When we confront the prospect of living forever, our moral framework will undergo a profound transformation. Humans have evolved to experience death; throughout the history of life on Earth, every existence has ended. There are no pre-established guidelines for behavior in an immortal state, nor for constructing a society where personalities can be stored on computers and transferred into new bodies. These are vast, distant, and deeply peculiar questions. Today they seem purely science fiction, but the last 25 years have shown that much of 20th-century sci-fi has already become 21st-century reality. Therefore, the 21st-century concept of mind uploading will likely materialize by the 22nd century. That gives us roughly 50 to 70 years to begin grappling with these extremely complex issues.
The concept of mind uploading involves transferring ourselves onto silicon — storing our personalities, brains, or aspects of consciousness on computers, where they could persist indefinitely. This technology remains highly speculative, despite work by British Telecom and other researchers. We are in the earliest stages. Ray Kurzweil famously predicted that we would need to address this by 2045. Some consider that overly optimistic; I view it as cautious. Regardless, at some point this century, it will likely become real. Consider the five major world religions, which use the prospect of an afterlife to guide moral behavior. What happens to religious morality when technological immortality arrives? That is the fundamental metaphysical question.
Richard K. Morgan's science fiction explores the implications of downloadable consciousness and disposable bodies for soldiers, armies, and mercenaries. This reveals a gritty cyberpunk underside to mind uploading technology, even as it is being developed for educational purposes — to preserve and study the minds of geniuses like Einstein, Beethoven, and Richard Feynman. I draw a parallel to television: its inventors envisioned it as an educational tool. Fifty years later, we see mostly low-quality content instead. Mind uploading may follow a similar trajectory. However, the crucial difference is that storing selves on silicon and approaching immortality fundamentally alters what it means to be human. At that deep level, we are tampering with evolutionary processes whose interruption could have unknown consequences, as we have never attempted this before. The author's most recent publication is Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact ( Follow Big Think here: YouTube: Facebook: Twitter:
