HOW TO LIVE FOREVER
Resource Review
This is an interesting exercise – to read through the ideas of my predecessors. I felt confused at first because it’s much more common to deal with the new articles from savants every week. But then I was coming across the familiar names of people with whom I started studying in the UBC in 2021, and it felt so good to hear their voices in my head again. Thank you for this brilliant activity, David and Ping! It’s beneficial from the point of view of technology (only recent concepts present in those posts while books and articles contain solid, yet a bit outdated info) and from the perspective of human relations. In a way, you made us all immortal here!
So, in the Knowledge Mill, “Mobile Technology” category and “I want to See Some Day …” section, I was mostly curious about a future of technology and appreciated the concerns of my peers about a technology available now (preferred: longer battery life, more appropriate translators, wardrobe advisors, enhanced Google maps etc.) and further ahead (for example, quicker and more reliable medical non-touch devices or collaborative LMS). I noticed the trend of excluding other people from a human-technology communication, and it worries me because we are social species. I have mixed feelings about being tracked or scanned too. As most pragmatic ones, I choose the ideas of Silvia Chu (social interaction and connection to the real world) and Anne Emberline (a smartphone with an expandable screen).
My Topic of Interest and Resource Mining
Being a modest person, I often think about living forever. In a traditional way it is done by raising children, writing books, creating paintings, making records, etc. while technology might help with collecting and preserving unique personality traits such as skills, impressions, experiences, and data acquired during their life time.
It would be fun having a human society existing at two different planes together – physical and non-physical. I can imagine those saved personalities making a think tank for humanity and acting as an AI for Superman: talking to each other, arguing, sharing wisdom and providing a direct advice to the plane of the living.
Currently I don’t think making artificial bodies would be such a great (or realistic) idea. Everyone feels the physical limits from time to time while pure minds seem free and worthy of saving for further usage. But I can be quite wrong if it is a physical bit that finally makes a human a human.
I believe I am mostly led by searching for a sense of life here while studying ableism in a parallel course influences my chains of thoughts too. Is it really that bad that we all have different abilities? It seems like a strength to me. There is also a greed in my interest because being in my 40s, I can clearly see that a person gets so much during their lifetime emotionally, intellectually, socially, physically etc. To lose almost everything in death seems quite irrational in the greater scheme of things. Besides, it would be excellent not to totally lose family members.
My main prediction or wish is that a human of the future should use a technology at maximum while cultivating those humanitarian qualities too, for example, an ability to sympathize, to enjoy life, to get hurt, to create, to make a mistake, to protect, to argue, to socialize, to take a risk, to love, to cry, to make a discovery, to be polite, to hope, to compromise, to study, to be selfless, to hate, to be careless, to regret, to concentrate, to care for others and so on and so forth.
I have read enough of speculative fiction to realize there is nothing original in my theory, yet this is how I prefer to see our future now. Our often criticized and not perfect, moral and emotional, a humane component is very important and has to be valued more. I am confident that while technology will help improve life longevity, the secret to true immortality is in staying human.
What do you think, my dear course members? Do you see any ways, technical or otherwise, of making our life eternal?
P. S. The first found and pretty simple article on this topic basically repeats my idea of the mind living forever, together with the promise of a better second body as its container: