Future gender equality – legally recognise everyone’s male and female sides

Equality is a slippery concept. While equality as a nice vague term is something everyone seem to agree is a good thing, the nice ideal and practical implementation are different things. The new European Commission sex equality laws on pensions and car insurance are a triumph of stupidity. Women and men must now be charged the same amount but not receive the same amount. Women  live longer, so get far more pension, and have fewer road accidents, so are insuring against a much lower risk. But fairness apparently only relates to the amount paid, not that which is received. In both cases it is now illegal to give men and women the same return on the same investment, and how much you get for your money now depends mainly on your sex.

Before I get onto the serious bits, it is fun to imagine the next EC fairness rulings if the same people are in charge. Men and women should get different sized loaves of bread when they buy one, or get a super-sized Big Mac Meal for the same price as a woman pays for the small one, since it is only fair that both must have their hunger satisfied for the same price. But women should pay less for gas, since they often feel the cold more but all must end up with the same level of comfort. Men will be able to get bigger cars for the same price because they need them to achieve the same level of social status, whereas most women are happy with small cars, but men will be faced with cosmetics, clothes and tampon taxes to make sure they compensate for the unfair extra load women must pay for these essential items. Men should be able to travel Premium Economy for the same price as a woman goes Economy to get the same relative seat size. Women should get more mobile minutes and texts for the same tariff because they like to communicate more. And so on.

OK, enough. This is clearly silly. It is not really discriminatory for men and women to be charged different amounts for different things. If women are insuring against a given level of risk or buying a pension for an expected number of years, they should be charged exactly the same for it as a man buying the same insurance or expected length of pension. Women and men should also be paid exactly the same for the same piece of work, equally well done. Legislating that everyone must be charged the same price or paid the same for the same product is a fair approach. That allows a wide range of factors to be fairly taken into account such as lifestyle, location, profession, genetics and so on.

Is it really silly though? At first glance, I’d instinctively and immediately say yes. On deeper inspection, let’s see. I’m not so sure.

Of course, sex is only one dimension of gender on which to level. Sexuality is related but different. On gay rights, a lot of equality has already been achieved, but the battles still go on. Gay marriage is coming, and already there are demands to re-level the overshoot by allowing heterosexual civil partnerships. It is a sensitive issue for both sides at the moment so I’ll leave that one alone until the dust settles.

A third related dimension that needs levelling is gender identification. A range of transgender issues are often covered in the same debates and legislation as gay rights but gender identification and presentation are very different from sexual preference and some issues get lost in discussions.

There has been some progress. Already, to some degree at least, transsexuals mustn’t be discriminated against. I have to confess I am no expert here, but as far as I can tell, a transsexual may dress how they like at work and be protected. In some regions a post-op transsexual may have their legal documents such as passports and birth certificates amended to show their new sex. But there is more to gender dysphoria than transsexualism. Not everyone with every degree of gender dysphoria goes through a sex change operation. There is a wide range, from full post-op transsexuals at one end to occasional transvestites and gender-swapping computer-gamers or chat room participants at the other. Many of the latter wouldn’t even include themselves as having any gender dysphoria – cross-dressing or acting a different gender in a chat room or a game may leave them otherwise fully gender-aligned and many are otherwise fully heterosexual. But some would-be transsexuals feel locked in the closet, staying in their born sex even though they inwardly identify with another one. Their family situation, lifestyle, career or aversion to treatment (lengthy, traumatic, painful and expensive) may prevent them from having a truly free choice to swap. But should that stop them from having legal equality of recognition? It is obviously hard to give someone a different status if they can’t or won’t ask for it. But going at least one step in the right direction, it seems to me that if a person can already change gender and have the legal right to be treated (almost) fully as a member of the newly adopted sex, then someone should be able to get that same gender recognition without any operation or medical procedures. If they feel a different gender inside than their physical body shows outside, they should be able to choose which legal status to have, with or without treatment or surgery. They should not even have to dress differently to qualify.

If anyone can choose to have any gender legally, it could actually solve some problems and create new ones. For example, even if gay marriage is overthrown, one member of a same-sex couple could just declare themselves the female and one the male, even if only to cut through the admin on the big day. In some gay and lesbian relationships, one partner adopts a female and one a male role, and it would allow them to have that legally recognised if they wished.

