This blog post will discuss life extension by means of artificial intelligence. There are two main methods. You can 1) use data collected about you to build an avatar of yourself, or 2) use actual memories from your brain and upload them to a computer. Both of these methods are currently in the realm of science fiction, but they may be viable within our lifetime. Thus it might be worth your time to act now to increase the odds that you achieve digital immortality. Namely you could choose to preserve your data and your brain so that they are available to be uploaded to a computer when the technology matures.
I am quite confident that even if you were to die next
month, current techniques are capable of preserving your brain in enough detail
that you could be resurrected from the data in the future. Just paying to have
your brain preserved though, does not ensure that it will be uploaded. However,
it is quite possible that merely preserving it will increase the odds that it
will be uploaded by altruistic scientists in the future. As we will discuss, it
is not clear if this upload will be a vessel for your current, sentient
consciousness or just an uncanny replica of your memories and personality. Because
brain preservation is an opportunity that is just now becoming available to
humanity I think we should all look into it, and consider it. However, because
the outcome is uncertain we should also make an effort to make peace with the
fact that we may be mortal and will never have our mind uploaded.
Creating an Avatar
from Data
You certainly don’t need a physical brain to construct a
decent simulation of a human being. Instead you could take data from a person,
living or dead, and attempt to reconstruct their personality and likeness. You
could do this for a person like Aristotle (385-323 BC) by programming it to
reflect his writings, and everything we know about him. But a much more precise
simulation could be made of someone like Bertrand Russel (1872-1970) who we
have actual photographs and video of. Even using today’s technology specialists
could take recorded conversations, photographs, and video footage of a person
and combine it with a generic chatbot to create a convincing digital simulation
of someone. Just a minute of video footage of someone talking can be fed into
an artificial neural network to create a highly realistic “deep fake” of both
their voice and their appearance. So if you want to have a chance at recreating
a parent or grandparent (or yourself) you ought to start collecting data on
them now. There are many kinds of easy-to-procure data that could help to
create a digital recreation of someone in the absence of a brain specimen.
A default AI capable of holding a conversation and reasoning
effectively could form a starting point. It would amount to a generic
reproduction of the brain’s algorithms and data structures. Then it could be
updated with a specific individual’s characteristics, and eccentricities. The
more data you have on that person the more realistic the simulation. Here is a
list that I brainstormed of sources of data that could help to describe someone
as an individual and thus could be used to help fashion their digital identity:
photos,
home videos,
emails,
letters,
art,
creative work,
diary,
voice memos,
SMS texts,
phone call log,
search engine history,
internet browsing history,
books read (Kindle, Goodreads),
their videogame records (trophies, scores),
music playlists,
movies and television
(Netflix viewing history),
youtube history,
recorded phone calls,
social network,
social media posts and likes,
map and GPS history,
travel history,
vitals & body measurements,
medical records,
structural brain scans (MRI),
functional brain scans (fMRI),
psychological evaluations,
personality tests,
psychometric tests,
school records,
standardized testing,
yearbooks,
surveillance records,
legal and medical history,
wardrobe,
childhood toys,
belongings and property,
online purchase history,
genome sequence,
epigenome sequence,
videos of their gait,
habits, mannerisms, posture,
terms, phrases and colloquialisms,
a list of their values,
a description of their morals,
ethical stances,
spiritual convictions,
recounting of fondest memories,
pictures of their homes,
historical setting,
You could certainly start gathering, saving, and
safeguarding this kind of data for yourself today. I am sure that in the near
future there will be businesses that help people to curate their data. Such a
business might also help to create a structured self-report questionnaire that
asks people questions about their likes and dislikes, and interrogates them
about what makes them unique, interesting, and sets them apart from others.
Such a questionnaire should ask about things that would not be obvious from the
person’s data. You could fill out the questionnaire about yourself, or about
your loved one. Some of this data might equate to a binary setting (e.g. I like
loud people or I don’t), but some of it could be used to train artificial
neural networks to create a convincing simulacrum of the person in question.
You could also collect data using detailed 3D photographic
scans and motion capture video in a performance capture environment. This could
help the system to accurately recreate the person’s lip movements, facial
expressions, microexpressions, eye movements, pupil dilation, sweating, intonation,
speech patterns, voice stress, and much more. Clearly this method could create
a convincing copy or mimic, but without a brain specimen it certainly wouldn’t
qualify as a form of life extension.
