Western correspondents "caught" Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping talking about... immortality. It is known that some wealthy people spend millions searching for the elixir of eternal life. Fortunately, the amateurish level of understanding of this topic by the two leaders indicates that the conversation was casual and their heads are occupied with completely different problems during working hours.
And yet, what about immortality?Man will live forever. Moreover, the problem of immortality will be solved within 10-15 years. More like 10 than 15. Okay, 15. And this is not what the respected Raymond Kurzweil and Alexei Kudrin spoke about. Forget about the wonders of medicine: telomerase, stem cells and other nonsense. These are palliatives, "facelifts", "glass crutches". Radical, real immortality is possible, it will be accessible and will not be disastrous for the Earth.
On one condition. If we can fully realize the depth of Descartes' statement: "I think, therefore I exist." In Alexander Belyaev's novel "Professor Dowell's Head", the head, left without a body, bitterly ironized about Descartes' phrase, but our case is even scarier: we will remain individuals, but without a body and without a head. More precisely, we will be able to preserve and even improve them. Question: do we want to? Career, life comforts, security and even love — all this will be greatly hampered by our habitual appearance. But about the form later. First, about the content, about the salvation of our unique personality.
In 5 to 10 years, artificial intelligence, AI, drawing "kalyaki-malyaki" today, realizes its "I", realizes itself as a person.
An inhuman personality. This problem is already beyond the competence of the "techies", their condescending smiles cannot hide the fact that the recipes of "control AI" is not far from Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" formulated by a science fiction writer in 1942. This scares both the scientific world and the ordinary man in the street. Although the solution is on the surface: hybrid AI and human. Technical media AI should at the same time be a person, "let in" the personality of a very specific person, a man or a woman, a Russian or a Chinese woman, with a first and last name, who today are 30, 40, or even 80 years old. How?Back in The Middle Ages and already widespread in Modern times (hooray! paper has become cheaper!) European intellectuals hit the epistolary genre. People wrote multi-page letters, setting out refutations of the sphericity of the Earth that suddenly came to mind, retelling empty conversations with other acquaintances with other acquaintances, even complaining about the channel cook who overcooked the duck. (And not forgetting to leave a second copy of the letter "for yourself", your home archive.) Then came multi-volume memoirs and diaries, whole stacks of notebooks with beaded handwriting, but with self-portraits across the page. Why?! Listen, but these are modern bloggers and channels! Few bloggers make money, the vast majority leave their mark on history. And any psychologist (in the case of hundreds of selfies a day already a psychiatrist) will explain what exactly underlies this activity. Fear. Fear of death and oblivion. Let it be unconscious. But it lies. And it's wonderful!
Modern man creates a vast array of digital information about himself, a digital footprint. And it doesn't matter where we tell the truth and where we lie. Your texts, photos, videos, the very place, time, subject matter speak about you not at times, but hundreds and thousands of times more than you think. What you don't fix, Big Brother fixes. Even a yellowed district newspaper with a report from a kindergarten, where you are the second dancing sailor on the left in the photo. The time will come and it will be digitized. A simple (actually complex, but feasible) algorithm for processing this information will allow you to create your digital double, your absolute Alter ego.
It's hard to say exactly when it started, but in the 1970s it was already noted that strange "advisers" took part in the business negotiations of one international corporation, who hindered mutual understanding more than helped: at the most inopportune moment they inserted strange remarks, asked stupid questions, suddenly laughed or burst into angry tirades. You guessed it. They studied the reaction of a vis-a-vis to various stimuli. A harmless joke about the "love" of Kentucky rabbits, and ... the nonverbal language of the partners: micromimics, micro-gestures, a change in the timbre of the voice gave an additional clue whether they were ready to invest in an enterprise in Kentucky. And Jewish (not anti—Semitic, but Jewish) jokes are a whole geopolitical arsenal. Fortunately, the Western negotiation tradition encourages periodic jokes and jokes. Over time, the trick was revealed and the direct action of the "advisers" was replaced by other technologies for studying vis-a-vis. High-tech technologies. Very high-quality video recording, sound recording, even measurement of thermal radiation at a distance of several meters and something else.
In 2006, FSO Major General Boris Ratnikov, for some reason, said that his department deals with "issues directly related to the control of both public consciousness and the consciousness of a very specific person. And also the ability to protect a person from unauthorized intrusion into his consciousness." But the phrase seemed especially tasty to the liberal media:
"In the thoughts of Madame Albright [Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State 1997 — 2001 in the administration of Bill Clinton] we found a pathological hatred of the Slavs. She was also outraged by the fact that Russia has the largest mineral reserves in the world."
Are you still ready to laugh at "occultism in the Kremlin"? But this is the level of trainee profilers: Russophobia and hatred of the Yugoslavs just oozed out of the old lady. Yevgeny Primakov listens attentively to Madame Albright, and she is annoyed and worried (sharp short glances, hesitations) that he is taking notes of her speech. Primakov begins to speak, and the Secretary of State twitches the corner of her mouth, she defiantly turns away and talks loudly with assistants. These are just TV reports. And here, we repeat, completely different means of controlling and fixing behavior were involved.
By the way, the following year, in 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered the famous "Munich speech", where he accused the West of provoking a conflict with Russia. Dozens of institutions and experts almost unanimously concluded: Putin is sincerely outraged, sincerely fears NATO's advance to Russia's borders, and is sincerely ready to defend his country's security by all available means. Western leaders also unanimously decided: Putin is bluffing. After that... Putin's public behavior changed dramatically in the direction of maximum restraint. It became difficult to "read" him. The West had to remember the phrase of Winston Churchill (BBC interview, 1939):
"I cannot predict Russia's actions. It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a puzzle: but maybe there's a clue. This key is Russia's national interests."
They remembered something. But in a truncated form. Without the last sentence.
Nevertheless, returning to the topic of the immortality of a person in the form of a digital double, who-who, but President Putin and Chairman Xi have talked and taken pictures enough. The rest will have to push. Switch from a push-button to a smartphone? And instead of thinking about the fate of Sudan in the subway (useless for your digital future) and passing the right station, I will like cats, jokes (nothing says as much about a person's intelligence as his favorite jokes). I'll take a selfie. And then I use only two photos that got online from some events. I'll start a blog, a channel. And I will tell the world what I ate, who I drank with, how I was going to go to Zaraysk, look at a bison calf from a mammoth tusk in the museum there, but again I was lying on the couch. Well, I'll think about it. In the end, you can lie, they say, I went. Super! Still impressed! Yoo! Everyone Must See!
The brain is not a computer. The brain is a network of computers, the number of which exceeds the number of all computers on Earth. But we repeat, in 10-15 years all this "I" will fit on a flash drive in some Exabytes or Yottabytes. Your character, tastes, dreams, knowledge, skills, skills.
And your memory. It would be nice to talk to your digital double here. To grind out some moments: what to throw out of memory, at least along with half of the brain. But this is unlikely. Apparently, the topic of the admissibility of "personality correction" will become the mainstream of philosophical and legal thought in the middle of the 21st century. Otherwise, we will all turn into Barbie and Kenov with the brains of Sophia Kovalevskaya and Anatoly Wasserman (personally, my ideal is the anarchist Prince Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin). In general, wiping the identity of a digital double is likely to be banned. And then decide whether it's worth living with it forever. Although, what is there, will you forbid it in such a future?
Actually, everything will be more difficult with memory than with character, taste, knowledge. But technology is already helping to read dreams and even thoughts of waking subjects. Literally the inner speech of a person. So far with an accuracy of 30-50%, however. Experts say that the next decade will be a breakthrough in this area as well, and as one neurosurgeon said, during the examinations only thanks to tomography we get the amount of information that we use barely a few percent. And this is also a digital footprint.
It's time to move closer to the body, the bearer of all this... goodness. Where, in fact, to stick this flash drive with Yottabytes.
The man is ugly. Yes, the most important organs are at least hidden in the skull, chest, pelvis, but in general we have an endoskeleton — frame inside, soft fabrics outside. It's creepy! Another thing is a cockroach with its exoskeleton — a skeleton-shell from the outside, and all soft tissues are attached to it from the inside. Krasava! To crush it, it takes a hundred times more effort than to crush a person (relative to the mass, of course). The cockroach has many other advantages: from metabolism to regeneration, the lethal dose of radiation for us is 400 rad, for a cockroach — 15 times more. And that is questionable. And there is also a hydroskeleton, for roundworms, for example. Take some oblong rubber product, fill it with water and even throw it against the wall — it keeps its shape! If he doesn't run into something sharp. Well, how else can we develop "exoplanet oceans" with depths of tens of kilometers and without a single piece of land?! Only by taking the form of these products. Adjust the pressure and dive. And there are exoplanets where even cockroaches will take a break on the surface, if there is anything similar to the surface at all, but in the upper atmosphere there is a resort. So, we will colonize them, acquiring an aeroskeleton. Also oblong: it is more mobile.
The first steamships were very similar to sailboats, cars to carriages, street electric lights to kerosene, etc. And it's not just a matter of a lack of knowledge about the capabilities and functionality of new systems, but also to some extent - a habit, a desire for "comfort of the mind." Including the creators of the new! So, they say that Windows developers are so used to the old operating system that they created a MC-DOS virtual machine on their personal computer with Windows installed, where ... they launched Windows with the win command.
