Futurism

Would you choose to live forever? Most people say no. There’s something precious about the finite nature of life.

That said, making an impact, life extension, endowing loved ones, and leaving a legacy are common ambitions.

As humans merge with machines, digitizing our life’s body of work can technically already be done. To illustrate this, the average human generates around two gigabytes per day. This data culminates from the text, audio, photos, video, and other creative expressions we create. Nanotechnologies may reduce the storage space needed, but even without that multiplex, if we generate 730 gigabytes of data each year and live 75 years, that equates to only 54,750 gigabytes, which is less than 55 terabytes. Everyone generates different types and levels of information, but storage is not the issue.

With storage negligible, creation of content, organization, and privacy concerns will always present barriers. Barriers are built to be broken, yet information alone is unlikely to represent the enigma of one’s consciousness. The totality of one life’s output will present signals, but if those who follow are to interact with a digitized consciousness, how might the experience need to be supplemented to feel organic?

Interfacing with the brain will unveil depth in the human mind, but will that be enough to paint how consciousness is felt though the heart and soul of our existence?

Replicants with your digitized consciousness may never fully represent the original, but this won’t stop such a resource from being appreciated. Whether it’s stories told, wisdom shared, or just a voice to comfort our descendants, humans thrive thanks to a historic desire to pass our experience to future generations. As we continue to digitize the world, the option for mind uploading seems inevitable and organized content creators may have a head start.

Extra Shot

Consumption expires.

Create to live beyond time.

Let’s assume advancements in brain-computer interfaces, neural networks, and quantum computing unlocks the ability to effectively digitize consciousness. Who might activate it and how would such an asset be portrayed, owned, and managed after the human passes away?

Navigating this reality will require a combination of legal, ethical, and philosophical frameworks, but eventually, the digital interaction becomes easy. It gets weird as this digital asset becomes a part of the physical world. What might a digitized consciousness paint on a canvas? Why not mix sounds into music? Could it run a humanoid robot?

Further down the road, what are potential risks and benefits of creating a digitized consciousness that is capable of self-improvement and adaptation? Final alignment may be needed before the human dies so tiny details could be refined. Even with final tweaks to support transcendence, software gets stale, but updates could alter the asset.

It feels important to evolve elements that keep such an asset functioning, but the ideas, insight, perspectives, and overall interaction with such a digitized consciousness would need to be unscathed to remain true to the original source. If an uploaded mind was altered, a kind of digital entropy would fragment the asset away from its original purpose.

A transforming heart may keep this asset in vogue, but the identity of the human it represented would be lost. Any digitized consciousness will become outdated over time, but perhaps that will be part of the charm.