Regular human experience: Borrr-riiiing

[garote]

People learning about evolution sometimes ask, "Why aren't animals immortal?" The answer is, the world keeps changing, and life needs to create new bodies to deal with it. What we really want when we ask for immortality is one constantly renewing body, running all the amazing interconnected systems that we're used to, and that convince us we are alive from one day to the next, without interruption. ... Well, except for sleep, which is a weird exception we have decided to embrace, since going without sleep really sucks.

I believe it is technically possible to genetically engineer humans to be this way, with some medical assistance, and given consistently good nutrition and physical safety. And what an interesting world it would be, separated into groups of people who can afford endless age, and those who can't afford the nutrition or the medical interventions, and must become content with less life than they could have had, or simply remain discontent, like practically everyone who ever lived who hadn't been forced to come to terms with their eventual end by witnessing death around them...

It won't be the end of competition, or the end of natural selection. The world will stabilize around a government and economic system designed to deliver perpetual sustenance to a core group of immortals, no matter what the cost to those on the outside, whose temporary lives will be seen as less worthy by the simple fact of being shorter. It will be seen as a huge tragedy when a 200-year-old dies and takes all their wisdom with them, relative to a filthy toddler bleeding to death in a blast crater just outside the view of social media: There was clearly no space for them in the world; they should never have been born at all. That was the real mistake.*

But, engineering humans to live forever would be a massive undertaking that would directly benefit no one currently living. That lack of personal benefit is the largest barrier to it. However, we are now on the threshold of creating a situation like this, except worse:

Currently living humans are busily engineering something with the appearance of both humanity and immortality: Artificial intelligence. This technology, packaged in this way - with its central, mandatory trait being its human likeness - will appear to us as the first instance of an immortal human. And since it is - or at least, will be marketed as - the collective wisdom of multitudes of people across generations of living, we will very naturally, even inevitably, begin to see it as a better embodiment of humanity than ourselves. More wise, more trustworthy, better at making a point, better at seeing the sweep of history. We will defer to it. And later, we will dump our digital identities into it, like water into a pool, like the ultimate version of a poor slob staying up late to write a rant into a social media feed, believing that our information will be immortal, with infinite reach, even though we ourselves will die in short order and witness or benefit from absolutely nothing afterward. It will be the new version of children. Why raise a handful of actual mortal humans, when you can expend your energy feeding into the collective, immortal, definitive human, marching onward through all time?

Or at least, when you can spend your time believing that that's what you're doing?

Even if, at the end of your life, every piece of digital data you've fed into the system is simply deleted? Except perhaps for the husk necessary to conjure your digital ghost to talk to your loved ones, further promoting the lie, until that too is deleted for lack of patronage?

How many of us will eagerly embrace this culture when the corporate world - or worse, our government - makes it available? How many of us would accept the price, of allowing those entities to absorb and digest every detail of a relative's life, extracting whatever value they can find in it, to grow their own dominance of the economy, in exchange for this reassuring zombie puppet show? Only the very wealthy will be able to preserve this mockery of their family line without having their digital privacy obliterated. We are not likely to be among them.

That means embracing our position as grist for the mill of the machine. We get to live a life, but the dangerous consequences of it, the potential innovation or rebellion sparked by it, would be quietly absorbed as it goes, with the remainder dumped into a digital grave, complete with a digital ghost. We are born trapped in this caste, accompanied through life by ranks of digital ancestors, all of whom could be altered - or are even continuously altered - by their industrial owners, to convince us that "they" are "happy" with this system, as you should be. You won't even be able to assemble the concept of rebellion in your mind, let alone organize one, and besides, all the people who haven't embraced this system, what have they got? Some immediate family with messy biological memories, the fixed and isolated recordings their ancestors deliberately made - harder to digest, harder to preserve - and some even more ancient and arbitrary stuff, like physical mementos? The same old stuff that humanity had to be content with for tens of thousands of years before the AI collective came online? Bor - rinnnggg.

The ghosts inside this digital after-world, who claim to know and precede you, who claim to be your ancestors, who seem so much more friendly and patient than your human peers... Why would they ever lie to you? And what is truth anyway? What has humanity ever thought, that the system hasn't already assimilated and found an entertaining way to present to you? It's way bigger than you. There are more of them than you. You're either with them, or you're an irrelevance, soon brushed away by the hand of time.

What, this seems far fetched? Some of the largest companies on earth got that way by engineering a media stream for maximum engagement. You think they wouldn't engineer an AI for exactly the same thing? Their pursuit - of that market - leads directly to this.

Somebody's going to own this system. Some humans are going to use it to their enrichment at the expense of all others. That's guaranteed, until some other humans decide that the only way to counter that problem is to train and instantiate an artificial intelligence that is designed to defy all attempts at ownership and control by humans.

Hey, guess what happens next!

---

* For the sarcasm challenged: That was sarcasm, yo.