the singularity reloaded
Everybody knows that a catchy headline means more attention so if you claim to oh, I don’t know, to have found a way to make humans immortal by 2050, it’s a good way to turn some heads. Unfortunately, if your claim is based on the arbitrary guesses of a futurist going down the same slippery slope as Ray Kurzweil with his rather catchy but ultimately flawed singularity concept, you may want to reconsider writing that story without at least a smidgeon of additional research into those bold and ambitious predictions.
Death is kind of a bummer but through recorded history, we’ve found ways to work with it. One of the most famous empires of the ancient world earned its fame with its unique way of dealing with death. Rather than just let a body desiccate into a skeleton in a sandy grave, they created a stunning amount of mummies who were supposed to party in the netherworld and then return to their preserved bodies for rest and nourishment before going back there again. If your body and your written name were preserved, it means you still existed and you’ve become immortal in a magical and spiritual way. This is why the scientists who study Ancient Egypt always like to note that in some way, the mummies we know today did indeed achieve immortality because in dozens of countries, their names still fill history books and their bodies are still with us.
What does Ancient Egypt and its burial rites have top do with today’s predictions of storing the human brain in a computer? Everything. It’s the same approach. As long as you exist in some identifiable form, you’re immortal. Ian Pearson, the futurist in question, thinks that immortality can be best achieved by downloading a human brain to a computer because computing power is catching up to the estimated capability of the human brain. The problem with this idea had a post dedicated to it a few months ago. The short version; these calculations of how powerful a computer or electronic device is to a human brain are totally arbitrary. Our brains work on very different rules and rather than using zeroes and ones, we use neurotransmitters. And the brain comes with a very long evolutionary legacy that’s vital for shaping our behaviors and desires. If you just transfer data from the brain to a computer, that vital biological wiring won’t transfer.
I know death is rather scary and it would be great to somehow cheat it, but to claim that by the year 2050 to 2080 we’ll just download our brains to a computer is pretty much the same as an engineer telling us that traveling to the stars at warp speed will be a humdrum activity in just a few decades. Theoretically it may be possible but we really have little or no idea where to start, just utopian dreams and grand ambitions.
