Timeline of trying to upload your mind to a computer:
- 1880s-1903, Nikolai Fedorov, founds russian cosmism and declares the scientific resurrection of all dead ancestors humanity’s “common task”
- 1930, Olaf Stapledon, imagines human brains grown into immobile machines (last and first men)
- 1931, Neil R. Jones, a human brain installed in a machine (“the jameson satellite”)
- 1955, Arthur C. Clarke, first true mind upload in fiction (the city and the stars)
- 1955, Frederik Pohl, “dorchin process” copies dead brain patterns into machines (“the tunnel under the world”)
- 1968, Roger Zelazny, mind transfer into new bodies (lord of light)
- 1988, Hans Moravec, turns upload into an engineering proposal with gradual neuron-by-neuron replacement (mind children)
- 1994, Frank Tipler, frames resurrection as physics and cosmology (the physics of immortality)
- 1990s, Timothy Leary, first public figure to digitize and post his dying self to the web and cryopreserves his brain
- 2005, Ray Kurzweil, mainstreams mind uploading and the singularity (the singularity is near)
- 2002-2010s, Martine Rothblatt, launches lifenaut and cyberev “mindfile” service plus the bina48 robot via terasem
- 2015-2017, Eugenia Kuyda, builds the roman bot from a dead friend’s texts which becomes Replika app
- 2016, James Vlahos, creates the “dadbot” to preserve his dying father
- 2020s, llm era, mass-market ai avatars