The elephant in the room is to do with duration and scope of the change. Does gender change have to be permanent, or could you change back in a few years, or could you swap your legal gender every time you fill in a form? How many hoops do you have to jump through to get the legal gender you want? Would it be like the 2 years living as the other gender that currently is typically demanded before you can get treatment, or like the eight week wait for a new passport, or could you just tick any gender box any time you like with no procedures to follow or penalties for doing so? Can you simultaneously be male for insurance and female for child benefit or pension? Would all changing rooms and toilets have to become unisex? If someone identifies with a different gender character in a game or chat-room, should they be able to legally use that alternate identity elsewhere alongside their different real life one? Could two men get a civil partnership as lesbians? There are many real issues that arise along with a good many red herrings. But that doesn’t make the problem go away. For many people, gender dysphoria is clearly not as simple as being 100% male or female. They may feel one way outwardly and another inwardly and it may change from day to day, from situation to situation, and they may feel both genders at once or at a varying point on a grey scale.

So on further inspection, gender can be a much more volatile, dynamic and transient factor than it often appears. There is no sole, fixed or steady link between outward and inward gender. People may have a male and a female side at the same time and may express either or both or any combination at will.

If we want to make true equality of gender, we will have to reconcile laws with this fact and I think the only way to do so is to make gender absolutely irrelevant in all laws. We have to remove any and all references to gender.

The deeper inspection ends up more in agreement with the rulings that seemed so silly on first inspection. The ruling says effectively that you can’t take into account the sex of the person. Extending that throughout the law would automatically allow gay marriage, remove all the asymmetries between men and women in marriage and family law, ensure equal pay for equal work and so on.

Another way to do this is to legally recognise both a person’s male and female side, for everyone, even if they don’t choose to recognise or express it. If everyone has an equally valid male and female legal identity all of the time, then the distinctions become irrelevant and may even disappear.

Paradoxically, I suspect this would actually reduce gender dysphoria too. The clear distinction between male and female forces people to choose an assignment for themselves and others. If that distinction is removed and everyone’s male and female sides are recognised, people may feel less dysphoric. The incentive to change reduces.

Of course, not everyone thinks of themselves as having a male and female side. Having the right to does not make it compulsory, so that should not be a problem.

We are left with one big problem though, and it is the one I initially highlighted. In general, women do actually have fewer accidents than men, and women do actually live longer. Short of forcing women to have car accidents and shooting them if they get too old, there isn’t a lot we can do to stop that, and I wouldn’t recommend that course of action. So we seem to be left with the initial incompatibility of equality in the cultural, legal world, and equality in the physical world. It reminds me of the problem highlighted in Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’, where they are discussing gender equality and a man complains of being oppressed because he can’t have babies. He accepts that he can’t, he just wants the legal right to. That really does sum it up. Life isn’t fair. We aren’t equal. The best we can hope for is legal equality.

But legal equality only seems to be incompatible with the real world, it isn’t really. We can remove any references to gender in the law and still charge everyone for what they get. It is perfectly possible to make a pension that gives an entirely fair personalised product with no mention of the gender of the person buying it in the contract. Each person has a particular personal risk, whether driving or possessing a combination of genes that indicate a particular probability of drawing pension for a particular duration. Eliminating legal notions of gender would still allow fairness or product pricing. It might even make it much fairer.

So, what the EC were doing wasn’t entirely silly, they were on the right lines. Hopefully, if they don’t outlaw personal products, we can still have fairness as well as equality.

Has the sisterhood forgotten older women?

We just went through International Women’s Day and I was one of many people asked to write an essay on the above topic for a compendium of essays for the International Longevity Centre, highlighting problems faced by older women and asking if they have been forgotten by feminism.

The pdf of the whole compendium is downloadable from

http://www.ilcuk.org.uk/index.php/publications/publication_details/has_the_sisterhood_forgotten_older_women

At the moment of writing, it is available via Internet Explorer but not Chrome. I haven’t tested other browsers.

What will your next body be like?

