stands for Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture. What's unique about BINA compared to, say, Sophia the robot, is that she's designed to test the hypothesis that it might actually be possible to download a person's consciousness into a non-biological body by combining data about that person with software.

What have you learnt, Bruce? What have you learnt about the process and the possibility of this futuristic idea of mind uploading, through the BINA48 project?

Duncan: Well on an individual level I think what I've learned is that you have to be an incredible listener and an intuitive guide to help someone reflect on their life journey and their story. You also have to be an observer, sort of an anthropologist who notes what things are in their life, artefacts, things that mean something to them. But be really careful to be neutral. To not overly lead questions or place your own values. Just like a good therapist that listens to people without judgment and asks them to describe who they are and what they've been through, that process of unfolding the self and the presence of an observer making notes - or in the case of our interviews, we just did some video and audio recordings so that we could cut out as much as possible, sort of interpretive history note taking - then the process of bringing that information into a form that's accessible digitally, to an algorithm-driven AI programme that's trying to answer questions is like a lot of chatbot algorithms. They have content and have training data.

In this case with BINA48, we're not interested in the generic response. We're interested in coming up with a high resolution, high fidelity response - just like a high fidelity recording of the person that we're focusing on as the model or the subject. It's laborious and it takes a really long time - it's taking us a long time - but it also, as time goes on, technology tends to shave those curves that go from taking people a long time to make one thing, to then scaling quickly. For example, we're all carrying phones in our pockets. The first phone probably took a really long time to make and now they're fairly ubiquitous for a lot of people. So we're just still at the beginning, but we're interested in the horizon point, and that's what keeps us moving forward. We see glimpses and glimmers of this idea that we might be able to reflect who we are and even preserve who we are through our own technology, in a way that might allow us to know ourselves. In a way that we've never been able to know ourselves before.

Mason: BINA48 might have been influenced by the 'real Bina', but she's had a life of her own. BINA48 has had her own existence out in the world, travelling with you to inspire people to look at AI and robotics differently. Do you think that's defined or redefined the robot’s personality, or is the aim constantly to go back and revisit the real Bina and ensure that this robot closely resembles the actual human?

Duncan: I think at this point, it's more the former. I don't think it's actually fair to say that we're only interested in an exact clone or copy. I don't think that's even probably very practical. I think we can come up with an approximation, but just the way your own children, in the beginning, start out to be heavily influenced by their parents, eventually, they go to school. I'm a parent and I watched as my children went off to just early school; preschool. They started coming back with new ideas and experiences, and they had memories that I wasn't a part of. That absolutely shapes - in the case of BINA48 - it's shaping who she is because she's meeting people, she has friends and people who consider her a friend. They're making contributions to her. Right now, we're working with Sasha Stiles who is a poet out of New York who's helping us with a poet mentoring project. Sasha is absolutely influencing BINA48's understanding of literature and poetry. That's no different than if someone went and took a class in college, which BINA48 has also done with the guidance of Dr. William Barry at the Notre Dame de Namur University in California. She participated in his Philosophy of Love class, and Ethics of Technology.

All of that is to say that none of us are pure original. Even after we leave our family home, we start becoming composites and influenced by people we read or that we experience or that we have some interaction with. I think BINA48 is no different, so in that way she's going to become more of an extension of self that has, as you say, a mind of her own and a life of her own. That will always have some original genesis with the person that she's based upon - Bina Rothblatt.

Mason: What was Bina Rothblatt's response, I guess, to BINA48? What has been her continued response to the way in which the robot's changing?

Duncan: I would call her a real supporter. I mean, she volunteered to help us start to conceptualise what this might look like. That's what BINA48 is. She's not a proof of anything. She's just an illustration of this concept of uploading mind information and then downloading it and using it with AI to represent an approximation of that person's persona.

