Sang Ha Park

While coming back home from late night drinks, probably due to intoxication, I realized actually how absurd it is for humans to die. (Or the fact that you take it granted). I mean think about it. Brilliant or normal, rich or poor, white or black, conservative or progressive, we all have to face this biological shutdown called death. And no one has escaped it. Even the most powerful men in history of mankind have died. Just like me and you.

As part of the so-called only sentient species of world, this scientific truth that all humans die is very hard to accept. I mean if we are that special, why are we given such a little time? In a cosmic sense, ~ 100 years we have is less than a blip. Yes, this time-constraint bomb called death can be seen as a great catalyst to enjoy what limited time we have as seen from numerous Latin aphorisms, (e.g. memento mori, carpe diem, and etc.). But is that actually all we can do?

If aliens or some higher dimensional beings existed, would they have conquered biological death? Or would they be facing the same conundrum that we face? I mean if you are harnessing the power of stars (Type 3 civilization from Kardashev scale), you must have solved the problem of death, right? In Ted Chang’s Story of Your Life, aliens don’t perceive time as a linear, sequential progression, but instead as an already completed event. In other words, they already know what will happen even before things have started. Perhaps that’s one way of escaping time and, at the same time, death as well.

Of course, there are heaps of scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs working on extending human life. And thanks to them, we are making huge progresses. (Check some of the latest exciting developments curated by Noah Smith here). But only selected few will be able to enjoy these advancements until they become cheap enough to be broadly accessible.

Then perhaps our quickest salvation (certainly not the best) may be transporting our conscience to digital realm. As I said in my earlier post, Digital Life, this will lead us to extend our lives beyond our biological death.

Finally once we have our digital selves that can be fully controlled by us, we can also have our digital selves to exist even after our physical selves perish. In short, our digital selves can be “immortal”. Our digital selves can be static or even be dynamic in a way that’s responsive based on latest AI technology.

People have been already using self-trained AI chatbots to achieve a similar purpose. Only difference is that these people are not trying to recreate themselves but their loved ones. These current renditions are probably static. However children who are born after mid 2010s will have most of their data recorded in digital devices. Then theoretically we will be able to port all their data – visual, textual, physical, acoustic – and recreate a digital person from birth and even try to “age” them based on how they’ve grown up. And we can predict how they would have grown as well. This will get us closer to a truly dynamic digital being.

In the future, perhaps we can even expect digital reincarnations to have conscience, where they can independently exist, think, absorb information, feel, and interact with other beings. Their sensations will be entirely composed of electronic signals. That would probably be the only key difference. And maybe in the distant future, long after I’ve died, people won’t really care about biological deaths anymore because they can live in digital worlds for eternity; When those days arrive, I might exist in that digital world somehow recreated by my posterity, with data missing till high school, but independently exploring the new digital world.