Many engineers, including me, think that some time around 2050, we will be able to make very high quality links between the brains and machines. To such an extent that it will thereafter be possible (albeit expensive for some years) to arrange that most of your mind – your thinking, memories, even sensations and emotions, could reside mainly in the machine world. Some (perhaps some memories that are rarely remembered for example) may not be suited to such external accessibility, but the majority should be.

The main aim of this research area is to design electronic solutions to immortality. But actually, that is only one application, and I have discussed electronic immortality a few times now :

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/how-to-live-forever/

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/increasing-longevity-and-electronic-immortality-3bn-people-to-live-forever/

What I want to focus on this time is that you don’t have to die to benefit. If your mind is so well connected, you could inhabit a new body, without having to vacate your existing one. Furthermore, there really isn’t much to stop you getting a new body, using that, and dumping your old one in a life support system. You won’t do that, but you could. Either way, you could get a new body or an extra one, and as I asked in passing in my last blog, what will your new body look like?

Firstly, why would you want to do this? Well, you might be old, suffering the drawbacks of ageing, not as mobile and agile as you want to be, you might be young, but not as pretty or fit as you want to be, or maybe you would prefer to be someone else, like your favourite celebrity, a top sports hero, or maybe you’d prefer to be a different gender perhaps? Or maybe you just generally feel you’d like to have the chance to start over, do it differently. Maybe you want to explore a different lifestyle, or maybe it is a way of expressing your artistic streak. So, with all these reasons and more, there will be plenty of demand for wanting a new body and a potentially new life.

Options

Lets explore some of the options. Don’t be too channelled by assuming you even have to be human. There is a huge range of potential here, but some restrictions will be necessary too. Lots of things will be possible, but not permissible.

Firstly, tastes will vary a lot. People may want their body to look professional for career reasons, others will prefer sexy, others sporty. Most people will only have one at a time, so will choose it carefully. A bit like buying a house. But not everyone will be conservative.

Just like buying a house, some rich people will want to own several for different circumstances, and many others would want several but can’t afford it, so there could be a rental market. But as I will argue shortly, you probably won’t be allowed to use too many at the same time, so that means we will need some form of storage, and ethics dictates that the ‘spare’ bodies mustn’t be ‘alive’ or conscious. There are lots of ways to do this. Using a detachable brain is one, or not to put a brain in at all, using empty immobile husks that are switched on and then linked to your remote mind in the cloud to become alive. This sounds preferable to me. Most likely they would be inorganic. I don’t think it will be ethically acceptable to grow cloned bodies in some sort of farm and remove their brains, so using some sort of android is probably best all round.

So, although you can do a lot with biotech, and there are some options there, I do think that most replacement bodies, if not all, will be androids using synthetic materials and AI’s, not biological bodies.

As for materials, it is already possible to buy lifelike full sized dolls, but the materials will continue to improve, as will robotics. You could look how you want to look, and your new body would be as youthful, strong, and flexible as you want or need it to be.

Now that we’re in that very broad android/robot creativity space, you could be any species, fantasy character, alien, robot, android or pretty much any imaginary form that could be fabricated. You could be any size or shape from a bacterium to an avatar for an AI spaceship (such as Rommy’s avatar in Andromeda, or Edi in Mass Effect. Noteworthy of course is that both Rommy and Edi felt compelled to get bodies too, so that they could maximise their usefuleness, even though they were both useful in their pure AI form.)

You could be any age. It might be very difficult to make a body that can grow, so you might need a succession of bodies if you want to start off as a child again. Already, warning bells are ringing in my head and I realise that we will need to restrict options and police things. Do we really want to allow adults people to assume the bodies of children, with all the obvious paedophilic dangers that would bring? Probably not, and I suspect this will be one of the first regulations restricting choice. You could become young again, but the law will make it so your appearance must remain adult. For the same obvious reasons, you wouldn’t be allowed to become something like a teddy bear or doll or any other form that would provide easy access to children.