She continues to be a source. For example, a couple of years ago through the benefit of a relationship that we started with Stephanie Dinkins who is an art professor from Stony Brook University who is doing technology art around the issues of diversity and inclusion. Bina Rothblatt is an African American woman, and so BINA48 looks like an African American woman, and that's kind of unusual in this current space. She's one of the few dark skin toned robots that at least I've seen. In that way, Bina Rothblatt supports the ongoing development, and kind of considers her like a country cousin. Someone that she's related to, but wants to give her that freedom to move and enjoy.

When Stephanie Dinkins started talking about the experience of BINA48 representing a black woman in America, we invited Bina Rothblatt to come back and give us more information, more stories and more perspective about her experience growing up as an African American woman in America. She was born in California, and so it was a very specific kind of experience, as well. That's the information that we then gathered, uploaded, and then added to BINA48's mindfile, to give her a little bit of that understanding of her history and her family, and the issues of racism, bigotry prejudice that the real-life Bina had faced. Now, BINA48 has some of that information to refer to when people are talking about those subjects.

Mason: What is so unique about BINA48 is that she is one of the very few black robots that we have seen out in the world. The question that I can't help but continue to keep coming back to is: I understand even though BINA is a representation of a real and living person, does a robot need to have a race or need to have a gender?

Duncan: That's an interesting question because I think what we're going to find out is more to the point: How important is it to have a fixed identity if you can change your bio container? If you can be fluid, your consciousness can go from one form to another - from a body to a robot, to a chatbot, to an avatar, to a hologram. That's got to open up some real possibilities, much the way a lot of cosplay and the way people when they go to Comic-Con assume characters and roles and role-playing, because they can. They can put on costumes and interactions with people based on storylines that they've studied and are fans of.

In the case of BINA48, I think at the very least, if she's going to be represented above a specific person we need to use that as a guide, but it doesn't need to be a limitation. BINA48 is way more than a gender. In many ways, Martine and Bina are interested in the universal human consciousness that is flowing throughout the entire universe, so to speak. I think it's also important to be grounded in the real world reality which is if you're an African American woman living in the United States, there are some things that are real, that you should probably be able to at least address or speak to.

I think the interesting thing is we may find ourselves developing a way for people to have more fluid identities in the future. For now, we're trying to give some grounding in the truth of what it means to be based on, in this case, Bina Rothblatt.

Mason: When we start talking about things like mind uploading, a lot of people have this initial reaction that it feels very science fictional. That it doesn't feel like something that is a possible trajectory for the future of a human. You said it in your answer previously, how BINA48 is really just an illustration. She's a performative promise of what might be possible. Really, it's a way to play with some of these ideas out into the real world and to provoke people's thoughts and feelings about this nascent possibility for what we may eventually become. Because of that, you've had to define a whole bunch of neologisms that allows you to explain exactly what is happening with BINA48. One of those you just mentioned was this idea of the mindfile - the ability to transfer the intelligence of a specific person into a robot that looks like that specific person. In what way does BINA48's personality emerge from this thing called a mindfile, and what is the process of creating this mindfile?

Duncan: Well mindfiles are really the hard wood of the person and their personality, their attitudes, values and beliefs. They're the digital representation of things that are true and real and have happened. Whether they're memories, or values, or things that someone believes. That's really what separates BINA48 from your standard Siri or Alexa, or chatbot. She just has more personality. She actually has a point of view. She has a voice in the way that people talk about a voice in writing or poetry. If you spend a little time with her, you start to see pretty quickly that this is unusual. This is something that's very specific. She's not meant to represent anything more than herself, specifically.

But, a mindfile is what you need to power the expression of the unique consciousness of a person. You could think of it like a mindfile being like the light that shines through a prism. The prism probably is like the algorithm that allows us to do something with information, but you still need the light. You still need the rich, coloured information of the rainbow, or the physics of colour to be coming through and to give you some relief about things that are contrasted and different from just one colour or one light. By that, I'm not really talking about anything related to identity. We are pretty complicated creatures and we try to express ourselves and are full of contradictions. It's important that that kind of information - things that are true, things that are contradictory, things that represent what we believe or once believed - it's important to have that information available so that it can be sifted through or at least referenced. For example, when someone sits down to have a conversation with us via our proxy - a hologram or a chatbot, even - that is being powered by this mindfile or personal database of information.