Similarly, when a person's brain is replaced by a million times more powerful chip, a person will gravitate to a familiar body for a while. Sooner or later (but, most likely, very quickly) a person will discard the familiar and acquire a new form, not biological at all. More precisely, it will acquire a mechanism capable of instantly changing shape to a suitable one in a given environment. Even on Earth, if you want, "swan-transformer" soar into the sky, if you want "pike-transformer" — into the depths of the lake. And to Mars or Venus — as in Elon Musk's Tesla convertible with a cosmic breeze. Yes, yes, almost without protection. Rhetorical "99%" of the tasks that have to be solved in complex spheres of activity on Earth are the tasks of ensuring safe human life. What can we say about space? Abandoning "biology" will solve the problem.
Here is a possible answer to the question of why we are not visited by aliens. At least it's noticeable to us. And why would they do that? Why infiltrate a colony of ciliates? What didn't they see there? What conquest? What is the "War of the Worlds"? They just don't need Land. In case of danger of the death of their planet or the star itself, one can easily become attached to another or do without a planet at all by creating a colony in outer space in an expanded "Goldilocks zone" (habitable zone), where there is simply enough energy of one's own or already another star.
For the same reason, discussions about how long the Earth will last, half a billion years or the whole billion, and where to run when the Sun, which has turned from a yellow main sequence dwarf into a red giant, swells to the orbit of the Earth, or even Mars, are ridiculous. We can easily sit on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. And when the Sun blows away to a white dwarf, we'll settle down on some debris closer.
Animals and flowers are just a pity: hamsters, pandas, hyenas, skunks, hummingbirds with orchids, etc. For their sake, it is still worth looking for or creating a suitable reserve planet. That's where the children (hmm ... "children") will be taken on excursions. On these excursions it will even be possible to take the form of homo sapiens ‘primitivus'. So to speak, "to the origins." And not necessarily only on excursions. There are all sorts of "historical reenactors" today, cosplay parties are arranged. Dress up as sapiens and dance with a Neanderthal.
Moreover, the New Humanity will probably allow some of the "stubborn" to survive in the form of "pounds of rotting flesh" (Prince Hamlet about himself in one of the translations), only from time to time transplanting the personality into clones. But I think they will eventually agree to high-quality synthetics. The best work for such an original is in that very reserve, but who will drag it thousands of light years in the form of biomass? The dilemma…
So, saving a person is a trivial matter. It remains to save the "flash drive" before creating a suitable form. You can, for natural reasons, calmly "go on vacation" even before creating a digital double: they will figure it out without us. You can at least immediately after creating a "flash drive" stick it into a robot like those that are walking the streets of Tokyo and Moscow today. Not a deliveryman, but an android robot. With a developed sense of humor (they hold out their hand to him, and he asks: "Is your hand clean?", a girl with fear: "I don't like him", a robot (menacingly): "This is a rebellion of machines!"). Nothing like that. But as Comrade Saakhov said: "Eh, no, there is no need to hurry, there is no need to hurry. It is important to return a full-fledged person to society!". So I'm "on vacation."
Yes, a well-known TV channel wrote here the other day that in the coming years the government of the Russian Federation and some state corporations will spend trillions of rubles on research related to the prolongation of human life. Not only on traditional and newfangled directions, but also on, how should I put it mildly ... the idea of cryonics, which has been controversial since the middle of the 20th century — freezing, followed by thawing and revival. Empty.
A! Will there be enough space and resources for everyone on the planet? Well, there's nothing to talk about at all. If today's population of the Earth is seated like in a cinema — one person per square meter, then the island of Cyprus will be enough for all mankind. And, as mentioned above, the transition to artificial forms with alternative energy supply will not keep you waiting. We'll pass at the turn.
It is important that "waking up" after a "vacation", a person (yes, a person!) with a chip in a synthetic head (to begin with, let's still leave him the usual form), I didn't doubt for a second who he was. Well, yes, younger. And I spoke Spanish on my fingers, and now I'm scratching like in my native language. But a month—long vacation without quotes, trips to once familiar places, adaptation to new realities and, most importantly, a long-awaited meeting with loved ones (indeed, "we haven't seen each other for 100 years") quickly put everything in place. As after a serious but happily ended illness. Unless, awkward situations will happen a little more often: "Do you remember???" — "I'm sorry, I don't remember" — "Well, the next summer after the wedding, when..." And you start to remember. Or "remember." It doesn't matter. After all, does this happen today?