Attention, smart people: You won’t be half as smart as your uploaded, digitized, afterlife self
Not quite three months ago, I helped broadcast the joyful news that Charles Manson was to be wed. We are now disheartened by the revelation that his bride to-be, Star, had only wanted to marry him to gain custody of his corpse upon his death. So that she and her real partner in life, some scheming dude, could embalm it and display it in a California roadside equivalent of the Kremlin display of Lenin. And because of this, Manson will not go through with the marriage.
He will not wed Star, because the plot to embalm his corpse proves to him Star is too stupid to be his wife, in that it shows she does not grasp that he is immortal.
I am also too stupid, it seems, to be married to Charles Manson. His immortality is likewise a bolt out of the blue to me.
It turns out I am behind the times. Everybody who is anybody is expecting to be immortal soon with the arrival of the “Singularity,” a supposed time when artificial intelligence melds together to outbrain the brainiest brainiacs, and human beings are integrated into the cloud.
To start with, you will be immortal on Facebook. Facebook is now rolling out new options to bequeath content from your Facebook page to a memorial page for you, to be run by what amounts to an executor of your Facebook estate, I guess. Before this, people could set up memorial pages for anyone they chose, but now they can apply for all the cat pictures you uploaded, the photos of your fantastic breakfasts and all your Facebook selfie posts.
Facebook doesn’t want you to have more than one personal account no matter how much time and effort you’re willing to devote to them, but die, and you can hog bandwidth for all eternity. Are they expecting advertisers to find special niches on these memorial pages? Perhaps the theory is your friends will likely follow you soon, so could be they’d like a nice plot, a modest cremation, a comfy coffin?
Other web services are stepping up to this demand for immortality by offering to collect and store your social media posts of all kinds while you are alive, to be displayed upon your death as a memorial website, which someone will have to pay for. Unless you’re a dead celebrity, in which case your ad revenue will probably be sufficient, as long as your dead-celebrity fame lasts.
All this is just the beginning. Like I said, there’s going to be a technological revolution, and artificial intelligence will take off like a rocket, and at the same time science will figure out how to map your brain when you’re dead and upload all your brain functions, your mind, personality and all your memories, into super-quantum computers.
Not only that, but people are all going to have wearable devices that record everything that happens to them all day, every day of their lives, and record their feelings and the states of their “interstitial bodily fluids” (eww) and such things of that nature, so as to back up all those faulty memories with solid documentation.
So your uploaded mind will be equipped with better memories than you had while alive. Your artificial intelligence you will be a better you.
What exciting times we live in. It’s as if we were living under the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, pyramids and embalming and whatnot all happening around us, as all the guys with money power jockey for a seat at eternity.
It’s great that we can afford to spend so much effort on creating super imitations of ourselves. It will give us something to occupy our time while we’re ignoring all the people in need around us who are inconveniently alive.
Then, when all the poor people are dead, we can hire someone to make a bronze statue of one of them and call it the Unknown Poor Person, who couldn’t afford either a life or a simulated afterlife.