Creating a Digital
Reconstruction Based on Brain Data
Life extension through brain preservation began in earnest
with the freezing of bodies. Cryonics is the low temperature freezing of a
human corpse or severed head with the hope that resurrection will be possible
in the future. Robert Ettinger first discussed it when he published “The
Prospect of Immortality” in 1962. Since then there have been many companies
that offer the service of keeping corpses in vats of liquid nitrogen. Cryonics
is often characterized as pseudoscience, and those that practice it have been
called quacks, but as the relevant technologies develop this will change.
There are currently three such cryopreservation companies in
the U.S. and one in Russia. As of 2014 about 250 corpses had been cryogenically
preserved, and around 1,500 living people had signed up for preservation. When
a customer opts to just have their brain and not their body preserved it is
called “neuropreservation.” Of course, this is cheaper. Depending on the
company and the method, cryopreservation can set you back anywhere from $28,000
to $200,000. There are a number of costs: medical personnel have to be on call
for death, the body must be transported quickly to the facility, the
preservation process has to be performed by medical experts, and the body must
be stored indefinitely. In many cases individuals set up a trust fund to cover
storage and revival costs. The cost of cooling and storage have already shown
to be substantial. Many cryonics corporations have gone into bankruptcy. In
fact, as of 2018, all but one of those that came before 1973 had gone out of
business and were forced to thaw and dispose of the corpses that they stored.
Consider the fact that most businesses have a one in one thousand chance of
surviving even one hundred years and you get an idea for how tenuous this is in
its current form.
Initially the idea was to freeze a body until medical
science advances to a point where it can be reanimated and treated medically.
However, freezing temperatures cause damage to tissues and cause individual
cells to break, destroying the information stored in the connections between
them. Certain chemicals called “cryoprotectants” can prevent ice formation
during cryptopreservation but they also cause damage making it so that the
corpse cannot be reanimated. These limitations of cryonics have led to other
options.
A company called Nectome uses a chemical called
glutaraldehyde to perform a “100% fatal brain preservation” procedure. It is
fatal because the procedure creates chemical crosslinks between protein
molecules that eliminate biological viability. So unlike with freezing, the brain
can never be resuscitated… but it can still be mapped. It must be doused in the
glutaraldehyde quickly after death though. The brain’s cells start to break
apart and die (the cell membranes rupture) soon after death due to lack of
oxygen. This is why this procedure must be performed either immediately after
death or on a live person under general anesthesia. In the second case it is a
form of assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia. Why would someone want to
undergo this procedure? So that their brain could be mapped, transcribed into
digital data, and reconstituted within a machine.
The molecular details of a brain would probably not be
needed to create a high fidelity map, but the cellular details would be
essential. All of the person’s neural connections (their connectome) including
cell type and location, information about the cell membrane and intracellular
structure, as well as the positions of hundreds of millions of axons and
trillions of synapses would have to be scanned by a computer. There are around
100 billion neurons in the human brain. Given that each of these can have up to
1,000 connections to other neurons each, that gives us 100 trillion neural
connections to hold in computer memory and model. A brain map or connectivity
database of the anatomic connections of a human brain has been estimated to
occupy less than 20,000 terabytes. Today this would cost over $300,000, but in
a few decades this price will drop significantly.
To upload the connections the brain must be cut into
extremely fine slices and scanned with an electron microscope. This is done
today, but currently it is done very slowly, and no human brain has ever been
mapped in its entirety. If the procedure could be fully automated like gene
sequencing has been automated in the last two decades it could become quick and
cheap. It is pretty easy to envision a distant future where there are automated
factories that takes preserved brains from the past and reanimate them
digitally. It may sound absurd, but this could be our salvation: a fountain of
youth, a portal to immortal godhood, and a source for eternal life.
This process of scanning a brain and copying or transferring
it to a computer is called whole brain emulation or mind uploading. The neurons
could be simulated by hardware and the software they run would come from the
mapped brain. If this was attempted today it would have to run on silicon
microchips, but by the time this becomes viable other forms of hardware may be
available such as optical, neuromorphic, or quantum computing.
You wouldn’t want to be among the first to be resurrected
because the tech will exhibit exponential improvement and the early methods
will be less effective, and more destructive to brain tissue. So you would want
to stipulate in your will, trust, or contract that you would like to wait until
the technology fully matures. This may be hundreds or even thousands of years
after it becomes technically feasible.
Most leading experts today believe that advancements in AI,
computer science, and brain mapping will come together to result in artificial
consciousness. An uploaded mind with artificial consciousness could inhabit a
robot situated in the real world, or could be situated in virtual reality or cyberspace.
