AI Will Preserve Our Lives, our Legacies, and Our Immortality
We now have within our grasp the ability to live forever. You will be able to speak to your great-grandkids and their kids and beyond. We live on past our death now in pictures, videos and the memories of our loved ones but at best these are mere snippets of our true selves. How well does even a spouse, best friend, or even a parent know us? How well do we even know ourselves? …But alas that is a question for philosophers and poets.
With the emergence of AI over the past decade or so and now the explosion in generative AI using Large Language Models (LLMs), we now can create a virtual person. This is more than a chatbot answering questions in a style based on the samples the AI could ingest. I’m talking about a digital clone of who you were that would fool your Mother (or even a digital clone of your mother). You can chat with virtual celebrities on platforms like Twitter and these are cool novelties but we have entered a whole new level light years beyond this.
It seems like we have gone from zero to sixty in a matter of months and what is possible already is mind-blowing let alone what is surely coming soon. You can already get ChatGPT to respond in the style of a given person assuming they have a decent sampling of content within the data the model was trained on.
Here is an actual prompt and response from ChatGPT:
Answer the question: What is the meaning of life in 1 sentence in the style of:
“The meaning of life, my friend, is like a well-crafted story, where we navigate the chapters of laughter and tears, learning to appreciate the journey and finding our purpose amidst the delightful chaos.”
“The meaning of life, my dear friend, lies in embracing the simple pleasures, embracing the unknown with a courageous spirit, and discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary.”
“The meaning of life is to flow harmoniously with the Tao, embracing the natural rhythms of existence, finding serenity in simplicity, and discovering our true essence beyond the illusions of ego.”
We can now upload samples of people speaking and an AI can almost perfectly mimic the voice. The same goes for pictures and videos. This has all been happening behind the scenes for decades but now the curtain has been pulled and instead of Oz being controlled by a human it is a human being controlled by Oz.
AI can make a virtual human being that looks and sounds like the original and given enough data to sample, can even appear to think and feel like the original. It will be hard to resurrect past lives where very little data exists but today we produce volumes of data just living our lives. Just think if you feed it every picture, video, text, and post on every platform and nearly every email sent. We have more than that though we have GPS and fitness data and all the financial transactions for an AI to go through forensically. There are phone records and family trees and DNA and the list of data goes on and on.
In the not-too-distant future, there will be a standard clause in Wills that indicates whether or not we want to live past death virtually which will bring a new meaning to pulling the plug. There will be ownership rights that will be bestowed just like passing on some family jewels. Who has access and who does not? Who has admin rights and who does not? Bye forever Grandpa…click.
“AI can make a virtual human being that looks and sounds like the original and given enough data to sample, can even appear to think and feel like the original.”
If this is the future and the future is now we should start preparing now. If this is a thing we want we need to start hoarding as much data as we can and we need to create our virtual doppelgangers while we are still alive and can tweak it to fix the flaws and fill in the gaps. It may be sheer vanity, maybe an act of love to the important people in your life and possibly it is a service society. Maybe it’s just a data point for how to build a flawed human being so the future can learn to build better ones.
I don’t know if I will live to see the age when humans can be uploaded into a computer and, even assuming that is possible, if that would really be me and my consciousness, soul, essence, or whatever you want to call it. I do know that it is technically possible to upload myself now with the right know-how. I am sure this will be a service made easy for the masses to do in just a matter of time.
Families will have a virtual hall of ancestors and maybe this will spark a new quasi-religious modern version of venerating the dead. We should never post things that we may be embarrassed to have sent from the perspective of our aged selves reflecting back on while resting in a rocking chair. Now we must think about that comment reverberating out of our mouths for all our descendants, for all time.
“there will be a standard clause in Wills that indicates whether or not we want to live past death virtually which will bring a new meaning to pulling the plug.”
Supposedly Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” The point is there is a bias from the author so who do you want to write your history? I would love to edit out the worst snippets of things I did or wrote in my life but even if I curate a digital best me based on only the best things I did in life that is but a perspective of me and that could be the closest to the inner me as we all are the heroes of our own stories.
Surely there will be different versions of people drawn from the memories of others and just like there are different biographies of famous people there can be multiple versions of each digital self. Then there is the whole question of which moment or age you claim to be the representation of you. Is the immortal virtual you the version at the time of your death, when you were at the cognitive peak of your life, or when you were young and your most virile?
We are a different person at every time to every person we interact with so we are already a multiverse of selves spread across hundreds, millions, or maybe billions of people and nearly infinite moments. Maybe this only matters to those who are closest to us and even to them, the need to interact with memory will fade until one day we are not thought of at all.
That sounds harsh but isn’t that how things work now? Unless you pursue genealogy you probably don’t know the names or probably anything at all about your great, great grandparents. Unless they were part of the sliver of humanity that did something remarkable in the year 1250 it is likely most people alive in that year are forever lost.
“Families will have a virtual hall of ancestors and maybe this will spark a new quasi-religious modern version of venerating the dead.”
Going forward we will have captured enough to preserve digital selves but with many versions of billions of people aren’t we sure to be lost to most if not all of history? Our best hope of being thought of at all may be a descendant having a school assignment to interview an ancestor and choosing us. Our lives are the future equivalent of us now seeing a name on a list of people who were granted marriage certificates in 1933.
In any case, there certainly is a blossoming business opportunity to house and protect and project our collective data and representation of ourselves. Perhaps some of us in the back half of our lives should start creating digital versions of the generations that came before us now and start a cult of ancestor worship and consultation now so we can also curate our immortal selves before we die.
It’s probably all hubris as most people in the future won’t care what we did or have to say. Humanity not only moves forward we expand and the thoughts and feelings of people who are less experienced, less knowledgeable, dare I say less evolved in their thinking are hard to be taken as wisdom. The ancients created philosophy but they also kept slaves bought human sweat to relieve muscle pain and so old ideas must be born again and tested in the modern era to let them be changed to fit the times or prove their wisdom in the light of the modern day.
“I want to pretend now that an AI interpretation of myself is a digital me that lives forever.”
I’ll say it’s for my loved ones and maybe they will benefit, but inside I’ll admit it’s for me. People long to live beyond the grave and this is another way to do it. The promise of Heaven is enough for some and occupying a place in a picture album is enough for others but I want to pretend now that an AI interpretation of myself is a digital me that lives forever.
I for one would like to hedge my bets so I’m saving everything I interact with as the cost is minimal but I’ll likely skip having my head frozen as that seems like an expense wasted on the dead where saving data is cheap. That of course is just a plan B in case I don’t make it to the Singularity and my consciousness is not uploaded to the cloud. If consciousness is an illusion and we are just a collection of memories, knowledge, and connections then maybe an LLM is in fact a version of me, and uploading ourselves is our best hope of living on and something we can start to do now.
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By the Author of- Plato’s Dream: Crisis of the Employment Singularity
