Modified carbon: Can technology make us immortal?
Is it possible to preserve our consciousness after death? This question in pop culture was not asked, perhaps, only lazy. Stanislav Lem and Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Clifford Symak, William Gibson and Greg Egan wrote about digital immortality, or "brain loading,". "Ghost in the Armor", "Lawnmower", "Thirteenth Floor", "Avatar", "Excellence" - only a few of the most popular films on the topic, and only TV shows, from "Star Trek" and "Caprica" to "Black Mirror" and "Modified carbon", generally an ideal genre for thinking about the not-so-distant, looking from 2018, the future.
There are people for whom the work on the preservation of consciousness after death is a daily, everyday work, the result of which, although remote in time, is not fiction in the full sense of the word. The preservation of human consciousness after death is spelled out in the missions of companies, in the long-term plans of start-ups and almost in the official duties of employees.
One of such projects is Eterni.me, presented by Romanian startup programmer Marius Ursacs in 2014 following the results of participation in the program for talented entrepreneurs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The platform, which journalists instantly dubbed Skype with the Dead, seeks to "save your most important thoughts, stories and memories for eternity." Within a day after the presentation on Eterni.me, thousands of users registered, and the authors distributed hundreds of interviews to all possible media in the world, from Forbes to Wired. The initial idea of the company was to create - a creepy, admit - a digital avatar of a user who moved and talked on a computer screen - hence the analogy with a scyp - and suggested to save memories by recording short informative videos for Eterni.me about themselves and the world around them. It soon became clear that people are just too lazy to do something that, although it has long-term benefits, is not urgent, for example, to record videos for posterity.
Ursace has changed the concept somewhat, and now Eterni.me is focused on preserving and structuring the digital heritage of a person by the user while he is alive: emails, text messages, chat conversations, blogs. In addition to the accumulation of records created on other platforms, the project involves the creation by participants of original logs "about the most important" right on Eterni.me: about the first memories and mood right now, about children's falling in love and yesterday's dispute with the boss, about the favorite book and recently watched TV series etc.
In a sense, this idea resembles a chatbot @ Roman, created by Roman Mazurenko, the tragically deceased founder of Idle Conversation, Eugenia Kuyda: conversation and partly reminiscent of the departed Mazurenko. Opinions of Mazurenko’s friends on this issue were sharply divided, and his parents supported the project. “If there existed a machine that perfectly matched your personality, we would all talk to it. This is normal and natural,” said Yevgeny, to whom, after a story with a chatbot, they began to make requests for the creation of similar constructs. “Someone died Someone had Alzheimer, and he wanted a bot to keep a memory of himself for the children, to remain the same as he is now. And I thought that you could grow a bot as a friend - and at some point it could become your representation. " .
“Our task is to create not a clone, but a convenient interface for accessing memories,” says Ursace. “Technology and innovation have changed a lot, but this has not affected death yet.” At the moment, the startup is in the testing stage with the participation of a limited number of beta users. The remaining approximately forty thousand registrants are waiting for Eterni.me to become available for full use.
“There are many cultural differences in how we treat death, but one thing unites us all - we perceive death as a threat and avoid talking about it,” says the creator of Eterni.me about the main, in his view, ethical problem of preserving consciousness. As a result, we are not prepared for it, and when this happens, we find ourselves severely injured. Worse, this lack of preparation ultimately forces us to try to actively forget those who have just died, although we often owe them a lot. "
The entrepreneur calls one more important ethical task the present impossibility to preserve and pass on to descendants our most valuable memories, lessons, and sensations. "When someone close to him dies, what remains after them? A few photo albums, maybe some videos, a Facebook page, a personal diary ... What about the most important stories and experiences - where do they disappear?" Ursace believes that humanity does not yet have enough data to create artificial intelligence, correlated with human intelligence, but this situation will soon change.
After fifty years, the level of the system will be comparable with the human consciousness and, most likely, it will be able to continue to develop after the death of the physical “carrier”
This point of view is also shared by Canadian scientist Hussein Rahnama, a digital futurologist, the founder of Flybits, a professor at the Media Lab of the same Massachusetts Technological Department and a teacher at Ryerson University in Toronto. Rakhnama believes that humankind is accumulating the necessary data set at a very fast pace, and given that ninety percent of all data existing on Earth was created in the last two or three years and this growth continues exponentially, its optimism is understandable.
“The main obstacle [to creating an analogue to the human consciousness] now is our inability to save such a huge amount of information and the lack of capacity to process this information,” Rakhnama said in an interview. “But we are constantly growing in this regard. What is really missing is the context around the data that we already have. I understand what you tweet about, and the range of topics that interest you - but I don't know what makes you tweet? In what tone is your email written? How do you write to who you like? Or do not like? "
Rahnama says that millenials, which produce five to ten gigabytes of information daily, are the first generation that, during their lifetime, will create the amount of information needed to achieve a singularity. The most important ethical question here is: Who owns all this information - Google? Facebook? Any other corporation? Who and how can it be used after the death of a person? Now one of the main projects of Rakhnama is a technology like the blockchain, which will allow the user to store all the information created by him in different places at the same time, dividing it into parts. What will make the preservation of such information independent, and the user himself - its sole owner.
