The Quest for Cyberimmortality

a lot of emotional um turmoil. But but the technology, modern technology seems to make these things flow a little different.

Like after I talked to him on the phone like earlier in the day and then I got this call that he was dead, and uh and so, I mean no knowing that I knew he was dead, but I picked up my cell phone and I, for you know, some reason, I pulled him up on that and I called him, and of course it went straight to his answer machine and I heard this electronical way message this question posed to me, you know, out of the void, and then I I left my response. You know that?

And uh, you know this in the sense is you know, it's the same message I've heard when I've called him and missed him. Uh, you know, or you know, or called him when I was in the middle of something, you know, many times before. Um, but there was this strange feeling, you know, of of conversing with the technology of a person that lives on after that person is gone, like this technological remnant of your Yeah, like little like technological pieces of my father, you know, insignificant pieces, to

be sure, but but pieces all the same. So, you know, since I've like I've saved the messages that he'd left me, I've and I you know, and I found myself wondering things like, oh, what have I recorded our last phone call? Because you know, I have this recording device. I could have done it. I do it all the time for interviews. If I had you know, if i'd only you know, had any inkling and uh. So it's you end up questioning what if what if I could What if I

could have done this? What else would I have done? What if I could have preserved him digitally in some way? You know? And uh and then the other question is there any sense to that at all? Is that just well, I don't know. I mean, we have been documenting ourselves, you know, since since we I think became aware of ourselves.

You know, how to put it best, but I mean if you think about the you know, the the Dagara type, right, you know, all of a sudden, it was photographs were widely used, and that was a different way of remembering our loved ones and going back to the memory which has been so important to us. Um. So it kind of makes sense that as we are, you know, smack dab in the digital age now that we began to layer these different pieces of our chiving together. Yeah, A

couple of interesting examples come to mind. Um. I mean, for starters, of course, any time someone has written something or created something, most of those creations continue to exist in some form after the the author or the artist has passed away. So you know, a book becomes a remnant of the person. Um. You know, a song they

wrote becomes a remnant. Um. I cannot but think of Mark Twain's biography or the volumes in his bot biography that are coming out a hundred years after his death right that stipulation that it could not be published until one hundred years after his death right, which which on one hand, that's pretty uh, you know, pretty ballsy to be like, yeah, a hundred years from now, they're still going to be craving me. So, yeah, that's Mark Twain, right,

but but but also it feels kind of eerie. It's like, hey, Mark Twain has a new book out. He's been dead a century, but here's here's this new book and her words that next to no one has heard before from him, right, and and a different understanding of him because I guess he felt comfortable in and sharing that information only one hundred years after his death, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. And the example that comes to mind, and this one

is also non electronic. Uh. Happened on a recent episode of This American Life, the NBR radio show Slash podcast uh and it was titled parent Trapped with the episode and there was a segment about a sixteen year old

girl named Rebecca and her mom died of cancer. But before the mom died, she wrote the series of letters to be delivered each year after death, one uh, one for for each birthday that Rebecca would have in the years afterwards years thirteen years, and then one letter to be delivered to her on the day of her her wedding.

So and and this is this was just a fascinating study until like into these you know, these missives sent off from you know, in a way, from beyond the grave, because like the first the first one she receives a year after um after her death, and it's you know, it's emotional, it's but it's comforting somehow, you know, you're hearing from this person. But as the years roll on, they become less comforting, become these grief bombs that go off each year to the point where she's kind of

dreading them. Um and the and the mother that is conversing or there is still this mother of you know, five years ago, six years ago, seven years years ago, talking to a version of her that doesn't really exist anymore because we change. You know, the person I was a year ago ago isn't the person I am now. The person I'm going to be in a year isn't

the person I am now. So you get this this increasingly disjointed conversation across time, uh, because it's like her mother's projections of who she wants her to be, right, and she's evolving as a person, and that's not matching up right, right, So we bring we bring these examples then into a discussion of cyber immortality or digital immortality, and the idea that the more technological, um, stuff that