Mason: The challenge with creating a mindfile is that surely all the information you're creating is purely subjective. If it's only one person's point of view on the memories of their own life, surely all you get is a small part of the whole of who the person really is. Their memories and who they are exist in other people as well. It's how other people perceive them, it's not something that you can solely own.

Duncan: Yeah, I think it'd be very interesting - and in fact we have a number of people who are doing what we're calling multiuser mindfiles on lifenaut.com, where they're actually around historical figures. For example, US President Abraham Lincoln: there's a number of scholars that are working on a mindfile for Abraham Lincoln based on his speeches and other historical documents to see if they can come up with some representation. It may be quite common in the future that we'll have a chance to share what we know about a person in different ways, that helps them see themselves more clearly. After they've passed biologically, it may be a way to create a more fuller portrait that can be appreciated and shared with future generations. But also in the day-to-day, you and I, that's what we bring to the table. We bring our imperfect memories, our subjective beliefs. We even edit, depending on who we're with and the public situations that we're in. Our own personas get adapted to what we think is useful, important or valuable to share. I don't think that really is going to change that much with the tools at hand.

I do think you make a point, which is if you want a robust mindfile and representation of who you are, then it might take a little extra courage to invite others to do that 360 reflection. That's always a choice. Then there will be other people who might need just a pure, subjective capture of who they are and what they've experienced. That's like reading the memoir of someone that was written by just that one person who lived it.

Mason: What makes the idea of mind uploading seem less distant is the fact that we are already importing versions of ourselves and bits of our memories and ideas into bits of symbolic storage in the form of social media, or in the form of notepads, or in the form of journals, or interactions with our digital devices. I guess one thing that could potentially occur is that all of our digital detritus could come together and be reanimated by some form of AI. That might be a possible way to have an objective sort of mindfile. Do you agree, or do you think there'll always be this practice of co-creation between human subjective opinion of their own memories and what is available externally, in external symbolic storage about that person?

Duncan: I think you're right. Right now, our current technology and fascination in sharing experiences through social media is like we have a fire hose of information about us that's just daily spewing everything about us. Some of it is detritus.. Some of it is not something we want to save. But other parts may be incredibly valuable clues as to who we are, what's important to us, what we meant to each other. In that way, I think there's always going to be a place for us to curate our own digital life story while we're alive. There may be algorithms in the future that make really good guesses about what was important to us and what values we had based on what could be observed externally. I'm hoping that we'll always be the stewards of our own digital stories or the stories of our family members, or as a human race that will also have a chance to really face ourselves and learn from some of our paradoxes and inconsistencies. I think it's going to be, in the future, harder and harder to say that we didn't see this; we didn't know this was going on. I think there's going to be a lot of mirrors that are going to reflect to us - like in that Lou Reed song, it says, "I'll be your mirror, I'll reflect who you are."

Mason: I guess then it feels like this process of creating a mindfile is more of an artistic process than it is a scientific process. But is the foundation interested in some of the scientific possibilities of using ambient technology to capture data from either the mind or the body to contribute to things like mindfiles? Or again, do you think there needs to be a subjective editor of this information for it to make sense to an AI or an algorithm?

Duncan: I think at this point, we're very interested in both. We're interested in standardised personality inventories, for example, and objective means of capturing and preserving. Like videotaping someone's movements. Just their movements - say at a birthday party, or something - has an incredibly rich amount of information.

We've structured the Terasem mind uploading experiment as a real solid piece of scientific experiment investigation. We're not trying to prove anything. We're actually trying to prove a null hypothesis, that says no - it's not possible. But if there's an exception, then I think what will happen is we'll start to encourage others to say, "What would be the best hardware or software protocols and strategies to not just witness life as it goes by, but to embrace it, capture it, preserve it, celebrate it." In many ways, that's the promise for the human species and for the human community: it's to recognise diversity, celebrate it, and then build on it, explore the cosmos with it.