You could be any gender. I wrote about future gender potential recently in:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/the-future-of-gender/

There will be lots of genders and sexuality variations in that time frame.  Getting a new or an extra body with a different gender will obviously appeal to people with transgender desires, but it might go further and appeal to those who want a body of each sex too. Why not? You can be perfectly comfortable with your sexuality in your existing gender, but  still choose a different gender for your new body. If you can have a body in each gender, many people will want to. You may not be restricted to one or two bodies, so you might buy several bodies of different ages, genders, races and appearances. You could have a whole village of variants of you. Again, obvious restrictions loom large. Regulation would not allow people, however rich or powerful, to have huge numbers of bodies running around at the same time. The environmental, social, political and military impacts would get too large. I can’t say what the limits will be, but there will certainly be limits. But within those limits, you could have a lot of flexibility, and fun.

You could be any species. An alien, or an elf, or a dog. Technology can do most shapes and as for how it might feel, noone knows how elves or dogs or aliens feel anyway, so you have a clean slate to work with, customising till you are satisfied that what you create matches your desire. But again, should elves be allowed to interbreed with people, or aliens? Or dogs? The technology is exciting, but it does create a whole new genre of ethical, regulatory and policing problems too. But then again, we need to create new jobs anyway.

Other restrictions on relationships might spring up. If you have two or more bodies, will they be allowed to have sex with each other, marry, adopt kids, or be both parents of your own kids. Bear in mind cloning may well be legal by then and artificial wombs may even exist, so being both parents of your own cloned offspring is possible. If they do have sex, you will be connected into both bodies, so will control and experience both sides. It is worth noting here that you will also be able to link into other people’s nervous systems using similar technology, so the idea of experiencing the ‘other’ side of a sex act will not be unique to using your own bodies.

What about being a superhero? You could do that too, within legal limits, and of course those stretch a bit for police and military roles. Adding extra senses and capabilities is easy if your mind is connected to an entire network of sensors, processors and actuators. Remember, the body you use is just an android so if your superheroing activity gets you killed, it is just a temporary inconvenience. Claim on insurance or expenses and buy a new body for the next performance.

In this future world, you may think it would be hard to juggle mindsets between different bodies, but today’s computer games give us some insight. Many people take on roles every day, as aliens, wizards or any fantasy in their computer gaming. They still achieve sanity in their main life, showing that it is almost certainly possible to safely juggle multiple bodies with their distinct roles and appearances too. The human mind is pretty versatile, and a healthy adult mind is also very robust. With future AI assistance and monitoring it should be even safer. So it ought to be safe to explore and have fun in a world where you can use a different body at will, maybe for an hour or maybe for a lifetime, and even inhabit a few at once.

So, again, what will your next body look like?

Things that don’t work but could

Avatar 0.0

There has been some activity in recent weeks on the development of avatars, as in the film, or at least some agreement on feasibility and intention to develop, with real actual funding.

The concept is that you could inhabit another body and feel it is yours. I have written many times about direct brain links, superhuman AIs, shared consciousness and so on, since 1992, and considered a variety of ways of connecting. It has been fun exploring the possibilities and some of the obvious applications and dangers. For a few years it seemed to be just Kurzweil and me, but gradually a number of people joined in, often labelling themselves transhumanists. Now that it is more obvious how the technology might spin out, the ideas are becoming quite mainstream and no longer considered the realm of cranks. Many quite respectable scientists are now involved.

Google DARPA and avatar and you’ll see a lot of recent commentary on the DARPA project to create surrogate soldiers, just like we see them in the film. Not tomorrow, but by around 2045. Why then? Well, 2045 is the date when some of us expect to be able to do a full direct brain link, at least in prototype. I think with a lot of funding and the right brains involved, it is entirely achievable then.

But DARPA won’t have it all to themselves. The Russians are also looking at it, and hosted a recent conference. Dmitry Itskov, founder of Russia 2045, has been given permission to develop his own avatar program. Check this out:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44938297/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/does-future-hold-avatar-like-bodies-us/#.T0YoIPFmKom

From their conference press release:

The first Global Future Congress 2045 (GF2045) was held on Feb.17-20 in Moscow, where 56 world leading physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers met to discuss breakthroughs in life extension technologies and draft a resolution to the United Nations setting the radical lengthening of human lifespan and the creation of Avatars as a priority for preservation of humankind.