we pile onto our being. Uh, the more it becomes possible for that stuff to live on after we're dead, and then what does that mean? And how do we process this and when what good does it do ultimately? Well? And what's so interesting to me too, is that it does become like an afterlife for us, right, I mean we you know in the biblical sense that there's there's the heaven and afterlife right there where you continue to

exist in another form. You know, essentially, if you've got cyber immortality, you're existing in another form, right, And it's interesting to break down, um. And we're gonna take this is a very scientific uh look at it and a psychological look at it. Um. So you know, we're just discounting religion for a second here, um, and we're going to talk about why do we have this idea of a soul and indeed, why do we have this idea

of a mind? And psychologist Paul Bloom argues that humans imagine that we have souls because the human brain has no awareness of its own functioning, Right, we falsely perceive ourselves to be separate from our bodies, I mean, our brain can we've discussed in the past how our brain can wrap itself around everything except itself. So we have mind, so we have souls. I mean the bulk of our brain's processes exist outside of what we can experience and

what we do experience. We experience that a slight delay. So um, so we have to compartmentalize at someone would we end up viewing ourselves as being outside of our bodies. So along with this argument, according to science author William Simms Bainbridge, religion enables us to turn the idea of the soul um turned to the idea of the soul to achieve highly desired rewards that are unattainable in the real world, like living forever or being becoming reunited with

loved ones and friends that we've lost. Yeah, and it's very interesting that in the Bainbridge article from the futurist Um I think that was from two thousand and six. Yes, pretty prescient stuff, right, because there he's talking about how it's very possible that technology could supplant some of the

ways in which religion is used. And again there's that idea of the afterlife, this idea that there's an assurance that there's meaning to our lives that there's some sort of flicker of our existence that extends beyond our mortality, right, um, and then create an archive of our memories that we could transfer to AI surrogates. He talks about this. Articles like robots, avatars and distributed intelligence would essentially do that job.

Or like a virtual world that you might you know, jack into where it's your you know, it's your childhood living room and there's your father or your grant or your uncle or or whoever, um, that you might converse with them again Yeah, yeah, And I don't want to jump ahead too much. But of course we know too with the Blue Brain project that we are trying to map our brains. There there are scientists that are trying to do this with computer models and are doing with

a wrap brain right now. So we're trying to get to that point where we understand how our brain works and actually maybe see our consciousness in action. Right And and of course we're obviously we're we're putting more and more profiles out there, like our our Facebook profiles are Twitter feeds, um, all these things, I mean, even our cell phones are are various accounts are Flicker accounts. Um. It kind of like the way I end up looking at It's kind of like this exoskeleton that we build.

And uh and when the person inside that exo skeleton goes away, you still have this this at least faint form of them. It's kind of like a shade or a ghost Stephen. Uh And and because what is the Facebook profile or the blog of a of a dead person but but a but a ghost and an electronic ghost that's still out there. Uh. It may not be interacting with us anymore, but to a certain extent, we can interact with it, and we can. It's still there

as if they are alive. Right, there's there. You have had some sort of trace of yourself uh on the web right in cyberspace, which is it's fascinating to think of that. And you actually sent me a really interesting article about a company called Virtual Eternity, which is offering an avatar that take the results of your Myers brig

personality test. Right, So, assuming that you're doing all of this work while you're alive, right, um and then along with all your memories and photos uh and and it actually has a computing process that has an endless capacity for data acquisition of you. Um. And it can then interact with others and will share specific memories depending on the clearance level of a family member or a friend.

So it's really interesting that you could set up this avatar of yourself, fill it with all of your memories, give it whether whatever information you want to give it, and then you live on for your relatives you know, who knows, I guess forever for as long as the Internet is alive, right, And and certain people have different access two different emotions or information, which is kind of creepy if you think about hackers, right, yeah, I mean

it's it's weird. I mean you could that's that's a huge concern um because the more and more information one puts into something like this, because because Bainbridge, he even argued that the online memorial, like a website honoring someone who's deceased, is in a sense of precursor to cyber immortality. And then this avatar that we've just discussed is even

