“In that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil”… soon that moment may truly be something entirely different. Tangled up in the news of the day, we could easily miss a change that is fundamental for humanity, for our species and for every single individual.
Do you think machines and artificial intelligence could make us… immortal? What price might we end up paying? What awaits us afterward? Where is the line between the possible, even the near future, and fantasy?
I know you have your own answers. And yet there are plenty of projects and ideas on the subject that give us reason to think about it more seriously.
Memento mori
Yes, it is a little strange to talk about something as incredible as immortality against the backdrop of years in which one tiny virus reminded us how insignificant we are, how fragile everything is. And how the scientific progress we so admire turned out to be practically powerless to save us even from a single infectious disease, from a single epidemic—the kind that has happened many times in human history and that scientists have always warned would, sooner or later, happen again.
What if the virus had been even deadlier? Either way, sadly, it did not turn out to be a fiction but a deadly disease that caused record mortality, Bulgaria included. One that drastically lowered life expectancy even in the most developed countries. In such an important battle, all our supposedly astonishing progress simply “went to the movies,” as Bulgarians say of something that has gone to waste. It couldn't even manage that, because the cinemas were closed.
But what if that same science, on the wings of technology, soon redeems itself by making human life, if not endless (is there even such a thing as endlessness?), then at least drastically longer?
Death always comes. At least for now. There is hardly a more powerful thought about life than the Latin wisdom that advises us to remember death. Only then can we breathe in the best of those moments, so insignificant against the scale of time, that have been allotted to us here.
Young at Heart
A few days ago, MIT Technology Review reported on Altos Labs, Silicon Valley's new hope for eternal life.
It all began in October of last year, when a handpicked “collection” of proven world-class scientists found themselves at billionaire Yuri Milner's estate above Palo Alto, California. The two-day scientific conference was devoted to the question of how biotechnology could be used to make people younger.
Milner is a fascinating figure, an entrepreneur whom many consider a speculator on the order of Warren Buffett. Others see him as a philanthropist, because he gives (or invests?) serious money in scientific research. His fortune is estimated at almost $5 billion. He is also a physicist by training.
The meeting led to the founding of the company Altos Labs. The startup drew investment not only from Milner but from many other moneybags, including the richest person on Earth, Jeff Bezos. The new company was set up simultaneously in the United States and the United Kingdom, with plans to quickly build a network of research laboratories around the world.
The Spirit of the Times
Serious scientists from the most prestigious universities have already been hired, lured by tempting salaries and the chance to leave their mark on something as important as studying the mechanism by which cells age. And the possibilities for reversing that process…
At the head of the team of scientific advisers is the Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka. The discovery that won him the prize is that by adding just four proteins, known today as the “Yamanaka factors,” cells can be returned to their original state, one that carries the characteristics of embryonic stem cells. Put simply: the cell “reboots,” grows young again. It is precisely his method that is expected to lie at the heart of the work at Altos Labs.
The team also includes Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish scientist working in California, who researches “growing” human organs in primate embryos and says that human life can be extended by at least 50 years. He is also known for having used the “Yamanaka factors” to achieve, in mice, the first successful attempts at reversing the processes of cellular aging.
The One with the Scythe
Altos Labs is far from the first venture of its kind. Back in 2013, Google cofounder Larry Page announced his own entry in the same race: Calico Labs. Once again, the goal is to reprogram cells, and this team's first scientific paper has already been released as a preprint. The company has managed to attract $1.5 billion for its research!
As the saying goes, the young dream of being rich, and the rich dream of being young. So it is no wonder at all that people like Milner, Bezos and Page spare no millions in this direction. In a way, it has always been like this.
As Prof. Alejandro Ocampo of the University of Lausanne puts it, it is no longer a problem to take a cell from an 80-year-old and, under laboratory conditions, change it so that it cannot be told apart from the cell of someone half that age.
Of course, things get a great deal more complicated when we are talking about tissues, organs and… our entire body. Izpisúa Belmonte's mice, for example, develop a very serious predisposition to tumors.
Liberty or Death
It is important to note that technologies of this kind may one day be able to stop aging. But not disease—people will still die, it just won't happen “of old age.” Average life expectancy will probably increase. But only if the process is refined truly drastically from where it stands today.
Besides, we are talking about a general process of cellular aging, but many new questions will likely crop up along the way about how the principle can be applied to each of our numerous organs, to the different types of cells.
And still, what will happen if, at some point, these world-class scientists succeed, thanks to the enormous sums being poured into these projects?
What if… the results end up available only to the multibillionaires who invested in the research? Or to the people they choose? What becomes of a world in which immortality turns into a commodity?
The End of the Song
For better or worse, it sounds almost impossible for this breakthrough to become a reality in the foreseeable future. And yet it is right to ask such questions, because otherwise we may not have the answers ready when they become necessary.
The topic has many other angles, too—quite different and interesting ones.
Whenever the conversation turned to the technologies that would lead to immortality, the favorite subject of such articles was, for a long time, Dr. Aubrey de Grey—a scientist with a long beard and a monkish bearing. To this day he keeps claiming that we have roughly a 50 percent chance of stopping aging, and therefore of turning death away, within the lifetime of the current generation of earthlings. There is logic in his arguments, but then again… it would have been great if some sufficiently authoritative scientist, say a Nobel laureate, had come along to give them a bit more support. Or if, in the two decades since Dr. de Grey became a superstar, we had heard of some minimal progress.
Image and Likeness
The fashion for cryonics has faded somewhat as well—the movement in which you pay to be deep-frozen after death, so that one day, when technology has advanced, they can clone you and cure you in a kind of human “Jurassic Park.” (And if they turn out to be right, and if this text somehow reaches them, the frozen may well have a good laugh at my skepticism a millennium or two from now.)
There are, however, many other concepts. Many of them require us to change our attitude toward immortality from what we imagine it to be—simply going on living for an endlessly long time without it costing us any serious compromise with our worldview so far. Not that any kind of immortality wouldn't do that; I mean… on a rather different level.
He Does Not Die!
Take cloning, for example. Today we consider it deeply unethical when it comes to humans. But… why, actually? We started with a sheep, moved on to other animals, and even gave a chance to the first species that have all but vanished from the face of the Earth. Yes, we are still talking about… well, a ferret. But ferrets are people too, as the saying goes. Besides, the list of cloned animal species is not short.
So let us set aside the ethical norms of biology for a moment; we know that ethics often falls victim, in one form or another, to the powerful of the day. Imagine some very rich person who sidesteps the rules directly, by going, say, to a distant, loosely regulated country… Imagine we clone a person.
And then, when their road nears its end, we clone them again—well, isn't that immortality? The same person, 100 percent the same genes, granted, without the memory of the past. But isn't that, in essence, immortality? Even if in a way very far from the human one. Because as a species we are (for now?) used to associating a person with their experience, their memories, their personal relationships… we are not interchangeable, and we would not exactly accept the mere survival of absolutely identical genes as immortality.
The Reports of My Death…
Or perhaps we don't want it, because it doesn't spare us the tiresome detail that we still have to die. For better or worse, attempts to clone humans are currently at a standstill (officially, at least), and that postpones the need to think seriously about the ethical and humane sides of the subject.
A curious fact, unrelated to humans but pointing in the same direction. In 2017, Barbra Streisand cloned her dog: once her Samantha had passed away, she already had a brand-new Samantha, so she wouldn't have to grieve.
In this field it is rather hard to find the line between science and fraud; between genuine optimism and inflated self-confidence aimed at raising money. Anyone (not just a billionaire) would give anything to live forever—all it takes is to be convinced that it is possible.
The Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, for example, has also set aside serious funds and hired a large team of scientists. But he has also set a concrete goal: immortality should arrive in 2045. He often repeats that he is 100 percent convinced it will happen. In his case, though, the talk is of “cybernetic immortality.” The search is on for a way to transfer the whole person onto an artificial, electronic carrier.
Madness or a stroke of genius?
In the End
In the world of technology, the favorite fashionable topics of discussion change very quickly. Cloning, for instance, somehow stayed behind in the first decade of the new millennium, as the list of newly cloned species makes clear. Today we talk so, so (so) much about artificial intelligence, about connecting people with computers.
So this is another logical direction in which to look for hope for the end of the end, or at least for its drastic postponement.
Let's look at the truly powerful of the day. Elon Musk, as has already been discussed in detail in Digital Stories, is convinced that our future as a species can only exist in symbiosis, as an inseparable and complementary part of technology. Because otherwise we will simply be swept away the moment artificial intelligence turns out to be stronger than us.
