Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends 247 is compiled in honor of Roland Piquepaille who musings have made an positive impact on many through his entries on SmartMobs , his Technology Trends blog and his also his contributions to ZDNet regarding Emerging Technologies.

Today’s Sunday Smart Trends explores thoughts on reaching digital immortality.

ThoughtShoppe: Digital Immortality

“The only difference is in today’s digital world, the digital identity is so intimately tied to the physical entity – much more so than people to designations, as in the past – that it is very difficult for us differentiate one from another : and the interesting part is that since this is difficult, we could leverage this difficulty, to create the illusion of immortality for the physical identity.

It is not immortality, but the illusion of immortality.

Even if I were to stop writing this blog but would get someone else to do it on my behalf, it is extremely likely that a majority of readers would not know the difference. And so in a sense, my current digital identity is, or can be, immortal.”

Gilgamesh, Search, and Immortality - John Battelle’s Searchblog

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the site instructed me, recounts mankind’s “longing stretch toward the infinite” and its “reluctant embrace of the temporal. This is the eternal lot of mankind.”

Terminally Incoherent » Blog Archive » Implications of Immortality

“[H]umans will never gain true immortality. Our species will be completely superseded by an off-shot race - the post-humans/transhumans. Can we speculate on the nature of this new species that will replace us? Sure, but we are bound to be wrong. The act of becoming or creating something that is more than human is the singularity moment. All our speculations beyond the singularity, are from definition futile.”

Amazon.com: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology: Ray Kurzweil: Books

Humankind [...] is at the threshold of an epoch (”the singularity,” a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of “GNR” (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word “unrecognizable” is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won’t look like us. Kurzweil’s argument is necessarily twofold: it’s not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with “immortality,” for which read a repeal of human limit. - Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Roland Piquepaille was a ‘”totally independent” blogger who gained the admiration of many a reader with his thoughtful analysis on emerging technologies and smart trends.  It is the intention of the SmartMobs community to honor his memory by continuing the regular postings of Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends.
Image Source: ZDNet.com