To whom it may concern:
I am writing this in 2010. My Gmail account has almost 2 GB of data, which contain some information about me and also some information about the persons I have exchanged email with, including some personal and private information. In addition, I have plenty of information about myself scattered across the web in various services, such as LiveJournal, Last.fm, and so forth. My hard drives also contain things such as IRC and instant message logs from at least the last five years, as well as various personal files.
I am assuming that as time goes, the amount of personal information about me stored both online and offline will only continue to grow. I am also assuming that there may come some point in time where:
1) AI-based technology is available to reconstruct copies of individual people by analyzing various sources such as the ones mentioned above, with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction.
2) It is legally and technologically possible to gain access to various personal accounts (including but not limited to e-mail accounts and encrypted hard drives) in order to do this, but it may be illegal without the consent of the account owners (or their heirs).
3) Reconstructing a mind may or may not be legal without explicit permission from either the person being reconstructed or their heirs.
4) Many of the people today, including myself, may already be dead and therefore incapable of giving permission to use the data in their accounts for such a purpose.
In case of such a scenario, I hereby give permission to the relevant parties to read all the data I have stored in various places both online and offline, and use them together with other available information to reconstruct my mindfile with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction. I also explicitly give permission for the actual process of rebuilding an upload copy of me, as well as for using this data for helping reconstruct other people I have been in contact with.
These permissions are given with the caveat that my uploaded copy should only be created if it will be treated in such a way that it is reasonable to assume that the currently living me would not, when presented with a description of the situation the uploaded copy ended up in, regret having given this permission. This clause is mainly intended to exclude the possibility of e.g. sadistic torture worlds, and is worded to make reference to my and not the copy's wishes to exclude possibilities such as editing the copy to not even be aware of the possibility of things being any better.
Should any of the content in this post become irrelevant or inapplicable because of future technological developments, the spirit and not the letter of the post should be adhered to.
Signed by Jaakko 3000 on December 22, 2010, and witnessed by readers. I'm assuming my real identity will be known at the relevant time.
NOTE: The accuracy of the process outlined above increases with the number of persons who give their permission to do the same. You can give your permission in comments, your own blog or other public spaces.