The scientist predicts that when humanity finds a way to preserve the amount of data accumulated by an individual over a lifetime, each of us will be able to leave the key to his digital inheritance to whom he wishes - digital wealth will be sorted and quite ready for posthumous use (apparently, just because projects like Eterni.me). In five to ten years, humanity will accumulate enough information to understand the missing link so far - the context of all this data, Rahnama said. And then, on the basis of all this information, we can begin to create a sensible sensing system. And in fifty years, the level of this system will be comparable with the human consciousness and, most likely, will be able to continue to develop after the death of the physical “carrier”. So the death in the usual sense will no longer be - approximately as in “Modified Carbon”.
All this, according to the scientist, is no fiction, but only a matter of time. The task, which is really interesting to him, is to recreate the sensations that arise when we interact with a certain person after his death. How to talk with your beloved deceased grandmother, in order not only to exchange information, but also to feel the care, love and calm that she emitted during her lifetime? “If we solve this problem, then we can synthesize feelings from a person in the absence of this person in the same space with us. Yes, just like in the Black Mirror, only a full-fledged, working version,” Rakhnama laughs.
There are, however, those who not only reflect on the near future or develop start-ups on the subject, but also directly work on the approach of immortality, their own and those around them, and not necessarily digital. In KrioRus cryo-storage facility in Sergiyev Posad, sixty people are in low-temperature anabiosis, as well as cats and dogs, many with owners, says Alexey Potapov, director of the company for North America.
The entrepreneur emphasizes how important it is for cryopatients to pay for the procedure and the entire storage period in advance, so that clients do not have to be thawed if their relatives change their mind or are late with a monthly fee. For cryopreservation of the whole body, Kriorus is asked for 36 thousand dollars in rubles or dollars, for preserving only the head - 15 thousand dollars, by installments. Potapov believes that successful defrosting of cryoclients in the future is impossible without achieving digital immortality both for diagnosing neurodegeneration and for assessing damage after cryopreservation, regardless of whether the patient is recovering in a biological body or in a computer simulation.
According to Potapov, death means so different things to, say, a believing old woman and a young resuscitator, that you simply cannot call her the same word. "At the moment, from a scientific point of view, the death process has about forty stages, from death agony through cardiac arrest to complete decomposition," says Potapov. "Medics, lawyers, scientists, ordinary people define death differently. The main paradox is that death is best studied by scientists, and people most often encounter it, simply statistically, are philistines. Therefore, people are accustomed to speak of death as one thing, and this is not so. "
The connection between AI and the human nervous system will become stronger, and more and more of the thinking process will occur in the "cloud"
The businessman believes that until science makes defrosting and recovery of cryopatients possible, it’s not too long to wait, only two or three decades, apparently, the company’s plans to open an official representative office of KrioRus in Europe this summer. The company has already collected more than $ 3.5 million in cryptocurrency from those who want to be frozen after death, and the offer remains open.
The main ethical problem in his field Potapov considers no less than the generally accepted attitude to death. “We live in a mortal paradigm society, where death is acceptable, where it is expected and guaranteed, and as a result, a constructive attitude towards it is impossible,” says the entrepreneur. Potapov complains about the dominance of "suicide bombings" in science, culture, society and business, which is why really huge projects, such as studying the brain for posthumous loading, do not receive the necessary funding so far: "There are several large projects in Europe, -5 billion, but no megaprojects, when the goal would be more important than the means, as it was, for example, with a space project, or with a nuclear project. " “Every day about two hundred thousand people die in the world, about half of them from causes directly related to aging. We immortalists consider this to be the main problem of humanity,” says the entrepreneur.
What remains to us, the townsfolk? Do we need to rush to structure the digital inheritance, reserve a capsule for freezing, or, conversely, continue to live as if no research in these areas exists, as if we are not generating 2.5 nonillion-bytes of new information with our own hands?
The answer, apparently, somewhere in the middle. It seems that the question of preserving one’s own consciousness after death will gradually cease to be something from the realm of fantasy and in twenty or thirty years will turn into one of the posthumous planning points - such as “donate organs to save other people” or “cremate or bury”. So, we will have the option to choose between digital immortality and the right to oblivion: not everyone believes that life ends with death, but those who adhere to just this point of view will be able to continue cyber existence - well, or someone like us to do, without regard to hormonal changes and features of the physical body.
British futurologist Ian Pearson believes that the model of a one-time “brain loading” is outdated and that, in fact, the human mind will very gradually shift more and more responsibilities to artificial intelligence, and after years of such a substitution, the brain will, in fact, not be needed: between AI and the human nervous system will become stronger and stronger, and more and more of your thinking process will occur outside the brain, in the “cloud.” One fine day, you yourself will not notice how in the “cloud” 99% of your consciousness is huddled, and when your body dies, you lose only a small part of this consciousness - everything else will be safely stored. You will buy an android body for everyday needs, go to your funeral, and then go back to the office. Death will cease be an obstacle to a career. " Pearson says that the necessary quality of communication between the brain and AI can be achieved by 2050, and this means that most people, who are now younger than thirty-five, will be able, if they wish, to experience digital immortality on themselves.
Photo: pogonici - stock.adobe.com
