Why you Will Kill Yourself and Abandon your Body to Live Forever

You are going to upload your brain to the cloud

The rise of the cloud will continue but in a far more intimate way. Upload of our minds, and with it our consciousness, is only decades away. Would you choose to effectively live forever? Would you choose to endow yourself with the power to transport anywhere at the speed of light and needle into an android at that location in seconds? That is the future we are on the brink of.

Our limitations will no longer be contingent on longevity as time will cease to be a burden. Our footprint will stretch as far as technology enables rockets to travel, while we will never physically make the journey. We can set vehicles off to explore the furthest regions of the galaxy while enjoying the delights that upload will provide here on earth.

We can master the technology required to walk amongst the stars while persisting on the planet we have inherited. We can be both here and there.

The next stage is conquer and exploration. Where we left the continent that humanity took its first steps we will leaps from the planet in supercharged androids which provide a new face to humanity.

How do we get there?

The most popular assumption is that we will progress towards a ‘Ready Player One’ like future. We will exist physically as we do currently and that won’t change even as technology evolves to allow for a fully immersive virtual world (the Metaverse).

To interact we will wear haptic touch enabled clothing and pull down a visor

The metaverse becomes a projection inside the real world, you interact with it for however long you are immersed then you disembark by simply unplugging from the network.

I find this cute

In many ways this is what we have already, Instead of wearing a visor we access this world through a computer screen. Placing that screen on your head and vibrating when you touch something isn’t a quantum leap forward in terms of possibilities. Sure altering the physics of what seems possible might seem novel, initially at least, but how quickly will your brain, senses and sensibilities reject the reality that what you are interacting with is effectively a computer game?

The argument may be that the metaverse and the physical world will become indistinguishable from one another, yet that motion requires a substantial leap of faith. Can the virtual world enable us to smell the salt in the sea or the wind that from over mountains are we race to the top?

The more likely outcome requires far more technological innovation

We digitise our brains and exist in a virtual universe. We can needle back into the physical world inhabiting androids to participate in the physical world when we choose while returning back to the virtual world when we are done. The digitisation enables us to operate at an inhuman level of productivity due to the speed at which we are able to operate in the cloud.

There is an estimation that says if AI reaches the same level of intelligence as we do, then in 1 year they are able to amass the equivalent of 1 million years worth of human knowledge.

Now imagine the AI is you and you are able to operate hundred of orders of magnitude faster than you can now. Imagine the advantage uploaded minds have over those who operate in the physical world. Every day they could needle into a human body, every night they could consume 1,000 years worth of human knowledge.

Why haven’t we discovered intelligent species?

What if the only reason we have never encountered intelligent species from another planet is because once we reach this level of technological capability, each of us essentially ascends to the role of god. We upload our minds to the cloud and no longer care about what might be out there and instead create whatever world we want to imagine.

I am fascinated by the fact that there are a finite number of possibilities that arise from the fact there are only a finite number of elements in the known universe, while the expanse of the universe is infinite. At some point the order of those atoms and molecules must align in exactly the same way as we are experiencing them right now, meaning that it is impossible what is happening right now with you is not happening elsewhere at exactly the same time.

It’s like drawing lottery balls. The odds might be hundreds of millions to 1 that your numbers come out but if you draw the numbers an infinite number of times your numbers would come out an infinite number of times as well.

So we upload our minds, and become the masters of a manifest destiny in our cloud. We preside over a universe of our own creation and spend eternity optimising it and growing a world similar to what we see now.

Wealth Dictates your Future more Than Ever

Meta-humans, those who take control of androids in the physical world but exist in the cloud, and NEO-humans, those who remain in the world and dial into the metaverse, will exist in parallel.

The rich will be able to live forever, while those who can’t afford to upload their minds will remain on earth and experience the limitations we are currently forced to endure. Ageing, degradation and regression will remain part of the human condition which afflicts those unable to afford the sacrifice of their bodies.

While those who can’t afford to live in the Metaverse pull on head sets, the Meta-humans will needle into the physical world by occupying android suited to the task they wish to undertake. They will swim the oceans in aquatic droids, soar the skies in drones or explore the amazon as king of the jungle.

And natural order will be disrupted entirely

No longer will we rely on the whims of nature to dictate the terms of participation on the planet. The scarcity of elements on earth will no longer constrain the size that humanity can grow to in the same way the available resources will no longer dictate how man people can find sustenance.

Money has already been digitised, smart contracts will facilitate necessary expenses for those who are uploaded, who’s marginal cost for life is the expense of energy their servers consume.

That is the future I see.

Pulling on a headset is commensurate to people wanting a faster horse

The future is always more unbelievable than we think

Utopia or Dystopia — you decide