By now you know I usually reserve this particular Blog for my AI fuelled rants, and my Substack for the more philosophically sentimental stuff. But today I want to briefly touch on something that sort of lies between the two; and since I haven’t blogged here this year I figure I might as well kill both proverbial birds.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, not mine, but I’ve recently had a very unexpected one occur and it’s put me in a sort of reflective mode. i’ve been told it’s misdirecting my grief, but at this point it’s brought me to pay actual attention to a conversation that I usually gloss over.
One of my favourite quotes says “everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.” I’ve heard many stories around the longevity movement where people’s ultimate goal has transcended the extension of years to the perpetuation of existence – even if it means existence in digital form. People are actively researching and funding attempts to digitise one’s conscience in a way that they can be uploaded to the cloud and remain fully functional to be downloaded to whatever synthetic body science gives us in the future. There are already apps that I have seen which are now asking you to upload the digital footprint/DNA of a deceased person so that they can continue to have a social media presence – and tweet or whatever as if they’re still here. this in particular, I’ve always found very unsettling and that is because when bots were becoming a thing I built one. And in my rush to test it I only had it draw from five things to tweet. Life happened and I never went back to reprogramme the bot and yet it chugged on, tweeting the same five things over and over at awkward intervals for three years. When I was finally able to get back to that account I just found the whole thing eerie and shut the experiment down. This very same scenario keeps playing back in my head. I'm not sure you want your quirky relative tweeting from a limited amount of data that you hurriedly uploaded in hindsight of their passing.
Now however, let’s re-examine the first scenario. While I find it highly foolish that anybody would want to stay alive forever, and while I’m not a fan of the fact that money is being pumped into research in this area simply because people don’t want to die, I think if you look past the narcissism of becoming immortal and equating yourself with an eternal God, there’s value behind the madness. With the advances that are quickly being made by Elon et al around brain computer interfaces and the staggering number of wearables – or as I call them, readables because they’re reading everything about us now – the stage is pretty much set for there to come a time when we literally have enough data in real time to map out not just digital twins, but digital future twins. That time may already be upon us, btw.
People are currently building their professional twins and uploading to them everything they’ve ever written, et cetera, and these twins are proving to be much smarter because at one go they possess at their fingertips all the information and all the knowledge that the human counterpart has, including what he may not even remember. Dial that up a notch and we could have so much data that suddenly, it’s no longer just my body of knowledge, but also knowledge of my body, my sense of humour, my peeves, my idiosyncrasies and ideologies, my nuances and habits, even the heuristics that influence my decision making over my life time. Now, that would be something I’d like to see taken on. And somebody’s doing it right now in some lab somewhere.
I’ve never really given this a second thought – until now. And it’s not just because I have replayed so many of my Uncle’s voice notes to me, or struggled with the notion that I never get to speak with one of my closest friends again until we meet in the eternal life but, I’ll admit that’s a big part of my tunnelling down this path.
However, now, almost pressingly I think the world is heading into a state of emergency where we are drastically losing the adults in the room. I’m actually concerned for Japan and then Africa in that order. As artificial intelligence heats up, it seems to be making natural stupidity a lot more glaring and ubiquitous. Unfortunately at the same time we are losing the great minds that have shaped the world across politics, art, literature, science, music, governance, culture and everything in between. The great human thinkers of our time are quickly becoming the forgotten human thinkers of the past. I would give much, for a council of elders in every national government to be constituted by the great Legacy minds of that country, as an example. What would that look like at Corporate level? What would it look like at family level?
When you watch my kind of movies, from Mortal Kombat to Marvel, A council of ancients always seems to exist in some guise or the other. The instance that I would like to reference is from Black Panther where even after his father dies, Tchalla gets to meet him again in some sort of garden of elders – although I’m pretty certain he was just high on those mushrooms they covered him with.
But, I digress. What if you didn’t need shrooms to speak with a council of elders? what if all you needed was Starlink and a Mac mini? what kind of difference would that make in a world where we are on the verge of losing the notion and substance of wisdom?
Until next time,
Spyda.