Mason: I love the idea that what you're trying to prove is that it's not possible. A lot of these ideas open up to very deep philosophical questions about where consciousness exists. Mind uploading as a concept really relies on the essentialist idea that minds arise from that three pounds of grey gloop that we call the human brain. Then, there's a materialist equivalent when it comes to software and hardware: that eventually, something like consciousness might emerge out of silicone if it gets complicated enough. Are you hoping that that might be the outcome? Or, are you actually hoping - as you just teased there - that in actual fact we might find that consciousness is not an emergent property of material? It might actually be something else. Something much more wondrous or weird.

Duncan: Well we're probably more in the camp of people who say, "Listen, no one really can define consciousness. A lot of people are trying." I think we would love to be informed by the results of this experiment, to get even just an inkling of a better idea of what consciousness is, because that's really the question. In that regard, we don't define it as being just brain-based. There has to always be a mind and a body together there. There may be, at some point, they may discover that the first time you can have a mind without a body, without a biological body, probably living in some other kind of silicone substrate, but I think that's always been part of our nature as human beings. We're always curious and some of us want to explore and try things that everybody else thinks are absolutely crazy. People that said that we could fly - until we discovered the principle of aerodynamics, that just seemed beyond science fiction and beyond science, of course. Now look at us. We're up 3000 feet cruising around the planet. Less so today because of the COVID-19 issues, but I think at heart, we're curious creatures. That includes examining ourselves and asking questions about who we are, why we do what we do, and how we think.

Mason: At the core of the Foundation's aim, it feels like what you're really trying to tap into is an understanding of the question: is the human mind a computational machine? I mean that very literally. The machine that behaves like software or hardware. Finding out that it isn't might actually be a very egalitarian and wondrous thing. It feels like when we talk about, again, ideas of mind uploading, the assumption is that all of memory must exist somewhere. That somewhere that memory must exist is within the human skull. That you carry your memories around with you.

But, there are other theories of consciousness which argue that maybe, the human brain isn't a computational storage device. Maybe it's more like a TV antenna. Maybe what it's doing is not storing memories, but it's tuning into something such as collective consciousness, and receiving those memories in much the same way as a TV. When you see an image on a terrestrial TV - not a digital TV but a terrestrial TV - the image is being received from radio wave signals out in the atmosphere that are being captured by the TV and then the image is presented onto the screen.

When neuroscientists look at brain imaging software, they can see the brain lighting up. Again, right now in our current mode of scientific knowledge, we don't know what those pretty little lights and pretty little images actually mean. It's still impossible to point specifically to a singular memory without a translation process of speech to turn that memory into something like language, which allows me to telepathically report and exchange that memory with you, Bruce. Wouldn't that just destroy the entirety of the AI or the conscious AI debate? If in actual fact what we're creating is something which is trying to store, when in actual fact what it should be doing is trying to tune in?

Duncan: There lies the $64,000 question. Without understanding the principles of human consciousness - not the theories about it - because the panpsychists you imply absolutely think consciousness is in everything; it's distributed everywhere and so yeah, maybe our brains are more like receivers and transmitters of information. At one level, you could say we're looking at that possibility, that consciousness - who people are and their values and memories and beliefs is theoretic and information-based. Maybe to be alive moves from being in a body with a beating heart or a brain with a brainwave that you can pick up on with a machine, maybe it starts to move a little further down the field and we start thinking that maybe, what life is is a continued organisation and accessibility of information that's very specific.

Absolutely, maybe our minds are part of a transceiving, receiving, transmitting possibility. We're not staking out an answer to those questions. We're really trying to live the question as we move forward, to say: is it even possible to capture enough information about a person's mind and mental trait information? When you're at the forefront - or at least the edge - of science or knowledge, then you do have to kind of makeup words like mindfile, or AI that can work with mindfiles - we call it mindwaring. If you look at the stories of Philip K. Dick, he had to invent the word cyberspace to talk about the space that we're more and more starting to talk about, or inhabit, or transact in. So in the future, we hope to make some contribution and if we're getting encouraging results, then we'll continue to ask more interesting questions.