an even more robust model of it. And it's this can if this continues to evolve, you know, you'll reach the point where to create a to create a more and more accurate simulation of a person, you'd have to put more and more information to the point where you'd have a lot of sensitive information because I think of the things that make us who, that make us who we are. There's a lot of stuff in the in

the architecture there that we don't want out in the public. Uh. You know, we might, um, you know flippantly say oh I wish I could take that memory away or or that weird thing that I do away, But it makes us who we are, and it's all a part of the of the finished product. You know. We can't pick and choose and then keep the form. You know, we can't see the joinery in all things. Well, I mean I look at it and I think this is something

that you can edit. This is a version of yourself that you can edit and put out there and people can visit, and then it's not really you. It's not really you. But also we we all know the amount of information that we're sharing online. So there's this different picture of us that could be forming depending on access levels, right. Um. I mean if you have a criminal record and uh, and if that were released, that would certainly be information

that people could access. Um. So again there's this like there's this idea of who we want to be in our cyber immortality and whether or not that's attainable. Right, Well, then you get into issues because remember it's kind of like funerals, um. Uh, they're they're always This is tug and pull um of where one you know that someone might be well, so and so wouldn't have wanted this to happen. But then it ultimately comes down to what

does the family want to happen? But then maybe there's the what the immediate family wanted of this, uh, the ceased individual, and what the uh the the friends wanted or what other parts of the family wanted. So would you reach a point where you had several different versions of this person that were memorialized in some sort of virtual setting, um, right, If nothing else, it just comes from the fact of like like which which version in

the past? Like do you want the like? Some people work may have been closer to John Doe a year before he died versus people who knew him two decades ago, and that's a very different person uh to have a connection to yees. So I guess the question is could you really get to the point where you could establish those sort of complexities to to give a full picture of who that person was, and like he said, everybody has different relationships with people and um, and it brings

out different aspects of that person. So is that fully represented? Is it possible? Again? From the article that you talked about with Bainbridge, that's called Battle to Save Our Souls by William Sims Fainbridge from the Futurists UM from two

thousand and six. Uh, he says, somewhat farther in the future, we can expect the development of rigorous means for recording and classifying all of the persons, perhaps fifty episodic memories, that is, memories of specific events and feelings that accompany them. A memory of the past event may exist as a network of mental associations linking images of a few of the people and things in a particular scenario. So he's

he's imagining this database and lo and behold. According to The Daily Galaxy, the National Science Foundation has awarded a half million dollar grant to the Universities of Central Florida and Illinois at Chicago to explore how researchers might use artificial intelligence, archiving, and computer imaging to create digital lifelike versions of real people. And they're also using video game

type technology. So UM to your point, like, you know, can you can you construct this this avatar of yourself in your living room? Yeah? As possible. I mean, what

they're talking about is taking UM. The folks you know at that National Science Foundation are basically talking about taking this virtual eternity offering that this company does and really sort of amping it up in terms of matrixing matrix ng your emotions UM and your personality Myers Briggs, so on and so forth, and and trying to have a fuller representation. Wow. But the more full that representation becomes.

It also you see arguments about whether UM robots, computer ais will eventually reach the point to where they have rights of some kind, but where they're can considered UM at least corporations if not people, you know, in terms of the rights afforded to them. So like, do you reach the point where who has the authority to say

copy that program that is the simulation of you? Or if or ultimately, if you if you remove some some more of the the ideas of the soul and you get down to the idea of of who we are is information in our brain, then you're then then what's the difference between that and this version and the computer as it grows more and more perfect, Who has the right to copy it? Who has the right to delete it? Is deleting it? Murder? Um? Right, that's the right to talk mean to it? You know? Is that I mean it?

Should we feel ethically, um crappy if we if we pull up a program of our uncle Carl and we just go in and tell him how elpset we are when he uh, you know, didn't eat the neat loaf

we prepared, uh, you know six Christmases ago. Well, and even if you could perfect it and you had this database, um, basically of of a loved one, um, and you could you could take let's say, the response to a questionnaires, a bunch of questionnaires if that person filled out, and you could feed that into an automated decision support system so that it could interact with you, and uh in a way that felt realistic. It's still as as we

talked about, um with the letters. You know, this this thing, this person that you knew, is now interacting with you at a much later date, and you're a different person. So it's still not going to be the person you I thought was the person, right, because they can't recognize you, they can't recognize change. Presumably this, this type of technology

isn't going to be that complex. Yeah. And if you were to take the simulation of you know, say you know, a deceased parent and put them in like a virtual sandbox world, I mean you'd have to like, how do how does that work? They would have to continue in a way, they'd have to continue a separate timeline or something, you know it like, they would have to It would be hard to keep them if you kept them the same,

that would be a problem. But then also continuing to allow them to develop into a new person in this program form would would seem to be really complex. And also what you brought up is this idea of ownership, right, so who owns this this virtual representation of your loved one? Yeah? And can they charge? Are they charging you for it?

Like where you are they charging you for it? What happens twenty five years down the road if they happen to sell the company or you know, and and what what happens is we continue to lay are on all this different data um in cyberspace about ourselves to do you know, does this do these sort of avatars get

shuttled away somewhere. Do they exist indefinitely? Um? Is it feasible that you could have tangent generations down from where you are now being able to access all of their their different relatives and look at the various pieces of information, right, I mean is the Internet that deep? Yeah? And we talk about identity theft now, but if you had this much information online, it would it would amount to soul theft or mind theft and h yeah, which is worse

than your credit card number. I was thinking about that if you took what is available today, right, if you just took um that like the Virtual Alternity, like the company that's doing that. And let's say my grandmother had participated in this and we had our Myers Briggs and we had all of her memories and her photos. Now let's say that you took what the National Science Foundation is doing and doing a more deep archive having of

this person. And then now let's say that you marry that with the Blue Brain technology, right, a Blue Brain Project technology which again is mapping the human brain um in precise cellular detail and it's simulating neural activity. Let's say that they, you know, had built my grandmother's brain in that sense, who's to say that someone couldn't then take basically this blueprint of my grandmother and use her

in in a robot or you know, for advertising. Advertising company buys copies of a bunch of these, like we want to really market the grandma's, so give me, you know, give me you know, fifty dead grandma minds and let me throw a whole bunch of product ideas at them, like right, And it's kind of and you can see how that would be so intriguing and so seductive because it would be a very real feeling representation of someone's life, for their feelings or their thoughts, and used in this

marketing way which would really sort of tug at the heart strings of people, right right, Um, but you know, and of course I'm awfulizing there, but it's possible. Yeah,

I'm awfulizing. I think that's an Oprah term. Okay, Um, but you know I'm saying, okay, what really, what is there's no legislation around this, right, there are no rules around it, And I think that's why we're bringing it up and saying, okay, you can you can see right now what's in existence, and you can see the roadmap going forward, that there's a real possibility that these versions of ourselves, multiple versions of ourselves could exist. Um, just

pretty fascinating. Yeah, like yeah, And and to go back to the letter that the thirteen year old letter from her mom, you know, at what point would you you know, it seems like a good idea at first to cyber immortalize a deceased loved one, but then you reach the point where it's like, well, well, heck, I guess I have to go out and kill the electronic ghost of my my dead parent because they're not they're not benefiting me anymore. And it's now it's just kind of creepy.

Or now it's just traumatic. It feels like you're haunted. Yeah. Another aspect of this that was brought up in the bain Bridge Futurist article is that you could use it very practically right now as a sort of backup database

to your brain. Right. Um, and this type of effective computing could help inform other devices, such as robots, to better respond to you depending on your mental and physical states, which is sort of interesting, right that that piece of AI in which we could have this sort of robot that is enhancing the way that we think and that it's anticipating and maybe even I was thinking about about this, looking at the blind spots in the way that we think.

So that's very possible that we could use this technology to try to approach maybe problems from a different angle. Right if you have a copy of your brain essentially that you can access and um and and play with. But that it seems like we would reach the point where like already we know we no longer know how to spell because of Firefox and and spell check. We don't know how to we haven't known how to do

simple math um. You know lookspt for mathematicians out there, but a lot of us have forgotten how to do simple math because we always have that calculator handy, first, the pocket calculator, now the various calculators and all of our gadgets. Well, so I see what you're saying, Get to think. Do you just turn to your database and go think, Okay, that's the algorithm for like what do I want to eat for lunch today? And then I'll say, hey,

you want some pizza? Great? You know, and then do we do we reach the tipping point between the person and this technological exo skeleton to where the technology technological exo skeleton is more the person than the flesh and blood person at the core of it. Well, and already. The interesting thing about that is that we already know the online representations that we put out there and edit.

Our different version of ourselves are the friendlier, nicier, whatever, versions of ourselves most of the time, um, sometimes naked or depending on the person. Yeah, you never know. But you know, the question is will people really want to do they really want to talk to the real you or the avatar you. You already have that in existence right now distinction. Yeah, can you imagine all the different layers you know that that might be possible to put on top of that. Uh. The other use that this

technology could be um employed is with the elderly. They could actually use portable digital devices documenting their lives to help them remember facts, so they could kind of dive back into their memories um to to help them sort of um say, oh, that's my daughter visiting me, or that's my grandchildren and so on and so forth. So they would essentially be interacting with some of this technology. But that reminded me so much of the vin Vendor's

film until the end of the world. And I won't go into the plot, but I'll just say that in a sort of quasi post apocalyptic world, people have access to this type of technology and it's actually documenting their dreams. So they're going into their past and they get completely addicted to to these portable old devices showing them their their previous life because of course they're you know, they're living in like rotted out canyons or something. I don't

know if canyons can rot, but you get the idea. Yeah, um and and post elliptic squalor um, And they keep returning to this other part of their lives and they become completely addicted. They quit eating, They just all they want to do is review their memories from their dreams. And so I thought, is it possible that you could build something like this to the point where you do you stop living in the present and you start mining

all the data of your own life. Yeah, Like I could easily, Like when you're talking about the elderly, like I would instantly imagine like two old dudes meeting each other for the first time in retirement home, like both of them just to sleep in their chairs while they're um they're like forty or fifty something avatars conversed um via USB, cab or something, you know, and or does it come to the point where it's like, say, to forty year olds meet and they're like, hey, how are

you going? And it's a two forty year olds meet each other. They upload their uh, several different versions of their past self so they can be too, because knowing

the current me isn't quite enough. I want the digital copy of your thirty year old self to meet the digital version of my thirty year old self, or you know, in various you know, you could just go go crazy with this vision of the future, and I will tell you that that's something that to me, I would I have to say, you know, if I'm eighty years old, I would love to have because I would love to be able to share with people the different things that I did in my life, particularly if I had a

problem communicating because I had memory problems. If I could just draw it up and be like, here's me, you know, rocking out and I don't know something. Yeah, the old you brings up with the memory problems, brings up the young you, and then brates there for all of our hard partying it's like, look what you did, I don't remember anything now, so they can be our punching bags. You know. Yeah, there's all sorts of possibilities here. But back to the the the the real reality in in

our current time. Um, Facebook already has the thing where um, when when you when you die, uh, your profile is memorialized. Uh. And this is this is like right off and right off the website. When a user passes away, we memorialize their account to protect their privacy. Memorializing an account sets the account privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or located in search, the wall remains so friends and family can leave post in remembrance. Memorializing an

account also prevents anyone from logging into the account. And to add a little extra that um, a recent estimate put the number of US Facebook users who die annually at something like um, which is you know, probably gonna go up. Um. And then in the world of Twitter, there's a really interesting thing like Yeah, Jonathan Strickland turned

me on to this. Who has an article by the time is web this Uh, this episode comes out His article on how stuff works website how digital immortality works should be out so be sure to check out that after you listen to this UM. But Jonathan told me about this blogger by the name of Brian Brushwood who teamed up with a web guru by the name of Patrick Delante, and uh, they launched Afterlife. Me. That's a f T E R L y f E dot m

e UM to pursue this idea of digital immortality. So the ideas you create a dead man switch on your online life, like every every time your birthday rolls around, you need to go in and push her button. Otherwise it's gonna activate the afterlife for you. In terms of social media, which means you'll your Twitter account will start, say throwing out random mundane um responses, or your Facebook I'm just thinking of all like the smart alec things that you could do. Yeah, like like Mark Twain with

the with the biography. Everyone's dead, so what does it matter. But but then also your Facebook account would be programmed to say give birthday, which is to to all your friends and family on their on their birthdays, things of that nature. Um And uh yeah, So the website is just in its early stages right now that it's not you can basically sign up and just get updates. On

the status of this. But it's an interesting like first real stab at cyber immortality and uh and it and it brings in all these questions the same you know, to what extent is this weird and cool? With what what extent is it comforting? Will it help with people with their bereavement? And to what extent that would it

eventually become creepy? And yeah, of course, someone says, Man, I'm gonna have to act call somebody at Twitter to get them to turn off, you know, my best friends Twitter account because it's no longer cute now it's just sad, right, Yeah, I know this. And again, this is what's so fascinating about this topic is, you know, technology again makes us rethink a place in the world and and how to

manage our ideas of ourselves. They are left ones. Well, hey, I have some missives from the void right here in the form of uh, well first person as an email that I'm particularly excited about. Uh. This one comes from a listener by the name of Bruce, and Bruce says, high folks, I was listening to a podcast of Yours and a Long Drive. It was on viruses. Robert mentioned Maximilian, the Big red robot in the Black Hole. Thanks much. I built that robot many years ago working effects at Disney.

That little blast in the past perked me right up. I spent two years of my life working on that flip. Thanks again for the indirect shout out regards Bruce. So that was awesome, Yeah, because that that is a that is a movie that I just grew up with. And uh and and and I don't I don't know what you call the affection that a like three year old or five year old boy um has for a evil red robot, but I definitely, yeah, I definitely had a bot crush on Maximilian Um and uh and so that's

awesome too to hear that. Yeah, they The only thing even close to that was when I was working for a newspaper and tell Homes in a Sea. I've interviewed a guy who ran a lokal antique store who helped build the set the giant bed that they created for the film Stephen King's Cat's Eye, because they have a little troll who's like, you know, it's like yeah, big, very little, little tiny guy and he's running around on

on this bed and jumping around. So they had to create this enormous version of a for the scale of the troll. Yeah, and create an enormous children's room with this, like you know, like a bed two stories tall. And he showed me all these pictures on it, so did the No. No, he was enormous. But apparently the guy telling me when I was talking to him that there was an ongoing bet to see, um who could well well to to see who could looks at what they

keep it tamped to? You could sleep in that bed first? Yeah, but but anyway, that but that was cool, but Maximilian is even cooler. So thanks, Bruce, really appreciate that. And um, one little note, Um, so I threw out a question on our Facebook pro wile which is blow the mind. Uh you can look that is blow the mind on Facebook, and we'll also blow the mind on Twitter. But I put out the question what will five hundred years of life due to the human mind, which is similar to

what we're talking about here. Uh. And I put this on the New House Stuff Works forums, So everybody out there, you can log into the forum, create an account, log in, and you you know, you can converse on the Facebook. You can also confers on the forum and respond to various articles, et cetera. Um But a listener by the name of Richard responded, and he says, quote, it is difficult to separate the biological from the mental and the brain.

They're connected, and so characteristics of the body follow into the brain and thus the mind. I believe that the system, limitations, and specs of the brain correspond to the body. It seems that without the assistance of technology, our bodies are meant to survive in the natural world. Between forty and sixty years since the brain mind coevolved with the body, it is reasonable to surmise that the specs are similar for the brain mind. With that said, I think that

we have a certain capacity for experience in memory. When we exceed this capacity, I believe that we begin to feel certain fatigue set in that leads to depression and thus um a, and thus we feel the need to move on. So I thought that was some interesting commentary there from Richard, and uh and uh some other people have already responded with some cool stuff. You know. Yeah, it's very thought provoking. Yeah, So you know, come onto the Facebook or the Twitter or the forums and interact

with us. We'd love to hear your thoughts on all these mind blowing questions. That's right, and you can always drop us a line as well at blow the Mind at house to works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.