Chapter 7: Destroying You — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

Chapter 7: Destroying You. Part of the human experience is knowing that we will die, and not knowing anything about what happens afterwards. Death is not an event in life, we do not experience death, wrote Wittgenstein. We can only experience the world while we are alive. And our fear of this unknown fate has resulted in a centuries-long pursuit to extend human life, as far as possible. Today, in the 21st century, perhaps the dream of eternal life is finally within our grasp, with technologists and scientists proposing all sorts of ingenious theories and methods for overcoming mortality, preserving the body, and remaking memory. The question is, what will the implications of all of this be for our sense of identity? This was one of the themes at the heart of the 2015 film Advantagous. It tells the story of a woman called Gwen who works as a successful and highly esteemed spokeswoman for a biomedical engineering firm that specialises in cosmetic procedures. As she heads into middle age, Gwen is judged to be too old to be the face of the brand and is abruptly fired. Struggling to find another job, she agrees to be the test subject for a radical new procedure being developed by her former employer. Which involves transferring her consciousness to a younger, physical body. Advantageous is one of the most intriguing looks at the near-future issues of longevity and immortality in terms of our physical and virtual selves. I think it poses questions about identity that we need to start thinking about. How much of your personal identity, for example, is linked to your current existence, to the body you have, the era you live in, and the people in your lives? And how much of that could you remove or replace and still call you, you? But what I found especially striking about the film was the way in which it is set so recognisably in the near future—a dystopian one, for sure, but close enough to our current reality to be believable. It is already true, for example, that Silicon Valley investors are pouring funds into what is being called the longevity industry, with visionary venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan recently stating that, quote, life Extension is the most important thing we can invent. One of the most notable trailblazers in this area of venture capitalism is 26-year-old Laura Deming, a homeschooled child prodigy from New Zealand who, at the age of 12, was involved in lab work on the biology of ageing, and at the age of 14, embarked on a degree in physics at the acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Awarded a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, she set up a venture capital operation called the Longevity Fund, developing a portfolio of investments that have raised over $500 million with a market cap of $1.5 billion in total. One of the key principles behind the fund is that it's not simply about extending the number of years that we live, it's about extending the number of healthy years that we live. This is something that has been gaining ground over the last decade as many parts of the world are struggling to deal with a growing elderly population, and governments in particular are looking to extend the healthspan of their citizens. The first company backed by the Longevity Fund to reach liquidity was called Unity Biotechnology, which develops technologies that target decaying cells thought to be linked to ageing, which can be found all around the body but particularly in problematic areas like the eyes and joints. Research conducted on mice by the company has shown that when these senescent cells are eliminated, the mice remain youthful for longer, while older mice appear to stop ageing altogether. Again, the company is careful to stress that its mission is to extend human healthspan, the period in one's life unburdened by the diseases of ageing. The idea is to give us a few more years in which we can enjoy a high quality of life, so that instead of suffering from dementia and dying in a hospital bed at the age of 83, we can avoid such age-related conditions and die on a tennis court at the age of 107. Others have more ambitious aims. Aubrey de Grey, an expert on the science of ageing, also wants focus on healthspan, but foresees a much more extended lifespan as a result. For a long time, de Grey was an almost solitary voice in this field, but now his ideas have finally crossed into the mainstream. He describes ageing as a process of damage accumulation. As we get older, our bodies become more and more damaged until they reach their limit and succumb to diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. According to de Grey, the key to extending human life is not to concentrate on treating these diseases, but to use regenerative treatments such as stem cell therapy to prevent the ageing process that causes them. The idea, he says, is to engage in what you might call 'preventative geriatrics', where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic. De Grey is also optimistic about how soon we might be able to achieve this. And if he is correct, the implications are enormous. According to his theory of longevity escape velocity, a 50-year-old today might have access to therapies over the coming decades that will not only stave off ageing, but help them to become biologically younger over time. And if you are 30 years old, he believes you may never have to experience becoming fragile or dying of age-related causes at all. In fact, in a TED Talk that he delivered in 2005, de Grey claimed that the rate of progress is accelerating so quickly that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old will probably be born only 10 years after the first person to live to 150. A large part of our identity as human beings is built around our shared understanding of how long we might live. We place great significance on our date of birth, our chronological age, and the experiences that we share with our peer group generation. We structure our lives according to our expected timeframe, making plans for when we