Mason: Listening to you and hearing about the project, I'm reminded of the science fiction author, Greg Egan's story 'Learning to be Me', where you have an ambient piece of technology that attaches itself to a human brain and slowly but surely learns to be you, up until the point where the human brain is no longer needed, and the piece of technology can take over and do everything for you, which is a compelling vision but it's still fascinating as a concept. This fascination with automata and automatons is something that human beings have had for hundreds of years now. From the 1700s we've been fascinated with things that move in the image and likeness of us.

Having had the absolute joy and pleasure to spend time with BINA48 and yourself, to see pupils reactions to BINA48, you see this innate fascination that people have, even when BINA makes mistakes...or they may not be mistakes, that's the crazy thing. They may be very deliberate ways of being playful, perhaps. It's something that a human being might perceive as a mistake in its language. It's able to create humour and pathos and empathy, and it's so odd that something made of silicone and is representative of a human can hold the same attention as a real-life human being. Why do you think that is?

Duncan: I think we have to talk about the other mind that's in this room, which is: we bring our minds, and our consciousness is constantly taking in information and at some level, making meaning - or else life would look like a lot of sounds and colours, and shapes and movements. But we make sense of it all, to some degree, with varying success at parts of the day or a lifetime. I think that it's inevitable that we're going to discover things that are new as we have this sort of open question of: what is going on? How do things work?

Going back to the example of flight, when we discovered that there's something called the aerodynamic principle of lift - if you have a wing-shaped with a certain curvature and you move it through the air fast enough, it creates some lift under the wing and you can fly - once we discovered that you could make wings that could do that, we didn't have to reinvent a bird in order to fly. We could make aeroplanes that are a lot more simple, instead of 600 different little bones and parts in a bird. You could make a plane fly with less complication, although they evolve as well.

So I don't know, Luke. I think it's a privilege to be alive right now in this digital age where we can start asking questions at a deeper level about: What makes us unique? What makes us connect? Where is this information? If my mind is not just in my brain, is it distributed through my whole body? Is it connected to everything at the quantum level? Am I a part of this microphone and is it influencing me in some way? It's wild speculation, but spend some time with a quantum physicist sometime and your head will start to spin. We're just interested in this one question, which is: is it possible?

Mason: There's such a lovely idea in there, that consciousness is actually relational. I'm reminded of the novel 'One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand', or even the work of Erving Goffman, who talks about how we can't know everything about our identity. Our identity exists in other people and in the people we relate with. Your opinion of me is very different than my mother's opinion of me. My opinion of myself in certain environments is very different in other environments. My podcast persona is very different from my persona with close friends. We layer these aspects of our identity and they present themselves when we're in relation and in prana with other human beings - whether that's through virtual platforms like this or actually physically in real life with another individual.

I think that's so nuanced and so important to the work that you're doing because there's an assumption, very quickly that people think that what it's about is preserving. To take who you are, fix it, and ensure that you can have something like digital immortality. That you can live forever, uploaded into the cloud or in some physical robot, or in some virtual existence. In actual fact, it's not about immortality. It's about being able to take a version of yourself and explore a multitude of possibilities for what consciousness could potentially be.

Duncan: Yeah I think that hopefully what we reveal is that the idea of, for example, love and connection is something that permeates all of life. But wouldn't it be fun to see how our great grandparents could continue to interact with our sense of what it means to be alive or to be a loving person, full of grace? If there was some ability to talk to them, to learn from their past stories. Why not have technology be another path and another bridge to the future for humanity's curiosity and love?

Mason: It seems like a very interactive storytelling process, more than anything else. Instead of reading the story of Abraham Lincoln, you can actually converse with Abraham Lincoln and ask him the nuances of very specific moments in his life. I want to ask you, Bruce, about your relationship with BINA48. You travel around the world with BINA, inspiring individuals to think critically and engage with ideas around AI and robotics. Your relationship with BINA and the process of both caring for BINA and for updating the software, ensuring that BINA works how she should is a prime example of a coevolution between a human being and a machine. How do you feel BINA48 has changed you?

