The theme song of the movie “Fame” puts emphasis on this one line which is “I’m gonna live forever” performed by actress Irene Cara. We know that when she talks about living forever, she is referring to the fame she gets and that this fame will keep her alive in the hearts of many generations. But in this fast-moving era of technology, we can propose the literal meaning of that sentence.
After advancing in all sorts of technological fields, scientists realized that human mortality is what holds them back from their true potential. So they decided to solve their problems by understanding human physiology, and after that, they went after AI Technology. In Silicon Valley, having a promising future i.e. immortality, is now being explored by corporate officials. Many big celebrities are now investing in ventures to figure out a way to attain immortality with a process that’s as easy as updating the software on your phone.
After much research, the biggest hurdle that comes in our way of achieving immortality is our physical bodies. Humans were always fascinated by the idea of being immortal, as seen in movies and shows in which characters are willing to kill thousands of people just to achieve immortality. So in order to live forever, we humans need to leave our physical bodies and join the virtual world and become legitimate applications.
The 2045 Initiative:
In February 2011, Russian Entrepreneur Dmitry Itskoy founded a non-profit organization called “The 2045 Initiative”. This organization includes a network and a whole community of researchers and Russian specialists who are working in the field of neural interfaces, artificial organs, and artificial intelligence, i.e. robotics, all with the goal of attaining life extension. They focus on combining brain emulation and robotics so they can form real-life cyborgs.
Their goal is
“To create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science, and society".
The 2045 Initiative aims to empower people to make their own decisions about prolonging their lives and living in a new body when their biological bodies have worn out.
Mind Uploading: When People Start To Live In the Metaverse:
Mind uploading, according to Interesting Engineering, is the hypothetical process of extracting a person's consciousness from his body, converting it to a digital format, and then putting the digital consciousness into a machine. Therefore, the consciousness is unrestrained by biology.
Elon Musk's Neuralink and other comparable firms have been researching metaverse technology that could be used to enable whole-brain uploading in the future. According to Science Times, Musk plans to market Optimus, a humanoid robot that can mimic its owner's personality traits and act like them, by next year.
Designing an artificial humanoid body (such as an "avatar") with an advanced brain-computer interface system is one of the featured life-extension initiatives. On the biological front, a life support system for hosting a human brain inside the avatar and keeping it alive and functional will be developed. In a subsequent phase of the experiment, researchers will look into developing an artificial brain into which the original individual consciousness can be transferred.
Tom Cheesewright, a self-described futurist, believes that AI and metaverse technology would one day allow humans to input their consciousness into Virtual Reality, which will develop a forever-living robot.
Stages To Mind Uploading:
The initial stage in this procedure is to obtain data from the brain, which contains around 125 trillion synapses in its cerebral cortex alone. Some argue that in order to fully recreate the information, the brain would have to be dissected first.
However, mind uploading argues for a noninvasive brain treatment that can provide adequate answers for duplicating information in the brain without killing the individual or harming their memory in any way.
Next, the artificial brain must next be built. According to an estimate published in Scientific American, the brain's memory storage capacity could exceed 2.5 petabytes (2,500 TB). As a result, the artificial brain needs to be able to deal with a massive amount of data. GPT3, the world's biggest artificial neural network, currently has just 1/300 the capacity of the human brain.
The final step is to match the awareness to a substrate, such as a metaverse or a network of connected artificial brains. Musk's Optimus humanoid robot is another alternative in which the physical robot acts as a person's new physical body.
Scientists, academics, and tech businesses working on mind uploading would have to invest a lot of time, effort, and money to complete these processes. Only time will tell whether it is a success or not.