About 500 people attended the three-day event featuring presentations by over 50 scientists including inventor Ray Kurzweil, Microsoft Research Director Rane Johnson-Stempson, and Astronaut Sergey Krichevskiy. The event was focused on breakthrough technologies that could create a synthetic body-vessel for the mind, offering humans unlimited prolongation of life to the point of immortality…..

Among the featured life-extension projects is “2045” a Russia-based Avatar project consisting of three phases. First, to create a humanoid robot named “Avatar”, and a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface system. Next, to create a life support system between the “Avatar” and the human brain. The final step is creating an artificial brain in which to transfer the original individual consciousness.

Development of a cybernetic body. This is about as advanced as it gets currently. You can link to nerves, and transmit signals to and from them to capture and relay sensations. But this will progress quickly over coming years as we start seeing strong positive feedback among the nano-bio-info-cogno disciplines. I’m just annoyed that I am not just starting my career about now, it would be an excellent time to do so. But at least I’ll get pleasure from saying ‘I told you so’ a few times.

I won’t repeat all the exciting possibilities for the military, sex and games industries, or electronic immortality, I’ve blogged enough on these. For now, it’s just great to see the field moving another important step further from sci-fi into the realms of reality

 

Zombies are coming!

Zombies are coming. They might arrive around 2075. I like Zombies, or more accurately, I like killing them. I shoot hundreds of them every week on my Xbox, in games like Half Life, Oblivion and Dead Space. There are a fair few zombie films around too, evidence that we just love being terrified by zombies. I think perhaps the big attraction is that they are extremely scary when done right, fictional, only a bit human-like, and of course dead anyway, so it doesn’t cause any guilt when you kill them again. So, I got to thinking whether they will always be fictional, or whether there is some prospect of them arriving, and if so, what can we do about it? Will it be like the computer games and movies, or different? Here goes. Bear with me, since you need to look first at the basic foundations of the technology platform on which their arrival will depend.
As I outlined already, nanotechnology is feeding in to neuroscience by enabling finer probes that can assist scientists in reverse engineering it. Biotechnology and IT are slowly converging, with insights in AI helping brain science and vice versa, but also in that we can now make rudimentary connections between IT and our nervous systems. Synthetic biology is rapidly getting to grips with basic tools and techniques used by nature, and improving on some of them, replicating others, to make entirely synthetic components of future biological systems. We are already designing bacteria to do specific protein engineering tasks, break down waste, and provide sensory capability So, lots of interesting tech is going on.
Listing a few of the important (from a Zombie perspective anyway) outcomes of such research, we can now connect IT to nerve tissue (and the connections are rapidly becoming finer thanks to nanotech). We can modify DNA and simulate and then assemble a wide range of proteins (although this is still very limited and very slow). We are starting to understand some of the basic principles of how to make smart and conscious machines and are already very good at distributed processing, self organisation, sensing and data storage and distribution. In the not too far future, we will be able to enhance human senses by linking various synthetic sensors to our brains. We will be able to link to peripheral nerves to pick up sensations and relay them across networks, stimulating equivalent nerves in other people to create the same or at least similar sensations in them. In IT, we have already progressed some way along the multi-core and distributed processing time-lines, and it is foreseeable that in the far future, computing my well be done by billions of tiny processors suspended in a gel, using optical interconnects. In fact, using progress in biotech and synthetic biology, it is equally foreseeable that this will be done by using bacteria to assemble the IT in their own cells, and using their own energy to power the circuits.
So, round about the time we figure out how the brain works well enough to connect properly to it, we will also be designing conscious machines and very probably using smart bacteria as the platform for them, creating and powering the electronic components in what is best described as smart yogurt. Looking at the basic physics and maths, it is clear that a smart yogurt could have as much raw processing power as all the human brains in Europe! Already scary, but let’s not go all Terminatory just yet, Zombies are much more fun.
Smart yogurt is actually really scary stuff. It would look (and maybe even taste) just like today’s. But each cell would contain electronic circuits, that can be connected to the circuits in other bacteria using optical signals (bioluminescence for example) to make very sophisticated circuits for all kinds of sensing, storage, comms and processing. And because they are still viable bacteria, they will be able to survive and flourish anywhere there is a decent food supply. Being very smart collectively (each yogurt could have an IQ equivalent to the whole of the EU), they will be able to genetically redesign their own offspring to capture and colonise other biological niches. They will be able to design offspring so that they can penetrate the human body and bypass the immune system, or to enter and remain in the brain (let’s not even call these bacteria, since they are more likely to be nothing like natural bacteria when they’ve finished, they may well be as small as viruses but with much more sophisticated capability). Inside the brain, they might connect to individual synapses and monitor and signal the electrical activity to their external allies. These allies might then create an electronic replica of that person’s brain, thereby replicating their mind. They might map out the connections to work out the signals the person uses to move their limbs, to speak or do anything else.
This obviously provides the means to remote control the person’s body, and to intercept or over-ride any thoughts they might have. Smart yogurt could take over your mind, over-ride your brain at will, and to control your body as easily as you can. Keeping a person’s body alive is optional, but obviously comes with advantages of maintaining its capability. Keeping the brain alive is less advantageous, as the yogurt can take over and replace any and all of its functions. So we are likely to have a few varieties of zombies. Some will be brain-dead, but otherwise perfectly healthy. Others will be fully alive but with their minds under supervision and subject to over-ride. They might know what is happening to them but be powerless to resist. Others will have no awareness of their predicament and think they are fine even though they have been enslaved. And finally, we may have some that are fully and properly dead, brought back to an animated state by the yogurt taking over all the main electrical functions while the brain itself is potentially even missing. We could even have headless zombies!
Killing these zombies would probably work much like it does in the games and movies. They all need a body to be in at least partial working order, and if they are going to get around, that means they need a circulatory and respiratory system, and legs (or a mobility scooter at least). So you could kill them by fire, chopping them up, or shooting them in the heart, or various other ways.
The headless and dead zombies sound quite disturbing, but they would be in small minority. The great majority of zombies would look much like normal people. This is more like ‘The Body Snatchers’ than ‘Dead-Space’. How much they will worry us depends mainly on whether they are aggressive. Terry Pratchett wrote amusingly about a zombie being gainfully employed as a solicitor. If they use the technology suggested here, many zombies could be fully functioning, valuable members of the community, even leaders and captains of industry. For a while anyway. But some might be violent. We might try to use zombies extensively in the army or police, for obvious reasons. But if they are as smart as or smarter than people, they will soon have their own culture and inevitably come into conflict with regular people. They might rise against us in a war against humans. Trouble is, if they have superior senses and faster brains and more intelligence and can communicate directly across the net, they will be pretty good competition. We will probably lose.
So, zombies are possible, plausible, even likely, given what we already can deduce about the future of technology. And the time-frame for this possibility is sooner than you would hope. Depending on our reactions and adaptations, they could become a threat to human existence. I’m going back on Dead Space to improve my aim.
The one possibly good thing is that as a way of wiping out life on earth, zombies are only one of 150 alternatives that are feasible this century. We might not last long enough to be killed by zombies. I am not sure if that is good or bad.

How to live forever

MIT were showing on Horizon how they can activate areas of a mouse brain using light beams. That’s fine if you have optical fibres going into the brain. I have always considered that being able to stimulate and read and individual cells in the brain is the main key to immortality – it allows you to make a copy outside and migrate you thoughts and memories across until that becomes your main mind platform, then your brain doesn’t matter. Combining the ideas, if you have some sort of photo active cell as per the MIT group, and you can create the light using addressing of photorealism near those cells, then injecting addressable photo-diodes that can be IP addressed should allow you to interact with brain cells without needing optical fibres. You’d just need a radio link.

We can’t reasonably expect to inject one photo-diode for each brain cell, but we could make all the brain cells photo-sensitive using viruses to carry the genes, or electro-sensitive. Doesn’t matter which. Once every cell is sensitised, we can impose local structure using self organisation techniques and use that as mapping for signalling. Again this could use viruses to introduce the genes needed. This will allow each cell to be mapped relative to each of its neighbours and a full map of the brain made, with the ability to have two-way comms with each individual cell. Once we have that, the brain can signal two way to an external replica, in which the processing can be far faster, the storage far more secure and long-lived, emotional control far superior, and the sensing better. As you migrate your mind gradually onto the superior platform, your brain matters less and less, till one day when it dies, you will barely notice any drop in your mental function.

