The future of death

This one is a cut and paste from my book You Tomorrow.

Although age-related decline can be postponed significantly, it will eventually come. But that is just biological decline. In a few decades, people will have their brains linked to the machine world and much of their mind will be online, and that opens up the strong likelihood that death is not inevitable, and in fact anyone who expects to live past 2070 biologically (and rich people who can get past 2050) shouldn’t need to face death of their mind. Their bodies will eventually die, but their minds can live on, and an android body will replace the biological one they’ve lost.

Death used to be one of the great certainties of life, along with taxes. But unless someone under 35 now is unfortunate enough to die early from accident or disease, they have a good chance of not dying at all. Let’s explore that.

Genetics and other biotechnology will work with advanced materials technology and nanotechnology to limit and even undo damage caused by disease and age, keeping us young for longer, eventually perhaps forever. It remains to be seen how far we get with that vision in the next century, but we can certainly expect some progress in that area. We won’t get biological immortality for a good while, but if you can move into a high quality android body, who cares?

With this combination of technologies locked together with IT in a positive feedback loop, we will certainly eventually develop the technology to enable a direct link between the human brain and the machine, i.e. the descendants of today’s computers. On the computer side, neural networks are already the routine approach to many problems and are based on many of the same principles that neurons in the brain use. As this field develops, we will be able to make a good emulation of biological neurons. As it develops further, it ought to be possible on a sufficiently sophisticated computer to make a full emulation of a whole brain. Progress is already happening in this direction.

Meanwhile, on the human side, nanotechnology and biotechnology will also converge so that we will have the capability to link synthetic technology directly to individual neurons in the brain. We don’t know for certain that this is possible, but it may be possible to measure the behaviour of each individual neuron using this technology and to signal this behaviour to the brain emulation running in the computer, which could then emulate it. Other sensors could similarly measure and allow emulation of the many chemical signalling mechanisms that are used in the brain. The computer could thus produce an almost perfect electronic equivalent of the person’s brain, neuron by neuron. This gives us two things.

Firstly, by doing this, we would have a ‘backup’ copy of the person’s brain, so that in principle, they can carry on thinking, and effectively living, long after their biological body and brain has died. At this point we could claim effective immortality. Secondly, we have a two way link between the brain and the computer which allows thought to be executed on either platform and to be signalled between them.

There is an important difference between the brain and computer already that we may be able to capitalise on. In the brain’s neurons, signals travel at hundreds of metres per second. In a free space optical connection, they travel at hundreds of millions of metres per second, millions of times faster. Switching speeds are similarly faster in electronics. In the brain, cells are also very large compared to the electronic components of the future, so we may be able to reduce the distances over which the signals have to travel by another factor of 100 or more. But this assumes we take an almost exact representation of brain layout. We might be able to do much better than this. In the brain, we don’t appear to use all the neurons, (some are either redundant or have an unknown purpose) and those that we do use in a particular process are often in groups that are far apart. Reconfigurable hardware will be the norm in the 21^st century and we may be able to optimize the structure for each type of thought process. Rearranging the useful neurons into more optimal structures should give another huge gain.

This means that our electronic emulation of the brain should behave in a similar way but much faster – maybe billions of times faster! It may be able to process an entire lifetime’s thoughts in a second or two. But even there are several opportunities for vast improvement. The brain is limited in size by a variety of biological constraints. Even if there were more space available, it could not be made much more efficient by making it larger, because of the need for cooling, energy and oxygen supply taking up ever more space and making distances between processors larger. In the computer, these constraints are much more easily addressable, so we could add large numbers of additional neurons to give more intelligence. In the brain, many learning processes stop soon after birth or in childhood. There need be no such constraints in computer emulations, so we could learn new skills as easily as in our infancy. And best of all, the computer is not limited by the memory of a single brain – it has access to all the world’s information and knowledge, and huge amounts of processing outside the brain emulation. Our electronic brain could be literally the size of the planet – the whole internet and all the processing and storage connected to it.

With all these advances, the computer emulation of the brain could be many orders of magnitude superior to its organic equivalent, and yet it might be connected in real time to the original. We would have an effective brain extension in cyberspace, one that gives us immeasurably improved performance and intelligence. Most of our thoughts might happen in the machine world, and because of the direct link, we might experience them as if they had occurred inside our head.

Our brains are in some ways equivalent in nature to how computers were before the age of the internet. They are certainly useful, but communication between them is slow and inefficient. However, when our brains are directly connected to machines, and those machines are networked, then everyone else’s brains are also part of that network, so we have a global network of people’s brains, all connected together, with all the computers too.

So we may soon eradicate death. By the time today’s children are due to die, they will have been using brain extensions for many years, and backups will be taken for granted. Death need not be traumatic for our relatives. They will soon get used to us walking around in an android body. Funerals will be much more fun as the key participant makes a speech about what they are expecting from their new life. Biological death might still be unpleasant, but it need no longer be a career barrier.

In terms of timescales, rich people might have this capability by 2050 and the rest of us some time before 2070. Your life expectancy biologically is increasing every year, so even if you are over 35, you have a pretty good chance of surviving long enough to gain. Half the people alive today are under 35 and will almost certainly not die fully. Many more are under 50 and some of them will live on electronically too. If you are over 50, the chances are that you will be the last generation of your family ever to have a full death.

As a side-note, there are more conventional ways of achieving immortality. Some Egyptian pharaohs are remembered because of their great pyramids. A few philosophers, artists, engineers and scientists have left such great works that they are remembered millennia later. And of course, on a small scale, for the rest of us, making an impression on those around us keeps your memory going a few generations. Writing a book immortalises your words. And you may have a multimedia headstone on your grave, or one that at least links into augmented reality to bring up your old web page of social networking site profile. But frankly, I am with Woody Allen on this one “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying”. I just hope the technology arrives early enough.

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.