playing god

Since the humanity exists has always struggled to avoid death. We want to live as long as possible and efforts to achieve immortality have been going on for generations. Currently, there are those who think that artificial intelligence, not only will it help us to prolong our life, but can make death optional.

Is what transhumanists believe. They support the ethical use of technology to transcend human limits. “The idea that science will defeat death is the basic belief of Terasem,” says Gabriel RothBlatt, pastor of this transhumanist religion.

“We believe that information, which is the soul, is storable and transferable“

“Us we believe that the information, which is the soul, is storable and transferable“, he explains to a convinced audience. They advocate capturing thoughts, memories, feelings, key data to build what they call mind files. East it would be the first step towards immortality? The answer of the transhumanists is, yes.

“There is no need to wait for death or heaven to prove that eternity is real“

And his belief is that from then on, could turn our mind in mental file format to an artificial body and so live forever. “There is no need to wait for death or heaven to prove that eternity is real,” he says in a television program with the same tone of voice as the doctor Deepak Chopra, his artificial intelligence avatar.

Sitting next to the royal physician, few could differentiate the machine from the man in appearance. “One day I hope to be able to talk to my grandchildren’s grandchildren. It will be a simulation of me and I hope it will be immortal“, adds this defender of traditional alternative medicines and famous writer on spirituality.

“Anyone can create their avatar and say: this is what I want my children to be able to access“

Up to now, the challenge of artificial intelligence has been try to imitate the logical brain, not the emotional one. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hossein Rahnama thinks “it’s extremely unlikely that you could just push a button and transfer your consciousness.” That’s why he works in the development of what he calls eternity augmented, a digital version of ourselves that contains our emotionsso that our future generations can interact with our clone and benefit from it.

“Anyone can create their avatar and say, “this is what I want my children to be able to access,” explains Rahnama. In any case, the motivation of artificial intelligence, beside biotechnology and robotics, it is not more than transcend our own death and be eternally free from possible diseases that limited us the last days of our lives.

Androids already inhabit Japan

In Japana country where the oldest traditions coexist with the most advanced technologies, androids are part of everyday life. “I’m trying to understand what humanity is by creating a robot that is very human-like,” says Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University.

is developing the first artificial intelligence android prototypes much more advanced. The last one, a robot boy called Ibuki, which in Japanese means breath, the spirit of life. But, Can an android have a soul?

Immortal or extinct?

Not everyone is so clear that the complex relationship between our brain and our body can be played on a machine. “We know so little about the brain, that to think that we can create something similar or similar is very difficult to imagine,” says Taufik Valiante, a neurosurgeon at the Krembil Brain Institute. The brain is the structure plus complex of the universe and one of the most difficult functions to measure is memory, continues the expert.

In fact, the memories are life experiences and in a certain sense, every time we count them, we re-create them. And artificial intelligence systems “can remember or can classify a piece of information, but without a doubt they can’t retrieve that kind of information multimodal, multidimensional, that you experienced”, the neurosurgeon replies to the journalist.

“We should be used for more than just keeping computers on“

In addition to neurosurgery, philosophy raises his own debate to the multiple capabilities of artificial intelligence on the creation of immortal and more intelligent avatars. What would happen if that supreme being surpassed its creator in intelligence?

The Oxford University philosopher, Nick Bolstrom, warns that “it could be a threat to the survival of the species human”.

Douglas Rushkoff, writer and professor of Media Studies at New York University, states that human beings deserve a place in the digital future. “Us we should be good for more than just keeping computers on and then fading into extinction.”

“Could be a threat to the survival of the human species“

Technology at the service of immortality it is as surprising as it is disturbing and advances towards the achievement that, at the end of our days, there is the possibility of choosing between dying or uploading our consciousness to a digital platform.

This is the question. If we could create an avatar of ourselves to be immortal, would we?