I’ll write more detail on the various parts of this in later blogs. Now I have another more intersting one to write.

Increasing longevity and electronic immortality. 3Bn people to live forever.

I have written and lectured many times on this topic, but it’s always worth doing an occasional update.  Anyone under 35 today will likely have access to electronic immortality and live forever.Well, not forever, but until the machines running their minds fail. How? Read on.

Scientists can already replicate the functions of small parts of the brain, and can essentially replace them in lab animals. Every year, this moves on a little, for all the best reasons. They aren’t mad scientists, they are trying to find solutions to enormous human problems such as  senility, strokes and general loss of brain function due to normal ageing. These destroy parts of the brain function, so if we can work out how to augment the remaining brain to replace lost function, then that should be a good thing. But although these things start in medical treatment, the military also has an interest in making super-soldiers, with faster reactions, better senses, superior intelligence and so on. And the rest of us present a large and attractive market for cosmetic use of brain augmentation.

Most of us would happily pay out for the cosmetic version of all of these things once they become available and safe. I want a higher IQ, perfect memory, better creativity, modifiable personality, enhanced senses and so on. You probably do too., though your list may not be exactly the same as mine. The wish list is long and many of the items on it will become available this century.

The timeline goes from today’s simple implants and sensory links all the way to a full direct link to most parts of the brain by 2045-2050. This will allow 2-way communication between your organic brain and electronic enhancement, which could physically be almost anywhere, though transmission time limits how far away some functions can be. What starts as a cosmetic enhancement to senses or memory will gradually be enhanced to add IQ, telepathic communication, shared minds and many other areas. Over time, more and more of your mind will actually be housed in the machine world. Some of it will still run in your organic brain, but a reducing proportion, so your brain will become less and less important to your mind’s ongoing existence . At some point your organic body will die, and you’ll lose that bit, but hey, it’s no big deal, most of the bits you actually use are elsewhere. But medical advances are fixing many of the things that might otherwise kill you, and pushing your date of death further into the future. That buys you more time to make the migration. How much time?

For young people, the rate of medical advancement expected over the next few decades is such that their expected death date is actually moving further away.

Let’s clarify that: for anyone under 35, each year, for quite a long period starting soonish, more than a year will be added to their expected lifespan, so they won’t be getting closer to dying, they will be getting further away. But only for a time. That rate of development can’t continue forever. It will eventually slow down. But realistically, for the developed world and for many in the developing world too, under 35s will live into their late 90s or 100s. If you’re 35 today, that means you  probably aren’t going to die until after 2075, and that is well after the electronic immortality option kicks in. If it appears on the market in the 2050s, as I believe it will for rich or important people, by 2080, it will be cheap and routine and pretty much anyone will have it as an option.

So, anyone under 35 has a very good chance of being able to carry on electronically after their body dies. They will buy some sort of android body, or maybe just rent one when they want to do something in the physical world and otherwise stay in the cloud. Space and resource limitations may dictate how much real world presence you are permitted.

How many people does this apply to. Median age in the world at the moment in almost exactly 30. 3.5Bn pople are under 30, but some will die too early to benefit. Another 500M in the 30-35 range will make up for the younger ones that die from accidents, wars, disease, or disasters. Then we need to discount for those that won’t be able to afford it. After much hand waving and guesstimating, a reasonable estimate of 3Bn results for those that will have reasonable access to electronic immortality, and will probably live to around 100 before that. Wow! We don’t just have the first person alive who will live electronically for hundreds of years after their body dies. We have the first 3Bn.

They won’t live forever. The Earth won’t last forever, nor will the rest of the universe. But they will be able to live until someone destroys the equipment or switches them off. Wars or terrorism could do that, or even a future society that turns against the idea. It is far from risk free. But, with a bit of luck maybe they could expect to live for a few hundred years after they ‘die’.

I know I’ve made the joke many times, but it’s still worth repeating. Soon, death will no longer be a career problem.