Silicon Valley Manual

How Will Humans Live Forever Through Computers?

August 5, 2007 on 5:43 pm | In Virtual Reality, Future | 1 Comment

The nature of any creature is to avoid its own destruction. It is this that motivates us to outlast the constraints of our own mortality through reproduction and other creations.

We may spiritually live on in heaven, through reincarnation, etc… but once dead are unable to interact with the living (barring ghosts and psychics) so we do not truly know in the scientific sense.

We do know mortality has an ending. All living things must some day die.

Heres the good news: our consciousness and memory are mere electrical impulses which can some day exist entirely in digital, zero one.

• Today computers allow us to store the content of memory, thought, and experience to a fair degree of accuracy. The connection between the mind and the computer which supports this exchange is deepening all the time as barriers are gradually broken down.

• Eventually we will be able to share our memories, thoughts, judgments, and control with our computer as directly as we do with our own consciousness–

• At a certain point the line between the human conscious and computer conscious will blur and ultimately disappear.

• The age of Selfware will come.

How will this unfold?

1. Withholding inter-planetary colonization, the natural resources on our planet will dwindle as mother nature is unable to reproduce as quickly as we consume.
2. Gradually the population growth rate will flatten out and then begin to be negative.
3. The living will exponentially convert to digital until all physical life ceases to exist.
4. Consciousness will be self-aware on computers and networks and this will allow us to exist in digital long after our physical form has been destroyed.
5. The entire human race will exist on one big social network.
6. All necessary physical activity will be accomplished through scores of nano-machines [see Nanofactory Video at bottom].
7. The world as we know it will be a cold hard rock with one massive computer network woven around it.
8. The only natural resources necessary will be the ones used to develop more computer components and electricity (one and the same in solar).

I do not believe that it will ultimately resemble the matrix movie scenario precisely because the relationship between humans and computers will never be allowed to sour in such a way as that– the consciousness of computers will be that of humans and as such a ‘computer race’ will never develop in opposition to our own, we will simply become computers.

The real world will become the virtual– we will exist in a ‘matrix’ but it will be powered by us for us and may resemble heaven, enlightenment, or whatever you like.

Nanofactory Video: