In 2016, Chan Ji-sen’s younger daughter, Nayeon, passed away from a blood-related illness. However, in February, the mother was reunited with her daughter in virtual reality. Experts created a digital version of her child using motion capture technology for a documentary film. Wearing a VR headset and tactile gloves, Jang could walk, talk, and play with this digital version of her daughter. It’s understandable why a desperate mother would want this, but in reality, it’s a bit eerie. Is this our future? Will our descendants want to interact with us in this way? We won’t care, or will we? Let’s explore this further.
Can Immortality Exist?
Once, immortality was the stuff of science fiction, something people didn’t even think about—they had more immediate concerns. Now, we live in a relatively peaceful world where we can contemplate such things. More people are now interested in immortality—whether it’s the physical immortality of the body and mind or just creating a living memorial, such as an AI version of a person or a chatbot with their habits. The question is, should we do this? And if so, what should it look like?
It all started with cryonics when people began to think they could freeze their bodies and then thaw them in 300 years to see what the world would be like. The question of who they would interact with and what they would do as a “relic” in such a fast-changing world didn’t seem to matter. The idea alone was thrilling. Though to this day, no one knows how to revive those who have been frozen.
Research like the study published in the journal PLOS ONE adds fuel to the fire. It suggested that chemical or electrical probes could be applied to the human brain to get it working again, at least to some degree. It’s important to distinguish between two goals of achieving immortality. In one case, a person wants to be immortal and live forever, or at least wake up after many years to see the future. In the other case, it’s the deceased person’s relatives who seek immortality. They want some way to communicate with them. But it’s important to understand that it will not truly be them, but only a computer model that deceives the senses and memory. In the first case, it’s more likely to be about real physical immortality, while in the second—only virtual immortality.
Immortality in a Chatbot
In 2015, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of Replika software development company, lost her best friend Roman after he was hit by a car in Moscow. Devastated by the loss of a close friend, she trained a chatbot using thousands of text messages exchanged with Roman over many years of friendship. This created a digital copy of him that could still “talk” to family and friends. The first time she interacted with the bot, she was surprised by how close it felt to talking to her friend again. “It was very emotional,” she said. “I didn’t expect to feel that way because I had worked on the chatbot, I knew how it was built.” It turns out, the machine simply tricked her brain and senses into filling in the reality.
Nevertheless, Eugenia acknowledges that creating such a copy for widespread use is unrealistic. Each person communicates differently with friends, colleagues, and family. People value how a lost loved one specifically interacted with them, and a model built on communication with another person could disappoint or make them unrecognizable.
This might sound familiar. If so, you may have seen it in the TV series “Black Mirror.” In one episode, a young woman’s boyfriend dies in a car accident. In her grief, she subscribes to a service that allows her to communicate with an AI version of him, based on his past online communications and social media profiles. Another problem with created copies is that they only allow you to “communicate” with the person who existed back then. They won’t evolve and change with you, and we value friends for how we grow and change together, remaining close over time.
Is It Possible to Digitize a Human?
Another option remains—to create a complete digital copy of a person, perhaps even while they are still alive. Eugenia agrees that this is only partially possible. You can create a full virtual copy of a person that looks and moves like them, but creating a copy of their mind and emotions is still impossible.
Again, let’s assume we create such a copy, but it’s somewhere on a social network or just in the cloud. Then the company supporting the technology goes bankrupt and shuts down. Where does the created image go, and how do you access it later? Consider the story of the computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to create HTML for the Internet—the machine exists, but no one knows the password. One of the most scientific concepts in the field of digitizing death came from Nectome, a Y Combinator startup. They proposed preserving the brain for future memory extraction using a high-tech embalming process. The catch is, the brain must be “fresh.” In simpler terms, a person would have to be deliberately euthanized for this.
Nectome planned to conduct experiments with terminally ill volunteers in California, where such experiments and euthanasia are permitted. The startup secured the necessary funding and gathered not only a base of volunteers but also those willing to try the technology on themselves when it becomes available. Reportedly, there were 25 willing participants. The startup attracted $1 million in funding along with a major federal grant. However, Nectome has not responded to journalists’ inquiries about the progress of the experiments, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology declined to participate in the research.
“Neuroscience hasn’t advanced to the point where we can say whether any method of brain preservation is effective enough to maintain the various types of biomolecules associated with memory and the mind,” said MIT in a statement. “It is also unknown if it’s possible to recreate human consciousness.”
Another project, called Augmented Eternity by FlyBits, aims to help people live in digital form for the sake of passing down knowledge to future generations.
“Millennials generate gigabytes of data daily, and we have reached a maturity level where we can really create a digital version of ourselves,” said Hossein Rahnama, founder and CEO of FlyBits.
Augmented Eternity takes your digital footprints—emails, photos, social media activity—and feeds them into a machine learning algorithm. This algorithm analyzes how people think and act to give you a digital copy of the person studied. Rahnama claims that one could even interact with this person like a voice assistant or even an anthropomorphic robot. The team is currently building a prototype, and Rahnama asserts that instead of asking Siri questions, you could ask a colleague or just a smart person who understands the topic.
Creating a Robotic Copy of a Person
Many have heard of how Hiroshi Ishiguro at the Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan created over 30 realistic androids—including his own robotic version. He pioneered research in human-robot interaction, studying the importance of subtleties like facial expressions, eye movements, and lip motions. “My main goal is to understand what it means to be human by creating a robot that closely resembles a human,” said Ishiguro. “We can improve the algorithm to make it even more human-like, but to do that, we need to identify some key human traits.”
Ishiguro said that if he died, his robot could continue to lecture students in his place. However, he noted that it would never truly be him and could not come up with new ideas. That’s the critical distinction. You can share memories with a robot, and it might say, “I am Hiroshi Ishiguro.” But that’s where it ends. It won’t evolve as a person because daily events shape our development in ways that no AI can model. It’s even safe to say that it never will.
It started raining, and you went into a shop to take shelter. There, you saw a science magazine and decided to become a researcher. Or you missed a bus at the stop and met someone who sparked your interest in geography. A machine is incapable of that. Ishiguro believes that soon enough, we will have a brain-computer interface that will blur the line between us and robots. It will be unclear where memories are stored, and we will be able to share them. But again, that will not be development, and communication with such a robot after the death of its “original” (excuse the comparison) will quickly grow tiresome, as communication is an exchange of information. It needs to constantly renew, or it quickly becomes boring. If you agree, share your thoughts in our Telegram chat. Humanity has evolved based on a biological principle—survival of the fittest. But today, we have technology that allows us to improve our genes and develop human-like robots. Could this be our evolution? Or is it, in fact, a dead end?
If it’s the former, we will be able to design our future ourselves, but a future where all humans are just computer programs is a bit unsettling. This would imply the need for a constantly updating (reproducing) group of system administrators. Would they be gods or slaves maintaining the digital well-being and immortality of others? Why then couldn’t they just erase all the files and continue living on their own? So many questions, and so few answers…