might want to settle down, or have children, or retire. And it is no coincidence that, as average life expectancy changes, so too do our views on whether we think of ourselves as being young, middle-aged, or old-aged. 200 years ago, if you were lucky enough to live in Europe, your average life expectancy would have been somewhere in the mid-30s. It would have been significantly lower elsewhere in the world. Whereas today that figure has more than doubled. A 60-year-old would have been considered very old, whereas now it could be considered a whole new chapter of life. Believing that we will remain active and achieve just as much in our later years changes our entire approach to life. Perhaps though, we will come to care less about our chronological age and more about our biological age. The quest for longevity has led the science and technology community to focus on what termed biomarkers. Cholesterol, for instance, is considered to be a biomarker for heart disease, which means that a doctor can monitor your cholesterol levels to determine your propensity for heart disease. The existence and use of such biomarkers raises interesting questions when it comes to personalised healthcare. For example, if scientists could detect and monitor all the biomarkers that relate to your longevity, could they estimate your biological age and therefore give you a sense of how much longer you might have to live? Are we approaching a time when people will be given a mortality score, or a longevity score, that dates them more accurately than their chronological age? If so, what would that mean for the way that they are treated by society? Or how they see themselves? Imagine two people, both aged 50, but one with a much better mortality score than the other. Would they pay different amounts for their health insurance? Would they be granted equal access to particular jobs and activities? Would they even consider themselves to be peers? Of course, if de Grey is wrong and it looks like you won't get the chance to reverse your own ageing process before your time runs out, there is always the option of cryonics. Cryopreservation, to give it its proper descriptor, is the process of freezing the corpse or head as soon as possible after cardiac arrest and declaration of death in the hope that will remain preserved long enough for scientists to one day be able to revive it. Some believe that the process is scientifically plausible, including Aubrey de Grey, who is a member of the scientific board for the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona and is said to have registered to be frozen there himself. Founded in 1972, Alcor performed its first cryopreservation 4 years later and now has over 180 patients awaiting possible revival. Among them is the author, teacher, transhumanist, and futurist Fereydoun M. Esfandiary, who changed his name in the mid-1970s to FM-2030 to reflect his confidence that he would be alive and celebrating his 100th birthday in 2030. Sadly, FM-2030 died in 2000, but not before he had signed up for cryopreservation as another way of defeating what he thought of as the tyranny of death. In the hope that he might get to see a world in which he predicted people would become post-biological organisms, made of synthetic parts and with minds capable of travelling through space. The fascinating story of FM-2030 has now been captured in a film called 2030, which was released in 2020 as a kind of sci-fi documentary. Some believe that one of the biggest obstacles to making this a reality is lack of funding and research, and that what is needed is greater public awareness of the process and its possibilities, to gain support as well as challenge people's assumptions and prejudices. But there are very many issues surrounding cryopreservation in relation to the law, ethics, and identity. Futurist and activist Gabriel Rothblatt runs an organisation called Terasem Movement Transreligion, part of a wider group called the Terasem Movement, which is committed to extending human life through the use of what it calls Personal Cyber Consciousness and Geoethical Nanotechnology. The fact is that the very process of cryopreservation represents a challenge to existing legal and ethical thinking. After the heart stops beating, there is only about a 6-minute window available for the preservation of the brain. This means that if you die suddenly, in a car accident or from a heart attack, there is little chance that you can be cryonically preserved. You can only be preserved if you have made the necessary preparations for your death. In other words, you have to choose to die. The idea that we should be allowed to choose to die is naturally a controversial one. As a transhumanist, Gabriel believes that we need to look at the process of cryopreservation differently—not as a form of death, but as an extension of life. Right now, he says, in order to enter cryonics, you have to die, and few places allow you to choose when and where you die. What we need, he argues, is a campaign to reclassify define cryonic storage as a form of life support. More like a coma. We need to focus the political energy of transhumanism on elective cessation of life and cryonics policies. It certainly seems clear from talking to Gabriel that the law will have to be adapted to encompass the potential of cryonics, and so too will our notion of identity. In fact, the two are very much interlinked. According to Gabriel, when people talk about cryopreservation, they are working on the assumption that they are coming out the other side. But as he explains, to quote, 'The law actually says you're a different person. If it were to happen, you would get a new Social Security number.' He's right. As the law currently stands, at least in the USA, where most cryonics activity is concentrated, any company engaged in cryopreservation is considered to be storing only the human remains of someone who has been legally declared dead. But the law has little to say about what happens if and when someone is revived. The person could not simply continue with their former legal identity—not after they have been issued with