First - worth linking to a Noam Chomsky's interview titled "
The Singularity is Science Fiction"
Chomsky does not really buy into the Singularity idea - he thinks it's perhaps a useful way to get us to visualize what the future could be, and that in itself may produce social change and new technology, but he thinks it's basically a science fiction idea. Technology doesn't "do" things, humans do, so even if new tech is being invented by old tech, it's still a world of human production.
But that's not really related to the OP, no? You're talking about immortality research, not AI....
Cliff Pickover has a book called
The Heaven Virus, which deals with the concept of "synthetic afterlives". The idea is that in the near future, we'll be able to image your brain and stuff it into a digital environment where it will continue to operate normally. Except instead of interacting with a physical environment, we just simulate a physical environment digitally - when your brain sends a "move your finger" signal, the simulation reads this and gives it the feedback to create that sensation.
So in the novel, a character wakes up in this digital afterlife. Somebody eventually explains that according to his file, he died in a train accident, but luckily, he had his brain imaged a few months beforehand, and at the moment of his death, they released it into this big digital heaven simulation. Pickover's version of heaven is like this incomprehensibly giant mall, where instead of stores, there are different kinds of experiences you can have. Except the simulation is also flawed, so that people don't become completely bored there... they have problems to solve and obstacles to overcome, too... So is it heaven or hell? and that's the main story of the book.
Just as an aside, imagine what we could do with that kind of tech... imagine we could image the brains of some geniuses, and dump them into a digital environment... now imagine that with enough processing power, we can adjust the speed of time within that environment... Allowing our digital researchers to complete their work FASTER than their meatspace counterparts. Imagine if we had the processing power to complete a year of research in an hour of processing time. Imagine if we could take a photo of Hawking's brain so we could continue to use that machinery after the original model has died - kind of like building a car engine based on schematics.
But either way - the YOU who is being imaged will be gone - at best, when you're gone, we'll have something like a hologram of 2Pac, spitting out P3nt attitude and it makes us all feel like you're still around. In the same way that a picture of my late grandma makes me feel like she's still around. But it's not
her, even if that photograph could bake me cookies.
But that leaves immortality drugs -- drugs which defeat or reverse the aging process. There's new movement in that field every few years.
Here's some from 2013.
But it feels like we've been 10 minutes from cracking the secrets of aging since like 1970, right? I mean, in the book Cosmic Trigger, doesn't RAW think the end of aging may be right around the corner? And that was 1977! If we ever crack that egg, it will definitely change everything we know about everything. Visualize hot chicks in bikinis at spring break showing you pictures of their great great grandkids. And they
all look like 24 year olds.
But I dunno, it seems so far off, I wouldn't start making long term plans around it just yet. I mean, you won't be able to afford it anyway.