Transhumanists and futurists see mind uploading as the most viable form of life
extension technology. There are definite benefits in leaving our organic
components behind. If we were made of metal, fiberglass, and silicon we could
better withstand accidents, damage, the vacuum of space, and the passage of
time. Mind uploading could even help humanity survive a catastrophe on Earth if
it were to become inhospitable to biological life.
To help you recreate a person it might also help to mine
your, or another person’s, memories of them. For example, if your brain had
been uploaded you could use your memories of your grandparent to help recreate
them, or to help train the system that is attempting to emulate them. If a
pet’s brain could be restructured digitally it could be mined for a very high
level of detail about someone’s movements and emotional reactions. The digital
memories of whole families could be used to reconstitute each other with even
higher fidelity. One could also collect information about (or mine the brains
of) teachers, classmates, childhood friends, roomates, coworkers, etc., and use
these to refine and reconcile a model of someone.
Once you are dead, you won’t be in any hurry to be brought
back to life. You will be unconscious until you are resurrected so it will feel
as if no time passed at all, even if it took one thousand years to resurrect
you. If the procedure is done properly the new version of you should remember
his/her last day like it was yesterday. However, you may not be able to recall
the last few hours before your death because the chemical and electrical
changes responsible for short-term memory would not have had the time they
needed to be changed (consolidated) into physical changes responsible for
long-term memory. These traces are very subtle and are likely to be very
difficult to ascertain and record.
Would It Really Be
You?
Would minds that have been uploaded retain a sense of
historical identity with their past self or would it be like being replaced by
a twin or doppelganger? If performed exactingly the mind upload technique would
probably result in a person that even our friends and family could not tell
apart from us. This new person themselves might even be convinced that they are
us, but that doesn’t mean that we are them. The important question would be:
“Would we feel like our sense of consciousness and personal continuity
continued to live on in this system? Would we experience identity perseverance
through time after having our mind uploaded from our body? Or would we be
effectively dead?” Personally I don’t think any kind of technology developed in
the next hundred years would allow us to feel like we have woken up within a
machine. But thousands of years from now, that may be a possibility.
Take the teleporter from Star Trek for instance. When
Captain Kirk steps into the machine his cells and molecules are read by it and
the data it collects is used to create a perfect copy of him in some other
location. As this is taking place his original body is destroyed, but the new
copy has all of his knowledge and memories, and even perfect recollection of
the thoughts he was having before he entered the machine. But let’s be honest,
the original Captain Kirk was killed. If his body had not been destroyed in the
process, there would be two of him, but neither would feel like they were two
people. In fact, it would be possible to convince the original Kirk that the
teleportation hadn’t worked and he would have no way of knowing that he had an
exact double on another planet. He would feel no psychic connection with it.
Some scientists have speculated there are two ways to
overcome this problem: 1) you could slowly turn off a person’s brain as you
slowly turn on its digital recreation as if you were pouring the contents of
one container into another, and 2) you could gradually replace neurons with
their electronic equivalents one by one until the entire brain had been
replaced. I don’t think the first solution solves the problem. I think the
second one might if done properly, but is too messy and complicated to be
feasible in the next several hundred years. The second technique is analogous
to the thought experiment of “the ship of Theseus.” Theseus gradually replaced
the parts of his ship until the whole ship had been updated, but the question
considered by philosophers is: “Is it still fundamentally the same ship?” It is
important to point out that both of these methods requires a living person and
could not be performed with a “neuropreserved” brain. Can there be continuity
between two selves separated by death?
The feeling that you are the same person that you were 5 or
even 50 years ago, involves an illusion. You are not that same person today.
Your interests, memories, and values have changed substantially. Keep in mind
that every year 98% of all of the atoms in the body are replaced. In fact, when
you wake up in the morning you are not the same person you were when you went
to bed. Billions of connections throughout your brain were altered while you
slept. We even lose continuity every time we take a mind altering substance.
Accidental drowning, near death experiences, coma, anesthesia, hard drugs like
psychedelics, and the passage of time all cause the erosion of neurological
continuity and personal identity. What would it mean for you to die, and then
have a version of you be resurrected 10 or 100 years later? Would that be
similar to the case of Star Trek teleportation? Or would it be a just another
example of imperfect continuity that we already accept and take for granted?
Ok, here is a simple hypothetical. Imagine being teleported
to a base on the moon. If your previous body was destroyed your personal
conscious awareness would be annihilated with it despite the fact that your
duplicate will behave as if it was you. But now imagine that rather than being
transported to the moon, you are merely transported three feet to the right.
Same outcome right? Ok, imagine that you are transported one nanometer (a
billionth of a meter) to the right. What if your duplicate was compiled in the
exact space that you take up now, perhaps using the same atoms and molecules?
It would feel like it was you, but would you feel like you were it? This
hypothetical scenario tells me that there is something illusory about the
persistence of personal identity through time. You are not the same person who
started reading this paragraph, or even this sentence. You might as well have
been duplicated multiple times.
Not only has your brain changed physically and chemically
every morning when you wake up, but countless physical vibrations and
electromagnetic rays have passed through it. Because the Earth revolves around
the sun, and the solar system revolves around the Milky Way your brain is now
in a vastly distant location than it was when you went to sleep last night.
During your eight hours of sleep trillions of tiny microscopic changes have
taken place in your brain due to metabolism, homeostasis, learning, and
entropy. Because of these constant changes, continuity in your personhood is
broken down on submillisecond time scales even when you are awake, so it’s not
clear how important it is that your uploaded AI brain feels 100% continuity of
consciousness with your previous biological self. What is really important is
to preserve as much of the identity, values, creativity, intelligence, and
humanity as possible.
The Costs and
Benefits to Humanity
To some people mind uploading sounds creepy and unnecessary,
but even these people must admit that it accomplishes the goal of preserving
interesting and important data as well as preserving the diversity of our
species and of intelligent life on Earth. Each person has their own perspective,
insights, and intuitions. Is it wise to just let these decompose with the rest
of the body? Historians go to great lengths to preserve books, cultures,
languages, movies, and even videogames. Our societies preserve mummies in
museums and academics try to make all possible inferences about historical
figures and events from prehistory through antiquity, and on through to the
present age. Why wouldn’t we want to preserve brains and minds?
Because uploaded minds could be run within a simulation
there would be few costs. If it costs pennies, creates no waste, and does not
contribute to pollution or overpopulation, wouldn’t it be preferable to have a
digital version of your grandparents? Why not? In the future, if these uploads
didn’t require a lot of energy or take up a lot of space, I can see
corporations or even the government getting involved and making sure that
corporations in the business of brain preservation that fail do not trash their
corpses because of the value of the information that they contain. If two heads
are better than one, doesn’t that mean that we want as many heads as possible?
Why not have a communal system of digital intelligences? In comic books and
science fiction it is already a staple. For instance Marvel comics alone has
the Xandar World Mind, The Kree Supreme Intelligence, the Phalanx hive mind,
and the Eternal’s Unimind.
If the costs to running uploaded brains are inconsequential
then there will not be many barriers. In the distant future the computer memory
and processing resources needed to run the equivalent of a human brain will be
very small. Your brain uses about the same amount of electricity as a 60 watt
lightbulb and this could be reduced dramatically by technology. Moore’s law and
Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns suggest that this could happen in just a
few hundred years. If you could run millions of lives in their own chosen
simulated realities on something like a phone, wouldn’t you? Of course it would
have to be overseen by some kind of ethical governing body because there are
ways it could go wrong.
There are certainly some risks and downsides. Your brain
could be destroyed accidentally (or on purpose) before you are brought back.
This is a problem because, as of today there is no way to back it up. Even more
disturbingly, your brain could be stolen and placed inside of a nightmare
simulation. It would be possible for a malicious person to upload you to a
computer, enhance your senses and intelligence one millionfold and then subject
you to the worst torture imaginable for the rest of eternity. You would be
totally disembodied, with no way to reach out to your own hardware, so you
could not commit suicide, and there would be nothing you could do to escape.
This is a serious concern, especially given that this could happen to people,
or even to copies of people, and the device involved could be hidden so that
any kind of law enforcement that exists at the time would have trouble finding
it.
Acclaimed futurologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil believes
that he will live long enough to be digitized before he dies. He is currently
72, but he points out that technology and medicine are advancing exponentially
and thus should be able to keep him alive long enough to see the next major
advancement. He uses the analogy of a bridge to another bridge to describe how
future medicine will be able to keep extending lifespan until brain emulation
technology finally matures.
Let’s assume that brain emulation technology will be
feasible by the year 2100. For someone who is 70 today to reach this time the
medicine of the future will have to be able to extend their lifespan to 150.