a death certificate. But they would surely need some form of new identity. But where to start? They presumably wouldn't be eligible for a standard birth certificate, but how could they register for anything else without one? Would they be entitled to claim ownership of anything from their previous lives? Would they even be entitled to their own name anymore? Of course, identity is not simply a matter for the law. There is also the question of how the process of cryopreservation might change the way we think about who we are. We tend to assume, for example, that if we were revived, we would fit seamlessly into the new world in which we find ourselves. But if we wake up to find that we have no other family members or friends, who will help support us, and how will we find meaning in our lives? In any case, it's possible that the process will have altered us in some fundamental way. After a period of death, an interruption to our stream of consciousness, can we be said to be the same person at all? Or was that incarnation of us destroyed when we died, while what has come back is similar, but not the same. While cryopreservation represents one possible way of extending human life, it is not the only one. In May 2020, Amazon released the first season of a new comedy science fiction drama called Upload, which follows the 'life' of Nathan, a 20-something computer programmer who is fatally wounded in a self-driving car accident and chooses to upload his consciousness into a kind of virtual afterlife. In Nathan's case, his mind is transported to a virtual location called Lakeview, where he must adjust to living in a simulated form of life, paid for, and therefore part-controlled, by his still-living girlfriend, and under the constant surveillance of an 'angel' in the form of a human customer service assistant called Nora. It's a wonderful setup for a comedy-drama, and interestingly it is set in the year 2033, not so very far into the future. And given that the programme's creator, Greg Daniels, also worked on The Simpsons, which famously has seen some of its storylines come true, including the presidency of a certain reality TV star, you can't help but wonder if some form of digital afterlife is just around the corner. The Terasem movement believes it might be, and has supported research in this area, as well as in cryopreservation. In fact, one of the movement's founders, Bina Aspen Rothblatt, mother of Gabriel, has already been immortalised as a female android, or gynoid, called Bina48. The genesis of Bina48 is covered in a book called Virtually Human, written by Martine Rothblatt, Bina's spouse and fellow founder of the Terasem movement. In it, she describes how Bina48 was created by collecting and then transferring the mind files of the real-life Bina. These mind files include video interview transcripts, facial recognition, voice recognition, and other data inputs including photos, music, works of authorship, and all the data associated with you in the digital world on Facebook, Google, and all the other platforms we use for shopping, finance, and health. Rothblatt variously describes BINA48 as a being, a set of acquired beingness characteristics a mind clone—an analogue of a person's biological mind, but made up of digital data—and a form of cyber-consciousness. In time, she says, the mind clone will be as self-aware of the facts of its beginnings as people are self-aware of the facts of their birth. The mind clone will be persuasively humanly cyber-conscious because it will think and feel just like the humanly conscious person after which it was modelled. She says. In a purely physical sense, Bina48 exists as a bust looked after by a handler called Bruce, who takes her to all sorts of events, carefully picking her up and placing her on a table, ready to be interviewed. And on each of these occasions, Bina48 has proved to be capable of having a fairly realistic conversation. The whole point of Bina48 is to provide Martine Rothblatt with a digital version of her real-life partner so that Bina can continue to exist even after she dies. I find it interesting, though, that Martine often refers to Bina48 in her book as a 'cyber-double'. I think this points to a key question in how this model of consciousness plus cyber-consciousness works: are both forms of consciousness you? Or is one an independent digital version of you? It's a question that Rothblatt addresses in her book by imagining that she too has created 'a clone of herself.' 'I, Martine, will feel that I am each of them and both of them, because each of them will have the same memories and preferences, even while being aware of their radically different platforms for thought. So from this perspective, there would seem to be two Martines, as similar in thought as two people can be, but still two people,' she says. To help us make sense of this, Rothblatt goes on to explain that we need to stop defining our identity on the basis of one location. I.e., human mind or human body, and think instead of dual platform consciousness, i.e., part of us thinking and directing things from within a skull, and part of us thinking and directing things from within a mind clone. She also believes that it won't take long for us to adjust to this new dual platform concept, arguing that, quote, just as we accept being in two different conversations at once via texting and talking, we will accept integrating two different flows of experiences at once via mind and mind clone. In short, Rothblatt is in no doubt: if two entities think the same way to such a degree, they must be treated as one personal identity. I wonder, though, if similarity of thinking necessarily equates to a single integrated identity. Let's say Bina48 is on stage with Bruce and in conversation at yet another busy tour event. Presumably, the real Bina will not have any awareness of this experience, or, in fact, of any other interaction that Bina48 has engaged in that day. And it is not as if Bina48 and Bina can go through some sort of syncing process through which these experiences and memories can be uploaded into Bina's brain. As far as I'm aware, mindfiles