A Soul on a Hard Drive
With the Neuralink project, Musk is already offering the first glimmers of what we call a “brain-computer interface.” Yes, we are still talking about a chip that can “read” a very small fraction of the signals in our brain. But the technology is proving that it works, and according to serious scientists, scaling it up shouldn't be too difficult. So what will happen if we really have a chip that can read the state of every neuron… and then record it and transfer it to a hard drive?
As the writer Ivo Ivanov aptly remarked when we met, “even now the most powerful computers in the US, China and Europe are working tirelessly on copying the human connectome. The most complex thing in the Universe! So far we have found nothing more complex than that kilo and a half of gray matter sitting inside every person's skull.”
Yes, for now it seems incredible that we will succeed. But having electricity at home wasn't possible either, nor harnessing the power of the atom, nor carrying in our pocket a technology that holds millions of books and films and lets us connect in a second with the other end of the world…
Downloading Your Grandma
The immortality of living on in a hard drive really demands quite a paradigm shift, and I'll honestly admit that it sounds downright creepy to me. Nobody wants to die, but I, for one, don't much like the idea of ending up like the pink Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles either.
We would have to bend our usual human worldview quite a lot to imagine that, afterward, the entire contents of our brain, somehow gathered up, could be copied into a physical body.
Of course, the other option is to assume that by then we will already live in deep symbiosis with technology, that the organic and the technological will be practically inseparable… Exactly like the world Musk is preparing for with Neuralink.
Frankly, next to some versions of technological immortality… death looks like a perfectly acceptable end to it all.
As Steve Jobs said in his famous speech to Stanford graduates, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”
Long Live Siri!
Technology offers yet another version of possible immortality, although it strays quite a long way from the core idea. Because here the goal is not so much for a person never to die, but rather for them to remain in some form, so they can go on talking with their loved ones.
The idea came in 2017 from Eugenia Kuyda. Two years earlier, her friend Roman Mazurenko had been killed in a car crash. She missed him terribly, and more and more often she caught herself sitting and reading old chats, wondering—what would Roman say to her if he were here today…
Then she decided to try something. She was herself the founder of the startup Luka, a chatbot company. She and her team had already built working solutions for big companies and had gained experience. Their products relied on artificial intelligence—they were fed as much text as possible, so that they could, in return, try to give their most accurate answers even to questions nobody expected them to be asked.
Yes, essentially exactly what Siri, Cortana and the other virtual assistants do. But Eugenia started to wonder: what would happen if she tried to create a chatbot that could “get under the skin” (forgive the macabre metaphor) of her departed friend?
The Living Dead
In later interviews, Eugenia said that the result of her work had literally saved her by giving her friend back. Whether she meant it sincerely or was simply advertising her company, there is no way for us to know, and it doesn't really matter—the idea itself is what's interesting.
Clearly, this kind of artificial intelligence is developing and getting better and better. The field of natural language processing allows a program, once it has been fed a large body of text, to return ever more fitting answers of its own. The process keeps improving, as the success of the GPT-3 platform shows.
So, if we gather an enormous volume of information created by a particular person, can we use algorithms to create their analog, a chatbot that cannot be told apart from the original?
The answer is most likely yes, or at least it will become yes with the even more serious progress expected in these technologies. Then we'll be able to chat (or even talk—nothing prevents a person's voice from being simulated too) with just about anyone. A few years ago, it emerged that even Microsoft was developing a patent along these lines.
Zombies or Cyborgs
So… would it be worth, say, bringing Einstein back to life and, armed with everything we have learned since, putting his sharp mind to work on the next steps in exploring the Universe?
This is where the big problem lies. On the one hand, the resurrection would be entirely imaginary. But, last but not least, even if some program were created, a virtual personality of someone who has passed away, there is no way it could have the basic knowledge and the natural development in every respect for the period after that person was gone. In other words, technology may well allow a chatbot to resemble a given person, but not to capture how that person would have grown.
A human being is constant change. Today you may like someone, tomorrow you may fall out with them for good. And depending on which of your opinions gets fed into the chatbot, there is no way to predict whether it will speak like today's "you" or yesterday's.
Carpe diem
The subject of death is so endless, so universal and so thrilling in every one of its aspects. Technology has certainly allowed us to live much longer (and, in my view, more meaningful) lives. Will it give us immortality? And do we really want it? There is no way to know—everyone has their own answer. I simply tried to gather a few interesting points of view from the world of digital stories.
Every artist, philosopher has spoken wisely on this topic, every person has thought about it. And yet, while we are still in the world of technology, let us part again with the words of Steve Jobs. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
