Digital immortality

Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality")[1] is the hypothetical yet increasingly realistic concept of storing (or emulating) a person's personality in digital substrate, i.e., a computer, robot or cyberspace[2] (mind uploading). The result might look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive.[3][4][5][6] After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and self-improve autonomously (possibly becoming seed AI).

A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal[7] by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.[8][9]

Following the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the 21st century, technological scholars now believe the vision of digital immortality to be imminent—raising not only new technical, but also ethical and legal questions.[10][11] Along these lines, it has been suggested that the emerging field of digital afterlife technology and its impact on human mortality and grief might prompt a new scientific discipline (cyberthanatology).[12]

  1. ^ Farnell, Ross (2000). "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"". Science Fiction Studies. 27 (1): 69–91. JSTOR 4240849.
  2. ^ Graziano, Michael S. A. (2019). Rethinking consciousness: a scientific theory of subjective experience. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-65261-1. OCLC 1084330876.
  3. ^ Parkin, Simon (23 January 2015). "Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality". BBC. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  4. ^ Rothblatt, Martine (2014). Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality. St. Martin's Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4915-3291-1.
  5. ^ Sofka, Carla (February 2012). Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe: For Counselors and Educators. Springer. ISBN 978-0-8261-0732-9.
  6. ^ DeGroot, Doug (5 November 2003). "VideoDIMs as a framework for Digital Immortality Applications". Intelligent Virtual Agents: 4th International Workshop, IVA 2003, Kloster Irsee, Germany, September 15-17, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in ... / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence). Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-20003-1. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  7. ^ Cohan, Peter (20 June 2013). "Google's Engineering Director: 32 Years To Digital Immortality". Forbes. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  8. ^ Lewis, Tanya (17 June 2013). "The Singularity Is Near: Mind Uploading by 2045?". livescience.com. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  9. ^ Strickland, Jonathan (12 April 2011). "How Digital Immortality Works". howstuffworks.com. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  10. ^ Ohman, Carl; Floridi, Luciano (2018). "An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry". Nature Human Behavior. 2 (5): 318–320. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2.
  11. ^ Stein, Jan-Philipp (2021). "Conjuring up the departed in virtual reality: The good, the bad, and the potentially ugly". Psychology of Popular Media. 10 (4): 505–510. doi:10.1037/ppm0000315.
  12. ^ Beaunoyer, Elisabeth; Guitton, Matthieu J. (2021). "Cyberthanathology: Death and beyond in the digital age". Computers in Human Behavior. 122: 106849. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2021.106849.