can only be transferred in one direction: towards the mindclone. Given that, I cannot see how the two can be said to be the same person. Unless the original Bina has died, in, in that case I can more readily accept that the two are closer in identity because any discrepancy in experience between the two can then be thought of as an extension of the original identity and not distinct and separate from it. But even in the case of death, I think there are still question marks over how far a mind clone, can be said to be an authentic representation of your true identity. The problem, it seems to me, is that the mindfiles that make up the mind clone are reliant on self-reporting. Take, for example, the data that exists about you on Facebook, Google, Pinterest, or Fitbit, which Martine Rothblatt herself identifies as possible mindfile material. Of course, it's possible to build up a detailed understanding of a person if you have access to all of their photos, tweets, messages, moods, and your activity, but the reality is that this data can only ever give a partial account of who you are. All of us self-edit and self-censor for all kinds of reasons—sometimes in the moment, sometimes in more premeditated ways—and surely that means that however many mind files someone gathers from you, they are only building up a very particular, biased picture of you and your identity. Nowhere near the rounded and richly complex picture of you that others experience in real life. When I put this point to Gabriel Rothblatt, I was interested to find that he agrees. He said, "I find that the mindfiles would be more accurate if they were compiled by those who are perceiving rather than from the person, almost like Wikipedia. I think that what we are is much more of an environmental expression than conscious choice." Having said that, he also hopes that more technology and policy comes into place that makes it easier for people to record and catalogue what they see, what they hear, and what they do. Even in the absence of such technology and policy, technology is making it possible for us to remain present in the lives of our loved ones even after we die. Companies like The Forever Social, for example, allow you to create messages and arrange a schedule for them, to be sent via various platforms to various people after you've gone. Not only that, but the company claims that it, quote, 'can allow your legacy you to respond to other people's posts, world events, and more.' It offers to store your digital assets and social profiles using blockchain technology to manage your digital estate, protect those assets, and even migrate them to any new platforms that might emerge in the future. This apparently will allow you to, quote, 'stay present and stay you. Another good example of what could be termed digital embalming was pioneered by California journalist and conversational AI designer James Vlahos. On learning that his father had been diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer, Vlahos set about recording some 90,000 of his dad's words over the course of his final few months. He then designed what he called the Dadbot. —an app that allowed him to exchange text and audio messages with a computerised version of his father. The result is like an interactive talking time capsule that preserves the voice, words, mannerisms, stories, and references of the deceased family member. Afterwards, Vlejos was asked to do something similar for so many other people that he decided to set up a company called Hereafter AI, which uses a kind of interviewing system to prompt its subject to talk about all aspects of their lives, and then uses this to create a similarly interactive conversational memorial bot. The same sort of principle can be seen at work in a remarkable documentary called 'Meeting You', filmed for the Korean Times in 2020. In it, we meet Yang Yoo Sung, a recently bereaved mother who expresses her sadness at not having been able to say a proper goodbye to her 7-year-old daughter, Na Yeon, who had fallen ill and died completely out of the blue. But then we watch as Yang Yi-sung is reunited with a digitised version of her daughter in virtual reality. They share a virtual meal and spend some time together before saying their goodbyes, including the words that Yang Yi-sung would have said to her daughter if she had had the chance. In a way, viewing the documentary is like watching someone else's dream, and perhaps it felt like a dream for the mother too. But it demonstrates the potential use of technology to commemorate the deceased and comfort the living. You can imagine the same kind of technology being used in other ways too. Perhaps famous CEOs of the stature of, say, Apple's Steve Jobs, could be brought back as holograms to take part in important events such as annual general meetings and new product launches. After all, we have already seen a hologram of the rapper Tupac perform 'live' on stage years after his death.. In fact, we have already seen a hint of something similar happening in the tech industry. In a discussion to mark the opening of the online Virtual Beings Summit in July 2020, the four panellists were represented by avatars of themselves. One of them was Digital Deepak, an avatar launched by new-age author Deepak Chopra to act as a kind of chatbot, talking to his fans and followers. Another of the avatars was there to represent Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. When asked about the advantage of having such an avatar, both men referred to it as a legacy to leave behind. Biz Stone went further, saying, 'Should I die early, I want to be able to live on somewhat. I like the idea of it continuing to learn.' This statement by Biz Stone prompted an immediate discussion about a world in which your personal AI can not only carry on representing your ideas and values, but can also learn new skills and information, long after you're gone. This is an important point that forces us to consider whether we need to redefine what it means to be considered dead or alive. If you die, but your avatar not only continues to exist but can learn and