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Progress toward Cyberimmortality
collect a great deal of data rigorously about a person’s skills,
beliefs, behaviors, preferences, and emotional reactions.
My own research has focused on recording people’s atti-
tudes and preferences, building on decades of past work
in such fields as sociology and political science that have
become progressively computerized. [5–7] Attitudes are not
merely personal but social, and my methodology begins with
the ambient culture surrounding with the individual. [8]
In May 1997, I launched a website called The Question Factory
to create questionnaire items by posting open-ended surveys
that asked respondents to write their views on various general
topics. [9;10] For example, after pretesting on The Question
Factory an open-ended question about what will happen over
the coming century, I was able to place it in Survey2000, a
massive web-based questionnaire sponsored by the National
Geographic Society. About 20,000 people responded. From
the several megabytes of predictions, I was able to edit 2,000
statements about the future that became fixed-choice ques-
tionnaire items, expressing the full range of views found in
our culture. The respondent is supposed to say how likely it is
that each idea will come true, and how good it would be if it
did, so the resultant number of questions was actually 2 times
2,000 or 4,000. [11;12]
Other work with The Question Factory led to a total of 20,000
statements or 40,000 items. One set of 2,000 were stimuli that
might elicit one of 20 different emotions in people: Anger,
Boredom, Desire, Disgust, Excitement, Fear, Frustration,
Gratitude, Hate, Indifference, Joy, Love, Lust, Pain, Pleasure,
Pride, Sadness, Satisfaction, Shame, and Surprise. I then
wrote a program for a pocket computer that would make it
easy and convenient for a person to respond to a few items
wherever they happened to be during the day. Each stimulus
was rated in terms of how much it might produce each of the
20 emotions in a person, and in terms of three semantic dif-