Saturday, May 29, 2021

IN the NEWS - Trying to Escape Death

Behold, all souls are mine; 
as the soul of the father, 
so also the soul of the son is mine: 
the soul that sinneth, it shall die. 
Ezekiel 18:4

"Ray Kurzweil, an outspoken futurist and the director of engineering at Google, computers will soon match the capabilities of the human brain. At that point, our consciousness will become intimately mingled with machine intelligence, leading to a kind of immortality.

Kurzweil thinks we’ll follow a similar path to the Singularity, the hypothetical time (around 2029, by his estimate) when the great blurring between humans and computers will occur. If he’s right, questions about what to do with the body at death will then become largely irrelevant.

We can create bodies with nanotechnology, we can create virtual bodies in virtual reality,” Kurzweil says. “I think we’ll have a choice of bodies; we’ll certainly be routinely changing our parent body in virtual reality.”

 

Many scoff at Kurzweil’s vision, questioning not only its technological feasibility but also its philosophical desirability. Fantasizing about immortality keeps people from living their best lives right now, Rosenbloom argues. “It feeds into death denial. When there's no longer a deadline on your life, it takes away a lot of the motivations that we have in our life.”

Like it or not, some forms of digital afterlife are here already, and more elaborate ones are on the way. Just as today’s kids have never laid hands on a VHS cassette, so they may soon find it strange that anyone ever traveled to a distant graveyard rather than activating a virtual memorial experience they can call up anywhere, anytime.

Indeed, for Kurzweil, the singularity, if it happens, won’t be a machine takeover. Instead, he predicts it to become more like a co-existence, where machines reinforce human abilities. Kurzweil predicts that a hybrid AI would become available by the 2030s. This hybrid AI, he explained, would allow human beings to tap directly into the cloud with just their brains, using what he called a neocortex connection." NBC