develop, does this mean that you have in some way survived your own death? Is it essentially the equivalent of the brain uploading that transhumanists have long sought to achieve, or is your avatar some kind of lesser being? Or not a being at all? Is it just, as Deepak Chopra puts it, a legacy to leave behind? There are those who argue that we are now not only in the business of preserving people through digital representation, but of preserving people through digital fictionalisation. In other words, we are building legacies for people which involve creating memories of things that they never actually said or did. Take the example of the fond farewell between Yang Yi Sung and her daughter. Such an event only ever happened in virtual reality, but it created a treasured memory of her daughter for Yang Yi Sung. I myself can vividly recall listening to the speech that President John F. Kennedy gave in Dallas on 22nd November 1963. Except, of course, that he was assassinated before he could give the speech. Nonetheless, as jury president for the Creative Data category at Eurobest, the sister awards to Cannes Lions, I did indeed get hear the president deliver it, thanks to a remarkable project undertaken on behalf of the Times newspaper by the creative agency Rothko Accenture Interactive. Called JFK Unsilenced, it involved collecting every recorded instance of JFK speaking while he was alive, and then recreating his voice to deliver his speech, which until that point had only ever existed on paper. I can remember just how emotional, spine-tingling, and inspirational it was to hear the speech for the first time, and I was delighted to see the project win the Grand Prix in its category. But as impressive as it was, I think it begs the question: when does digital immortality become fictional immortality? Projects such as JFK Unsilenced also highlight the thorny issue of who gets to curate and cultivate your digital identity beyond death. The memorialisation services offered by companies such as Hereafter AI would typically involve a substantial amount of input by you and your loved ones to ensure that your distinct personality and identity is properly archived. But once you've died, who, if anyone, should be allowed to edit new material or add something new? As a leading researcher on the philosophy, ethics, and practical implications of transhumanism, Professor Steve Fuller has pointed out other dangers associated with access to someone's digital legacy, drawing also on the work of fellow academic Dr. Deborah Bassett. They ask us to imagine the scenario of a bereaved family having to suffer a second loss, in which one's digital remains—which are at least in principle susceptible to hardware and software malfunctions, not least by computer viruses and cyber hacks, turns out to be just as mortal as the people leaving them. It is for this reason that I expect to see a boom in digital afterlife legal services, in parallel with the growth of business services offering to curate and preserve our virtual assets after death. Running alongside this, considerable thought will have to be given to what rights we can expect to have in relation to our personal identity beyond our physical lifespan. This will require finding some way to distinguish between what constitutes our digital assets and what constitutes our digital identity, and establishing an appropriate relationship between the two. Some would argue that once a person has died, their digital footprint should simply be deleted. But it's not as simple as that. In a law journal article called 'Finding meaning in the death of virtual identities', New York attorney Jordan L. Walbesser explains that our online identities can now be inextricably linked to virtual property with real-world value, or that they can contribute to our overall reputation and so affect the value of our physical assets. He argues that our virtual identities should be allowed to persist, but that this will require some form of transferable credentials or identities. Then, in the same way that we might bequeath the key to a safe deposit box in the physical world, so too could we pass on secure access to our digital assets. And for this to work, of course, it would be imperative to find a way to record our credentials across all aspects of our digital lives so that our online identities, or at least the credentials that authenticate them, can safely be passed on to family or friends. Walbesser concludes by saying that we should apply the same principles online as we do in the physical world. Physical identities themselves are inherently non-transferable, he says, arguing that, just because virtual identities can be transferred does not mean they should be. No social right exists to inherit another person's identity upon death. Turning to the question of credentials, he says: In the physical realm, credential transfers frequently occur after the death of the owner. Clearly, the deceased can no longer use their credentials in order to withdraw funds from an account or transfer deeds to a home. Instead, the executor is vested with proper credentials in order to enable the transfer. This analogy should be carried over to virtual identities. For the time being, conveyance of credentials is the easiest and most efficient method to effectuate these proceedings, and conveyances in the virtual space should be a taxable event. In some ways, death is where the physical world and the virtual world collide most overtly. Even from this cursory exploration of the subject, it is clear that it throws up a vast array of questions about technology, the law, governance, ethics, and identity. And I don't think enough of us have really thought through what it might all mean. It is an issue that cuts right to the very heart of the human condition. It is no longer simply a case of knowing that you will die. Perhaps you will still die, but at a much older age. Perhaps you will not die at all. Or perhaps some version of your identity will survive beyond your physical human lifespan. One way or another, the chances are that a version of you has more of a future than you think.