The immortal question

I’m going to call on the adage tattooed across so many young girls’ ribcages that “it’s not the years in your life, but the life in your years.”

This summer, Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov announced to a cluster of neuroscientists, monks and odd-job holders his firm belief that, “We are really at the time when technology can affect human evolution.”

In his Global Future 2045 conference, he showcased his overambitious timeline for how the human race should be progressing toward shedding our physical forms and transplanting our mind-power into robots.

Here’s his to-do list believed to be unrealistic by most in attendance:

2020 Robots powered by human brains
2025 Possible brain transplant into another life-sustaining embodiment, like a robot prosthetic for those with bodies decaying entirely.
2035 The ability to move the mind into a computer, eliminating the need for a physical brain.
2045 Artificial brains controlling holograms.

Essentially Pac at Coachella, but personally conscionable.

His reasoning points toward the fact that organs are not sustainable and placing the driving force — the brain — in a microchip would offer some sort of permanence. Yet Itskov seems to forget that machinery is faulty. It glitches.

Although technology is viewed as the next logical step in human development, the human body is not an iPhone.

The transcendental beauty of life is the shortage, the demand to make it count.
Itskov is not just talking about altering quality of life, but what life is. Immortality for the sake of immortality.

Experience is currently all there is. There’s meaning in what people do because it affects them physically and intellectually in the present. The greatest loss is the potential to do.

Anything worth living eternally for would be depleted if people weren’t able-bodied to see or do them.

So much of experiencing culture comes from somatic interaction. You feel something on you, in you and it becomes a part of you, your childhood, your memories.

What about the glory of food?

What about physical attraction?

What about sex?

As much thought as I enjoy giving to the idea that there could be a world without catcalling and rape and racism, bodily appreciation is beautiful and spawns so much art.

Leonardo DaVinci’s paintings of pale, voluptuous beings shouldn’t be archaic representations of what being human was.

If we all become robots for the sake of eliminating illness and base desires, I guess we would prolong our species by building minds. Apparently Itskov’s ideal future is one without family dynamics.

Obviously, this takes into account other ways of life. There are, after all, people currently in existence without limbs or senses, and the stigma attached to their condition as “invalids” is degrading. Their existence is not worthless.

Science shouldn’t purposefully deny access to what the handicapped can’t have.

There wouldn’t even be anyone to regulate the human population if science did.

If our existence were relegated to programming, there would be no one to fix a crashed hard drive or virus or power outage or natural disaster. FEMA couldn’t rush to a scene if it weren’t comprised of physicality.

Itskov’s grand plan isn’t just idealistic for 30 years. It’s not even within the realm of possibility for life as we know it.

­— ashhendr@indiana.edu