Would You Do This To Cheat Death?

OneEyedDiva

OneEyedDiva

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A friend of mine told me about the Amazon series Upload about a young man who's nearly killed in a car accident. Thinking he's going to die when he gets to the hospital, his rich girlfriend convinces him to "upload" his consciousness. He exists digitally in a ritzy place that seemingly has anything an uploaded person could want. It allows for continued communication with the living, even romantic and sexual encounters via their advanced technological achievements. It's set, not 50 or 100 years in the future but in 2033.

About two years ago, I read a story about the work being done to advance the possibility of uploading our consciousness to a computer or AI, in a sense keeping us alive. I saw a special featuring Joe Rogan in which a woman uploaded her girlfriend's memories into a robot. The robot was able to converse with Rogan to his astonishment. What are the ramifications? Would you do this to stay "alive" if you could? This article shares the opinions about uploading consciousness by experts in related fields.
https://gizmodo.com/will-we-ever-be-able-to-upload-a-mind-to-a-new-body-1822622161
 

Recently, HBO had a very good series that included this as part of the plot. It was called Years and Years, and takes place in the very near future, and includes the ability to upload at least part of your brain into "the cloud." The teenagers in the story are wildly enthusiastic about it, but with one of them, something goes terribly wrong.

Less extreme, the kids have some minor kind of surgery where a chip is implanted into their body, turning their hands into virtual phones. They can use all the technological abilities of a phone without actually having to hold a phone in their hands; the phone is the chip in their bodies. Disturbingly, this doesn't seem so farfetched to me.

It's not really a science fiction story, though. It's about a middle class British family caught up in all the changes, including the election of a horrible, dictatorial prime minister played by Emma Thompson. It's a good series; check it out.
 

Say, that it was possible to duplicate what is living tissue- your brain, into a living computer program? Would I go for it? Leaving religion out of the equation, considering the alternative, I would have to say yes. Damn it. wouldn't you know. We got from fretting over glucose levels to fretting over battery levels.. Life ain't fare.

On thinking it over, that might be a good way to go- some kind of living computer program. Put the computer in a "deep" space ship, launch it. Put the program on "sleep". It takes a gazillion years to get to where it's supposed to go. The program wakes up, we do what we would do if we were biologically alive. During the voyage, you wouldn't have to feed us, need air, get rid of wastes- the perfect long time travelers.
 
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OneEyedDiva said:
A friend of mine told me about the Amazon series Upload about a young man who's nearly killed in a car accident. Thinking he's going to die when he gets to the hospital, his rich girlfriend convinces him to "upload" his consciousness. He exists digitally in a ritzy place that seemingly has anything an uploaded person could want. It allows for continued communication with the living, even romantic and sexual encounters via their advanced technological achievements. It's set, not 50 or 100 years in the future but in 2033.

About two years ago, I read a story about the work being done to advance the possibility of uploading our consciousness to a computer or AI, in a sense keeping us alive. I saw a special featuring Joe Rogan in which a woman uploaded her girlfriend's memories into a robot. The robot was able to converse with Rogan to his astonishment. What are the ramifications? Would you do this to stay "alive" if you could? This article shares the opinions about uploading consciousness by experts in related fields.
https://gizmodo.com/will-we-ever-be-able-to-upload-a-mind-to-a-new-body-1822622161
Click to expand...
Definitely makes one think.

Myself, I don't think so. With some 7.5 billion people in the world, I feel unique in the sense that there isn't another one of me, and what I was born with is staying with me right till the end, and wherever I go when all is said and done, so, too, will my consciousness.
 
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