Do you (really) want to live forever?
In 2009, before I defended my PhD thesis in front of a jury specialized in cancer biology, we published a few articles on longevity meditated by autophagy (preventing cellular -and whole organism- aging by triggering cellular self-eating). We claimed that autophagy has a broad positive impact on organismal aging.
Almost a decade later -and for many more years to come- , many researchers and philosophers are still trying to figure out the way to address single wish of billions of human beings: Living longer -or even- living forever. Can we live longer? As we’re a species programmed to be constantly dissatisfied, how long is good enough? Well then, can we live forever? If yes, then the question that we should also ask is would we accept to be immortal? Under which circumstances?
Dr Ian Pearson, a futurist at Futurizon, claims people born after 1970 should be able to live forever with the help of genetic engineering & artificial intelligence. He thinks that by the year 2050, humans could outlive the constraints of the physical body.
How can genetic engineering help with human longevity/immortality? (quick answer : Rejuvenation technology)
Human longevity is a complex phenotype with modest heritability. The identification of the involved genes and variants still remains a challenge. A new large-scale international study identified 25 genetic markers now known to be associated with exceptional longevity, that could one day be targeted to help prolong human life. Genes involved in senescence, the “frozen” state that cells enter into after being damaged, play an important role. Genes related to inflammation and auto-immunity are also prominent. The results confirm that many genetic variants combine to influence human lifespan: no single gene variant has been found to be responsible.
Human Longevity, Inc. scientists have published a significant breakthrough in the journal Nature Genetics indicating the role of the non-coding genome — which accounts for 98% of the overall whole genome — that could be essential for survival and health, exposing new frontiers for genomic exploration.
Telomeres are protective caps on the end of chromosomes that confer genomic stability. In 2015, a Danish study concluded that telomere length robustly predicts longevity, even after factoring out the effect of age, smoking, exercise, blood cholesterol, BMI, and alcohol consumption.
Biomedical gerontologists such as Aubrey de Grey argue that growing old is a disease that we can circumvent by having our cells replaced or repaired at regular intervals. You may not want to live forever when you are 95 years old, full of chronic diseases and terribly deteriorated quality of life, but if you make your body (and mind) feel like 20–30, you may want to do that. We may extend life by using biotechnologies and medicine to keep renewing the body, and rejuvenating it which could be done in several ways such as genetic re-engineering, prevention (or reversion) the ageing of cells, or replacement of vital body organs with new parts using the 3D organ printing technology.
This deep makeover would ‘turn back the clock’ on your body, leaving you physiologically younger than your actual age. But this still leaves you vulnerable to nasty diseases and fatal accidents! How can we ensure that our “self” is preserved, when our bodies are no longer renewable and rejuvenable? The answer may lie in exponential technologies, such as AI.
How can Artificial Intelligence help with human longevity/immortality? (quick answer: Mind uploading)
According to techno-futurists, exponential technologies — AI in particular- will radically transform humanity via two revolutions:
- The singularity is the point in time when all the advances in technology, particularly in AI, will lead to machines that are smarter than human beings. Ray Kurzweil predicts that the dawn of super-intelligent machines will happen by 2047, and the process towards this singularity has already begun and we can use this technology to expand who we are.
- Virtual immortality: Experts claim that long time before we get to fix our bodies and rejuvenate it when necessary, we’ll be able to link our minds to the machine world in which your brain is digitally scanned and copied onto a computer. We’d effectively be living in the cloud, and our mental selves would live on beyond the demise of our fleshy, physical bodies.
Whenever your “organic hardware” is hit by a disease or an accident, it wouldn’t matter because your mind will exist in the cloud like a software & can be uploaded to a brand new hardware. Ian Pearson asked another relevant question: if our minds are online, do we even need robot bodies? We could all just live in a computer simulation quite happily. You could spend most of your time online in the virtual world, of course anywhere in the world on any computer. You could link your mind to millions of other minds, and have unlimited intelligence, and be in multiple places at once.”
Ethics of immortality
Predictions on the timelines and costs are very similar to what we observe in all exponential technologies. We’ll probably have to wait until around 2045–2050 before we’ll be able to create these strong brain-to-machine links, but the cost will be very high initially and then the price will gradually come down. We can be pretty certain that rejuvenation and mind uploading would widen the gap between the rich and poor, and would eventually force us to make decisive calls about resource use, whether to limit the rate of growth of the population, and so forth.
Despite the discussions on “When is this revolution going to happen?” we also need to challenge the philosophical foundation of the claims. Unfolding the definitions and complete understanding of consciousness and mind are going to determine the feasibility of the AI singularity. Can mind be decoded on silicon chips with the support of neuroscience only? Will our consciousness in the cloud be able to “experience the world around us” as the way we perceive it using our good-old fleshy and organic hardware? What makes us human in the first place? What makes us conscious and sentient beings? And what will become of our “humanity” in the era of AI singularity? Can a computer be even conscious in the sense we philosophically attempt to explain??
According to Berkeley philosopher John Searle, computer programs can never have a mind or be conscious in the human sense, even if they give rise to equivalent behaviors and interactions with the external world. Searle cautions that the one mistake we must avoid is supposing that if you simulate it, you duplicate it. David Chalmers think there is a possibility that your upload would appear functionally identical to your old self without having any conscious experience of the world. You’d be more of a zombie than a person, let alone you. However, Daniel Dennett, have argued that this would not be a problem. Since you are reducible to the processes and content of your brain, a functionally identical copy of it — no matter the substrate on which it runs — could not possibly yield anything other than you.
Several hundred people have already chosen to be ‘cryopreserved’ in preference to simply dying, as they wait for science to catch up and give them a second shot at life. Just last week, biotech startup Nectome, backed by MIT, piqued widespread interest when it publicly revealed its goal to “back up” people’s brains in an attempt to one day revive consciousness. But then, funnily enough, it was discovered that the mind-uploading service is 100% fatal with an approach similar to physician-assisted suicide!!! Obviously, trouble in dystopian paradise emerged swiftly: MIT cut ties with the startup, which now claims it won’t be uploading brains any time soon. In a statement, the MIT Lab declared that, “Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.”
ASK YOURSELF: DO I REALLY WANT TO BE IMMORTAL AND “EXIST” ON A SILICON CHIP?
Can we predict what the actual upload would feel like to the mind being transferred? What if ending your biological existence will cause a complete block of any form of communication to outsiders or inability to switch yourself off? What if your uploaded mind is copied simultaneously and you don’t even know who is the original? Will you survive in any meaningful sense if you were copied several times over? Are you going to be fine with millions of versions of your mind existing in the cloud doing their own thing? What if your mind is hacked to become a fanatic digital terrorist? What if your “software” is attacked by viruses beyond the possibility of any repair? Will “you” still think you are you? In all these cases, your immortality would amount to more of a curse than a blessing. Death might not be so bad after all, but unfortunately it might no longer be an option.
Immortality is a quality attributed to Greek Gods, but their immortality gives them all kinds of personal issues such as boredom, difficulty in giving meaning to their immortality, impossibility of living a life repeating itself eternally (remember Groundhog Day). Now, however, immortality has gone secular and investors are attracted by the idea of being the only patent holder of the technology of human longevity/immortality. Clearly, the prospect of living forever has always been and will always be one of the main quest of our lives.
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This article is created by Ezgi Tasdemir. All the views, analysis, and perspectives are fully independent and belong to the author only.
