Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality")
is the hypothetical concept of storing (or transferring) a person's
personality in more durable media, i.e., a computer. The result might
look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive. After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and develop autonomously.
A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.
A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.
The realism of the concept
The National Science Foundation
has awarded a half-million-dollar grant to the universities of Central
Florida at Orlando and Illinois at Chicago to explore how researchers
might use artificial intelligence,
archiving, and computer imaging to create convincing, digital versions
of real people, a possible first step toward virtual immortality.
The Digital Immortality Institute explores three factors
necessary for digital immortality. First, at whatever level of
implementation, avatars require guaranteed Internet
accessibility. Next, avatars must be what users specify, and they must
remain so. Finally, future representations must be secured before the
living users are no more.
The aim of Dmitry Itskov's 2045 Initiative
is to "create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s
personality to a non-biological carrier, and extending existence,
including to the point of immortality".
Method
Reaching digital immortality is a two-step process:
- archiving and digitizing people,
- making the avatar live
Archiving and digitizing people
According to Gordon Bell and Jim Gray from Microsoft Research, retaining every conversation that a person has ever heard is already realistic: it needs less than a terabyte of storage (for adequate quality). The speech or text recognition technologies are one of the biggest challenges of the concept.
A second possibility would be to archive and analyze social
Internet use to map the personality of people. By analyzing social
Internet use during 50 years, it would be possible to model a society's
culture, a society's way of thinking, and a society's interests.
Rothblatt envisions the creation of "mindfiles" – collections of
data from all kinds of sources, including the photos we upload to
Facebook, the discussions and opinions we share on forums or blogs, and
other social media interactions that reflect our life experiences and
our unique self.
Richard Grandmorin
summarized the concept of digital immortality by the following
equation: "semantic analysis + social internet use + Artificial
Intelligence = immortality".
Some find that photos, videos, soundclips, social media posts and
other data of oneself could already be regarded as such an archiving.
Susanne Asche states:
As a hopefully minimalistic definition then, digital immortality can be roughly considered as involving a person-centric repository containing a copy of everything that a person sees, hears, says, or engenders over his or her lifespan, including photographs, videos, audio recordings, movies, television shows, music albums/CDs, newspapers, documents, diaries and journals, interviews, meetings, love letters, notes, papers, art pieces, and so on, and so on; and if not everything, then at least as much as the person has and takes the time and trouble to include. The person’s personality, emotion profiles, thoughts, beliefs, and appearance are also captured and integrated into an artificially intelligent, interactive, con-versational agent/avatar. This avatar is placed in charge of (and perhaps "equated" with) the collected material in the repository so that the agent can present the illusion of having the factual memories, thoughts, and beliefs of the person him/herself.
— Susanne Asche, Kulturelles Gedächtnis im 21. Jahrhundert: Tagungsband des internationalen Symposiums, Digital Immortality & Runaway Technology
Making the avatar alive
Defining the avatar to be alive allows it to communicate with the
future in the sense that it continues to learn, evolve and interact with
people, if they still exist. Technically, the operation exists to
implement an artificial intelligence system to the avatar. This artificial intelligence system is then assumed to think and will react on the base of the archive.
Rothblatt proposes the term "mindware" for software that is being
developed with the goal of generating conscious AIs. Such software
would read a person's "mindfile" to generate a "mindclone." Rothblatt
also proposes a certain level of governmental approval for mindware,
like an FDA certification, to ensure that the resulting mindclones are
well made.
Calibration process
During
the calibration process, the biological people are living at the same
time as their artifact in silicon. The artifact in silicon is calibrated
to be as close as possible to the person in question.
During this process ongoing updates, synchronization, and interaction
between the two minds would maintain the twin minds as one.
In fiction
- In the TV series Caprica a digital copy of a person is created and outlives its real counterpart after the person dies in a terrorist attack.
- In Greg Egan's Permutation City people can achieve quasi digital immortality by mind uploading a digital copy of themselves into a simulated reality.
- Memories with Maya is a novel on the concept of digital immortality.
- The Silicon Man describes Cryonics as a precursor to digital immortality.
- In the 1998 novel Vast by Linda Nagata "ghosts" are recorded memories and personalities that can be transferred to another body or kept in electronic storage, granting a limited form of immortality.
- In the TV series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Overmind and Lord Dread planned to digitize all human beings to be able to create a new world.
- In the TV series Black Mirror it commonly features the themes and ethics of digital humans, called "cookies," across multiple episodes. In San Junipero, for example, people's consciences are uploaded to the cloud.
- In the novel / Netflix series Altered Carbon, a person's memories and consciousness can be stored in a disk-shaped device called a cortical stack, which is implanted into the cervical vertebrae.
- In Frictional Games' SOMA, the story revolves around the problem of existing as a digital personality scan taken from a physical person.
