We mentally inhabit the virtual world, but we still get born, breathe and die in the real world.
And unlike our ancestors, we create mountains of digital data where they would have created smaller mountains of print data.
We write emails. They wrote letters.
We shoot pictures. They painted or drew.
We record videos. They had memories only.
Because of this, we will face problems they didn’t have when kicking the proverbial bucket.
The value of any recorded memory lies in its context. Photos of our grandparents that didn’t mean much when they were taken are dear to us now that they’re gone. If nobody would remember them, then the same print photos would suddenly lose their personal value. They may still hold historical value, if any. And while print photos keep for at least a century in ordinary shoe boxes, digital pictures are ephemeral by nature. Their strength lies in the ease of producing copies of them, but this same strength is highly reliant on evolving technology which ain’t the case with print photos.
Apart from the necessity of keeping up with new devices of storing and using digital data as well as their proprietary formats, we store a lot of digital data created by us in someone else’s servers. Each company giving you a free ride has its own terms of service. By creating accounts on social media and email websites, you are implicitly agreeing to their terms of service. Since these companies are still new in the grand scheme of humanity, they don’t specify what will happen at the account owner’s death. And sometimes they specify that as soon as they are notified of it, the account will be closed.
And while real property is dealt with estate planning law, that is not the case with digital property. The copyright over your creations will still be yours many decades after your death, but if the only copy lies on someone else’s server and you have no other local backup, then you may never retrieve your old photos or emails. If you are young when reading these lines, you may not care. But 50 years from now on, those photos and emails and homemade videos may mean a lot to you or to your children.
Apart from creations uploaded on forums and social media websites, you may have digital banking accounts. Or you may earn money on the side by selling products and services. Leaving that in your will is a hassle that society is not yet prepared for. An excellent book on the topic is ‘Your digital afterlife’ by Evan Carroll and John Romano. I especially recommend the resources section on digital archive companies that sprung up to cater to this need our ancestors never had.
I mention the importance of preserving digital data and the access to it not because I’m gloomy by mentioning death on a blog about longevity, but because all this digital data is a huge part of who you are and by preserving it, you are taking the first step towards mind uploading.
For those not familiar with the concept, mind uploading is a technology that doesn’t exist yet in which the personality and consciousness of a human being is transferred on another substratum. Presumably, switching the hardware only and uploading the same data would cause no loss just like you don’t suffer any when you copy digital files from one device to another.
If mind uploading was possible, you would only suspend your consciousness, just like you did last night and all the other nights beforehand. Of course, it is debatable whether consciousness can really be switched like that from one substratum to another and honestly, you won’t get any precise answer until this technology will become reality. If ever.
Anca Ioviţă is the author of Eat Less Live Longer: Your Practical Guide to Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition ,The Aging Gap Between Species and What Is Your Legacy? 101Ways on Getting Started to Create and Build One available on Amazon and several other places. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to sign up to receive updates on longevity news and novel book projects!
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Nothing Found
I think that mind uploading, in a form that it is mostly talked about — via a radical biomedical procedure, done in a short time period (an example – movie transcencence) — may or may not happen. Not because it is impossible, but because the main purpose of it — overcoming aging and death — might be achieved through other means: biological research into regeneration, stem cells, new drugs and others.
Who knows which research direction will succeed first? As fantastic as it may sound, mind uploading has closer ties with, and hence can profit more from, the hugely fast progress in computer and engineering technology.
But even if we do defeat biological aging through more “conventional” means, mind uploading will still happen, but in a different form: not quick and visibly transformative, but slowly, continuously…. As people integrate more and more of computational external devices: now we don’t leave our smartphone out of our pocket even for 5 min, soon will be the smart glasses. Wearables, which now are on the outside, will go inside, to monitor our health parameters. Brain wave scanners progress in brain implants. It will be as normal as smartphones and glasses, as dental fixtures and hearing aids of today.
That’s the view of Ray Kurzweil (and not only) of a gradual evolution of our species into a new one; and there is no choice: any enhancement that confer clear and net advantage, will be adopted sooner or later, while those who don’t… will be left behind.
This is exactly why I thought in the beginning that mind uploading had more chances of being successful than solving aging. I studied engineering and medicine at the same time and the difference in regulation and speed of innovation is huge, even if machines can be just as dangerous as biological organisms. Nowadays, I think that regulations are not that strict in biotech especially in developing countries from which I expect big breakthroughs to appear. And if mind uploading would need progressive transplantation of artificial devices then I expect that to be a huge bottleneck as well as most people are reluctant to try surgery, especially if not having any emergency.
The field of biomaterial and implantable devices advances too, including those for the brain. (Last time I checked, it was a couple of years ago and they had neural probes, made of some kind of soft material) that could reside in close contact with neurons, inside the brain, for a “long” time without causing scarring or suffering corrosion).
Plus, several labs work on microrobots , swallable or injectable, for monitoring and microsurgeries. ( One of them was a steerable microrobot in a pig’s blood, steered with fMRI, if I remember correctly; other worked on “saddling” a bacterium with necessary equipment — again, from at least 1 year ago). After micro, nano will follow.
Of course, it’s rare who risks a surgery without an emergency (self-biohackers do). But if a person is in a late stage of his/her life, and if that person is really valuing life (and does not believe in an after-life) then I don’t see why an even radical surgery would be rejected.
Just like it happens with most other cures, they will first be tested on animals and terminally-ill etc