Now that we have become creators of life on Earth (full-grown clones and soon - the wide consensus seems to be within the next 5 years -, AGI), what is next for us?
It seems enough people look into a mirror and don't like the person looking back at them after a while. Hiding our age has been the interest of domains like beauty & cosmetics, and more recently, plastic surgery.
But what's the point of hiding your age, if you still get old, get sick, and die? You're both old and sick? Common! It's not enough one of them?
Health extension and immortality have been a fascination for certain key people for ages. But only recently, it became important at the masses level. Maybe we don't realize it, but not longer than a century ago (before WW1), the life expectancy in civilized countries was around 45-50 years old. Now, it's around 30 years more and higher.
Extending life makes more sense if you extend health also. Why live to be 100 if the last 30 you are in constant pain or you don't remember who you are or your children?
In that sense, when extending life is combined with extending health to the same degree, I believe a moderate increase in life expectancy would be reasonable.
But some elements need to be taken into consideration:
- even prominent people involved in the business of extending life and health (Peter Diamandis, for example) have issues formulating what would have value to humans in a post-AI-taking-over-jobs world; if we can't find something valuable that brings meaning to our lives, why extend them?
- the speed of discoveries is ever-increasing as are the generational gaps; a longer active life probably won't help create a generational bridge, quite the opposite: it will likely exacerbate generational conflicts
- humans are generally social beings, and if life extension is not relatively uniform, the ones left alive long after everyone they ever cared about is gone will have issues finding reasons to stay alive; this will probably be "handled" if our lives become more virtual than real in the future.
AI-generated vampire
Regarding immortality, what can we say? Pharaohs were considered gods during their lifetimes and through their tombs they tried to carry immortality in death - and in a way they succeeded. Julius Caesar was declared god after death too.
For a good while, key people tried to achieve immortality in the flesh. If we don't believe some old Chinese legends, none succeeded. Then, there is immortality in spirit, on which many if not most religious beliefs (and some science fiction writings) are based.
The trend nowadays is to achieve immortality through technology.
If we believe there is no soul because we can't determine it scientifically, and that the mind is everything that defines us, then it is likely we will be able to achieve immortality using technology.
The way envisioned right now is to "upload" our minds to the cloud. Obviously, it wouldn't be a simple "upload", and it is questionable if the mind, once uploaded, will want to work in the environment, probably on a quantum computer.
The question is if we should even try that. But I'm sure people will.
Would you want a Donald Trump living to be 1000? How about Joe Biden? Putin? Xi Jinping?
Maybe I'm choosing the wrong characters. Some people may come with the argument they would like to be able to converse with the bright minds of the past.
Ok... I'll buy into that. What would you talk about with Socrates? About things from his age and his ideas, right? You can't really bring him up to speed.
How about Newton? Bright mathematician and physician, but really, he wouldn't understand a word of what Einstein said, three centuries later.
Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way. If we are talking about present-day people who, by accessing this technology, will become "immortal", they won't have an informational shock like people from the past.
Ok, let's explore that. People's memory is a marvel of nature. It's inaccurate, it forgets things, and it makes strange connections between unrelated events, based on triggers like a common smell. It's also long or short-term, but based on the lifespan of a human. How do you deal with this when you make a human immortal using technology? Do you rewire its memory to make it remember everything? Forgetting is also a defense mechanism for humans. If not, what is long-term and what is short-term, when you live forever?
I believe we are quite far away from "uploading" someone's mind in a "working form" to the cloud. And even further away from understanding the full implications of making someone virtually immortal (provided the technology doesn't crash and is kept in working condition).
From my current understanding of humans and technology, this is a barrier I wouldn't like to see crossed. I expressed the same feelings about AGI not long ago, and it looks closer than ever.