Experts in gerontology estimate that almost everyone would develop Alzheimer’s
if they lived to be 130. However, even
if you died with profound Alzheimer’s and severe memory loss, the data could
still be mined, and your synthetic brain could be free of Alzheimer’s and have
full recall. Much of Alzheimer’s disease is an issue of data access due to
reduced brain metabolism. In most cases it is not necessarily an issue of
complete loss of memory traces (although cell death and brain shrinkage are
issues). Thus much of the mental aging or cognitive morbidity you suffered in
old age could be reversed, because increasing the energy output of an
artificial brain would be as easy as turning a knob.
Upgrading Your Own
Hardware
I would want to live forever, even if it meant that I had to
remain in virtual reality within a computer. This is partly because very soon,
virtually reality will be much more interesting and stimulating that actual
reality. Just look at the progress in videogames and computers in the last 40
years. Think about the jump from Pong to a game like Red Dead Redemption 2. We
have gone from simple sprite graphics to vast, photorealistic, polygonal worlds.
Virtual reality will become insanely immersive within our lifetime and its
quality will continue to increase exponentially. But the digital environment
won’t be the only thing that shows exponential progress. Your mind and
consciousness will too.
Today our brains are stuck at a fixed energetic capacity
because our hunting and gathering ancestors could only find so much food in a
day. Our neurological blueprint is encumbered by the metabolic constraints of
our past. Not so for machines. You could easily turn up the juice on an AI. You
could increase the processing power and speed easily. You could add as many
neurons and synapses as you want. This would expand the level of consciousness.
Working memory, and intelligence, could be expanded millions
of times. There would be many ways to do this but one of the most interesting
ways would be to manipulate something called “sustained firing.” The ability of
neurons in the brain’s association areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, to
engage in sustained firing allows them to maintain whatever information they
encode for as long as they keep firing. This firing can last up to a minute at
a time and allows us to keep specific representations active for sustained
periods. If we didn’t have this ability we could not have a train of thought
and thus. Sustained firing in humans lasts for longer than any other animal,
but if it was made even longer then we would be less forgetful, near-sighted,
and impulsive, and far more intelligent. Merely, increasing the duration of
sustained firing in an AI could vastly expand its awareness and mental
capabilities.
Using techniques like these to amplify the working memory of
a digitally reanimated brain would result in interesting abilities. A digital
brain that could coactivate many more parameters and specifications (memory
fragments) would perform searches for associations with much more specificity.
This could result in the ability to completely recall events that a biological
brain could not. This could allow you to recover distant memories that you have
long since forgotten. In fact, you might be capable of remembering virtually
any semantic knowledge that you had acquired before (such as facts about the
world), and also a great deal of episodic memory (such as minute details about
every birthday you ever had).
If the hardware and software is consistently upgraded your
intelligence and knowledge will grow geometrically. Constant tweaks, additions,
and improvements to our artificial minds would cause us to rapidly gain
computational power in the same way that computers did in the last 70 years.
Thus as we aged we would consistently get smarter. Each day you would think
faster and more comprehensively. But even more excitingly, this computational
power would enhance our very sentience. We could become incomprehensibly
intelligent and commune with other superintelligent beings in fantastic ways.
Imagine a hyperintelligent future version of yourself that was able to engage
in a form of profound post verbal communication with hundreds of other entities
simultaneously.
Imagine learning new fields of science, mathematics, and
engineering in seconds and having the mental wherewithal to put them to use
creating not only new theories, but practical uses as well. You will be free to
learn about, explore, and contribute to whatever endeavors, or lines of
progress you wish. You will also be able to watch all of the fantastic social,
scientific, and technological advancements and breakthroughs being made by
others. Imagine living in the year 30,000 and having encyclopedic knowledge of
everything that has happened and everything that has been discovered. The
neural circuits associated with physical and emotional pain could be cut out,
and those associated with pleasure, excitement, and love could be amplified. Imagine
living in a cyberspace afterlife paradise with trillions of times more
cognitive resources than you have now. I want that.
It is pretty clear that missing out on brain uploading may be
like missing out on heaven. It has the potential to provide everyone alive
today with eternal bliss, replete with endless knowledge, superintelligence,
limitless growth, incomprehensible beauty, and unlimited connection. So you
might want to start looking into curating your data, and preserving your brain.
As we have discussed though, for people alive this century the desire for a
postmortem existence could all be in vain, and for that reason we should also
come to peace with the idea that we may not be immortal. Also we should not let
the specter of digital immortality in any way diminish the value of a good and
worthwhile life, or our sense of peace with the natural way of things.
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