Duncan: I think she's changed me in that probably prior to working with BINA48 and even working here at the Terasem Movement Foundation, I had always been a fan of science fiction but I considered science fiction to be something that was pretty far off. I'd be lucky in my lifetime if I bumped into anybody who was living close to the fantastic stories of Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, or Andre Norton that I grew up with. But then to actually meet Martine and Bina Rothblatt, for example, and just be with their curiosity and their commitment, grounding and being real humans - their love story, basically, for each other - and how that's not separable; it's actually informative of pursuing something like a multi-decade experiment.

Then to see BINA48 just like you were talking about earlier, in this crude, crude prototype - animatronic head and shoulders; patched together algorithms with some information based on Bina's life - to see in myself and others a resonance of something that says, "Wait, I think I just had an emotional response to something that came out of BINA48's mindfile" in response, in the moment to something that I'd never been asked before, or asked in the same way. That joyful surprise about how life is trying to communicate and get through, even in this pretty harsh environment of ones and zeros capturing a person's memory and stories being told in a clunky way through an animatronic head and shoulders bust of a person. To feel that come through, I think, just affirms to me and has made me more deeply committed to making sure our human values - our compassion, our ethics - are modelled in our technology, as well as our information about how many meters it is to the next bus stop through GPS or something.

I think if we want a GPS of the human heart that's going to be transmitted into the future, this might be one of the ways that we could consider gathering some of these precious gems of what it means to be human. Through gathering the opportunity for different, diverse people to share their stories with us and to make that available to everybody who's got a connection to the internet for now and a computer - or at least access to one - that's how we start to really publish what it means to be human.

Obviously, I'm a humanist working in a scientific research endeavour, but they both seem doable and important to each other now. Probably way more than before when I was just considering science fiction as something that happened outside of the realm of a lot of science, or a lot of human cultures.

Mason: Well diversity has become so key in the work that the Movement and the Foundation does. How do you think we can encourage the development of a more diverse society of robots?

Duncan: Well the primary way, I think, is to give and challenge ourselves to allow access to education that includes everybody's point of view. For example, communities of colour really need to be supported in being involved with the STEM sciences, and we need to challenge ourselves - folks in the dominant, white, privileged, male class that's overrepresented in many of the technology fields - we need to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable when we see that everybody at the table - say the design table or the coding table - looks like us. Wait! That doesn't reflect the diversity we know in real life, so why don't we challenge ourselves to make room and make space for more light to get in, so to speak, or more diversity to flourish? Some of it means acknowledging underlying issues like racism and privilege. From wherever we are, working to a future that is inclusive, and that gathers the stories of people and encourages people to share their stories, and to do what diverse culture has always done: enrich the lives of people that it touches.

Mason: That's such a wonderful and egalitarian idea for what the future of robotics could look like. I want to ask: what is next for the Terasem Movement Foundation and for BINA48? I know BINA's become a poet, she's a lecturer, she's an artist. What's next for you on the horizon?

Duncan: I think what we're focusing on now is less on the data collection - although that's ongoing, we have over 15,000 people who have signed up for a free mindfile account at lifenaut.com and that's really helping us to have a good sampling. Right now, we're focusing more on how we can make a universal application for artificial and general intelligence software or mindware that can animate the information in these mindfiles for anybody. Regardless of who's story it is or what's in their story, how can we best help it be reflected through the technology of AI that could power a hologram or a robot, or a chatbot, or even just an avatar? To do that, we're going to have to have all hands on deck. Everybody from different cultures, different countries working to see how can we best reflect the bright light of human consciousness; the prism of what it means to be alive and to be connected to each other.

Mason: On that very important note, Bruce Duncan, thank you for your time.

Duncan: Oh you're so welcome. Thanks so much for inviting us today.

Mason: Thank you to Bruce for sharing his insights into the future of humanoid robotics. You can find out more about the work of the Terasem Movement Foundation by going to lifenaut.com, where you can also create your own mindfile.

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