Will scientists ever discover the secret of immortality?:
- Will scientists ever discover the secret of immortality?
As
Western science still has not found the immortality gene, it is perhaps
not surprising that in Silicon Valley and on the outskirts of Moscow
the eccentric wealthy (and it always is the eccentric wealthy) are now
turning their attention – and their money – to projects that are
promising to deliver a new version of the age-old fantasy (or folly) of
everlasting life: digital immortality. And this time it may actually
work. For writer Stephen Cave, author of the new book Immortality,
digital immortality does not refer to the "legacy" we have left on our
Facebook pages. Cave's book explores the quest to live for ever and how –
he believes – it has been the driving force behind civilisations,
coming to a climax in modern science. "Digital immortality," he says,
"is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies" as a
kind of "Plan B if bioscience fails to deliver an actual biological
immortality". And of course, he adds, biological immortality would not
stop you being run over by a bus. "So your brain is scanned and your
essence uploaded into a digital form of bits and bytes, and this whole
brain emulation can be saved in a computer's memory banks ready to be
brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life,
or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that is a
replica of who we were." For Cave, though, this "is not true
immortality" as "you physically die" and this new you, "even though its
behaviour could fool your mum", is then just a copy. A copy that, he
admits, could carry on growing, marrying and even having children.
Currently, however, this is still "almost science fiction", as there are
"three big challenges" that stand between us and digital immortality –
challenges that projects such as Carbon Copies and Russia 2045 already
believe they can overcome within 40 years. "The first is that we have
to be able to read all the information that makes up who you are, and
this is likely to be achieved destructively by removing the human brain
from the body and then preserving, slicing and scanning in the data it
contains. Then there is the challenge to store an amount of information
many millions of orders of magnitude bigger than the current computer
systems. And finally we need to find a way to animate it." In the end,
Cave argues, "theoretically the problems of digital immortality seem
solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story...
Although when it does happen it is simply inevitable that the rich will
get there as they have the most power among us." Others are more
positive about the prospect of true digital immortality within a
generation. For Dr Stuart Armstrong, the rise of the idea of digital
immortality is due to the realisation that this time – perhaps – we
actually have the key to immortality in our hands. Dr Armstrong is
research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of
Oxford. "Technology is now advancing faster and faster and we
understand it a lot better because we built it ourselves. So the
problems that digital immortality is facing are merely engineering
problems – albeit complicated and difficult ones – that could be solved
within the decade if we decided to set up a scheme on the scale of the
Manhattan Project." In particular, he feels that "scanning is the
critical problem" and that if you "spent stupid amounts of cash then
within a decade many of the limitations of scanning, such as its
resolution, could be solved". If computer power continues to double
every two years, as described by "Moore's law", then in the end that
will not be an issue either. "Or it may be that at first we just have
to accept a trade-off between what we can do and not do," he suggests.
And for Armstrong this represents true immortality, since, rather
pragmatically, "if this avatar or robot is to all intents and purposes
you, then it is you." Dr Randal A. Koene, though, is determined to take
digital immortality from the pages of books like Cave's and turn it
into reality. Koene is founder of the non-profit Carbon Copies Project
in California, which is tasked with creating a networking community of
scientists to advance digital immortality – "although I prefer to talk
about substrate-independent minds, as digital immortality is too much
about how long you live, not what you can do with it". And for Koene it
is very much "you", there being a "continuity of self" in the same way
that "the person you are today is still the same person you were when
you were age five". "This isn't science fiction, either, this is closer
to science fact," he argues. Carbon Copies "is working to create a road
map to substrate independence by pulling together all the research that
is going on, identify where the gaps are and then what we need to do to
plug it. "A Manhattan Project can easily have its funding removed by
government, whereas in this network there are usually multiple projects
going on in the same area, and only one needs to succeed." Furthermore,
he feels, the tide of science is moving his way, with India expecting
to have built by 2017 a supercomputer big enough to handle the one
exaflop of memory required for one brain upload, and such institutions
as the Allen Institute for Brain Science spending $300 million to try to
crack problems he also needs to solve, such as how the brain encodes,
stores and processes information. "Ultimately we won't even be aware
that we are being scanned, uploaded and replaced," he believes. In the
end, in Stephen Cave's opinion, digital immortality may well turn out to
be a curse, as it always does in mythology. "If my child died and I
replaced her with a digital avatar to help me overcome the grieving,
would I let her grow up or even have children of her own? Would I tell
her she was a copy? I can imagine just how easy it would be to tell her
in a row." The complications have more serious and wide-ranging
implications if humans cannot resist the temptation to "tweak their
digital avatars", which may – as Stuart Armstrong argues – lead us
closer to a world of "super-upgraded copies" and "the real game changer,
multiple copies or clones". "You could copy the best five programmers
in the world a million times or the best call centre worker and these
copies would simply replace the humans, who would no longer have any
economic value," Armstrong says. "Humans would be left to die, face a
life on welfare or live under coercive regulation to control the
technology." For Koene, human societies have faced these kinds of
problems many times before. What matters more, he believes, is that
digital immortality is the next stage of human evolution as it will
"allow us as a species to have the flexibility to survive the process of
natural selection that every species has to face", whether on this
planet or another. This time it won't just be the rich who benefit,
either, as the technology will be made "open source" for everyone to
have the choice whether to be digitally immortal or not. And that would
be a curse.
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