Can super-smart information machines bestow immortality?
Machines can use artificial intelligence to understand some of what's in our heads. Will they confer a form of immortality in the 21st century?
Paul Cohen, director of the UA School of Information: Science, Technology and Arts, discussed the possibilities last week in the final "Living Beyond 100" lecture at the University of Arizona.
Local science teachers in a writing workshop reflected:
JACK ERICKSON: KEEPING IT REAL
My great-grandfather was a circuit preacher, riding horseback across Texas.
My grandfather was a pilot during World War II and in Korea and Vietnam.
They told stories and wrote letters and books for their children, gaining a form of immortality.
People are also reading…
These days, more than 70 million children worldwide attach their emotions to a toy companion called a Tamagotchi, a digital pet on a key chain that's been around since the mid-'90s.
Are teenagers going to need ever more robust, more interactive digital friends after being sensitized to their early digital pets? Are we approaching an age where friends and family will be replaced by our machines?
Google and Amazon can recognize patterns in your decision-making and attempt to predict your wants. New software may be able to spot the places and faces most familiar to you from your digital pictures, and computers may help stimulate memories for those with dementia and Alzheimer's by asking questions like, "Do you remember this trip with your daughter?"
But if we leave cognitive care of loved ones to a laptop, will we be robbing grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the chance to make memories with aging family members?
RON BERNEE: UPLOADING THE HUMAN MIND
Babe Ruth became immortal in his own way - for slugging home runs.
Thomas Jefferson earned that status for his ideas, which still inform Supreme Court decisions.
They represent the first two levels of immortality Cohen described - one based on a memorable action, the other on a legacy involving a process.
In the next level, a machine will take our ideas and let a virtual "us" process and produce new information, even beyond our death. New information can emerge from our ideas via technology, in theory, forever.
Cohen calls that emergent or symbiotic immortality. And it is, he said, "the real deal."
In the future, we will be able to upload our consciousness to a machine. Together, we and our host machine will process information and memories - either experiences or stories.
So far, the Internet can't quite understand and re-create our narratives. But, Cohen says, "Memory engineering - the reconstruction of stories from clues by computers - is inevitable."
JOSH FARR: The technology-human frontier
Relief at the first monsoon rain, nervousness before a date, the experience of a first paycheck: These are the kind of memories that machines still have a hard time handling.
If computers are going to someday preserve our essence, they will need programs that can go beyond just recognizing sets of pictures and voice clues about our existence to be able to literally tell our stories, called episodic memories.
Already, "life-loggers" wear devices that collect and upload their experiences to the Web, moment to moment. A wearable camera captures video logs of their lives.
In Europe, the Companions Project lets users carry on a conversation with a clever machine. You load personal photos and voice commands to a virtual avatar-companion, and it learns from your tone of voice and timelines, and infers topics of conversation from the Web. It weaves connections between you and your friends, family and location, and current topics relating to you. It can offer advice and comfort.
We are in a multitasking, technology-driven world. And as Cohen puts it: "We're finding it harder and harder to find some peace and quiet."
BRIE BENJAMIN-BAKER: GETTING THE GIST
We humans throw away a lot of useless information from each memory and just get the gist of it, often inaccurately.
It's what keeps us sane.
The problem in making computers more companionable is that they remember too much - everything, in fact.
"Machines need gisting memory," Cohen said. For machines to become companions, they need the ability to carry on conversations, be predictable yet interesting, show support or empathy, and even need you back.
Machine memory is exact. Human memory is rarely accurate - but we are interesting.
Companionship will require a computer to understand context so that it could eventually store information in a manner that would mimic our memories.
The loss of one's memory can be devastating. It would be enticing to know that at some point, our memories could be off-loaded and shared with computers. When that happens, we will be a lot closer to Version 3.0 of immortality: generating and processing information beyond our days.
Our memories may live forever, but what we don't know yet is whether they will be the interesting, ever-changing memories that we cherish.
JEFF OFSTEDAHL: THE PARADOX OF INDIVIDUALITY
In our digital age, every one of our photographs, every Google search, every keystroke on a computer leaves a trail of evidence that tells the story of who we are and where we've been.
Google combines such information about tens of millions of people to make assumptions about each individual.
This is what Cohen calls the Paradox of Individuality.
"Finding what is common in our thoughts gives us a collective memory that machines use to complete our sentences," he said. "You can give a search engine one or two words, and it can figure out what you have in mind."
Are we ready to cede so much personal power to a machine? Cohen argues that we already do. We allow a car's GPS computer to tell us where to go and how to get there. With a swipe of a card, we let machines take over monetary exchanges.
In all these lectures on whether living beyond 100 is possible, no one quite told us whether we should - until Cohen.
"Living longer is a gift," he said, "and a moral test for humanity."
Jack Erickson teaches in the Vail School District. Ron Bernee teaches at Sahuaro High School. Josh Farr teaches at Cienega High School in Vail. Brie Benjamin-Baker teaches at the statewide Primavera Online High School. Jeff Ofstedahl is K-12 science director at the Center for Academic Success in Sierra Vista. The UA writing workshop is supported by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
