Sideloading in a nutshell

What is sideloading?

Sideload is an experimental computer technology that seeks to reconstruct a person's personality as accurately as possible. Not to be confused with the mind upload proposal, which is a hypothetical technology that would read an entire brain and translate information about the brain's physical structure and processes into a computer program that would run indefinitely.

Why sideload and not mind upload?

While the mind upload community has made no progress in this regard and stagnated in unproductive philosophical discussions, a different approach was proposed in the sideload community.

They proceeded to think scientifically about how to program a computer with the personality of a specific subject by collecting and studying all the data produced during a person's lifetime.

How does sideload work?

The approach is simple: we start by collecting all the information about a person. Ideally, the person concerned should be in the daily habit of keeping a detailed record of their life until the end of their life. There are two ways: voluntary and automatic.

The voluntary way would be to keep a detailed electronic diary where one writes down one's day-to-day life in detail, experiences, thoughts, opinions, likes, dislikes, dreams, fantasies, daydreams, photographs, videos, sound recordings, psychological tests, genetic analyses and records of medical tests.

The automatic way is to use a series of programs on the computing devices we use to record all our internet activity: websites, applications of all kinds and their historical records, GPS data, fingerprint, climate, location, time, smart bracelets, food records, sports training records, emails, all the digital documents we read or our notes when taking lecture notes and when studying.

All that information is then stored on your devices and, when you get home, they are synchronized to store all the information on a single computer. That computer, in turn, should be scheduled for regular incremental backup to the cloud and to an external hard drive connected to the home intranet.

The main thing is to install the programs that you feel fulfil these tasks and a folder structure with a certain order to maintain control. However, if you are not computer-literate, you can ask a computer friend to help you organize the whole structure in a proper and easy-to-maintain way. It is recommended to continue with such a structure all your life.

You can add an extra step to make sure that your information is not lost: burn everything on high-capacity archive-grade optical discs with a century of secured storage and inside a security case designed for that purpose.

How is sideloading processed?

Machine learning algorithms are used to generate neural models that store this information in a related way as if they were memories and with the aim of replicating a person's behavior similarly. Currently, they are at the stage of replicating the person's speech and knowledge, a limited animation of their face and a digital copy of their voice. All three parts are already being done separately and together by several companies. We want to be able to run them on average-powered computers to democratize their use.

And the ultimate goal?

Because the power of computers and the Internet in general is always growing, the ideal goal would be to be able to simulate an individual down to the cellular level in real time accurately but with minimum computational cost.