Prometheus, Caprica, Facebook & Me

What happens to your Facebook profile when you die? If I’ve understood Caprica correctly, then it gets downloaded into a giant robot’s brain.

Caprica is a prequel series to Battlestar Galactica (that show with the sexy robots at war with humanity), which is supposed explain how those sexy robots came to be. In the first episode, Zoey, the daughter of the inventor of the internet, gets killed in a terrorist attack and her dad misses her so much he finds her online avatar (her conscious Facebook profile), and installs it into a giant warrior robot he’s building for the government.

Horrifying, isn’t it? The idea that the information we leave of ourselves on the internet could be rolled together like a ball of yarn to form a working consciousness, and then used to animate an abominable being like Frankenstein’s monster.

But it’s almost believable. After all, social networks make it entirely possible to keep track of friends, family, and perfect strangers down to the excruciatingly shameful and mundane daily details. FOR EXAMPLE, I’ve been made aware of all the disgustingly private details of what giving birth is like because a friend of mine just had a baby this week (SHE POSTED HOURLY UPDATES AND LEFT NOTHING OUT, SHUDDER).

Google, Amazon, and Facebook already have sophisticated algorithms to take your personal information and show you individualized advertisements. How far of a leap will it be to take that same information and create a replication of your consciousness and put it in a robot? And since the Caprica/Battlestar universe is kind of a parable for our own, this suggests that the perversion of intelligent life rooted from taking our perverted internet personalities and creating a new race out of them will kill us all.

Well, I’m sure as long as the robots are sexy no one will actually mind. Amen.

Oh, and I want their electronic paper. Like right now. Now.

(graphic by me, with images courtesy of SyFy Channel and Facebook)