Artificial Immortality III

I’ve previously looked at why digitally uploading my consciousness is not the same as immortality. Even if I create a simulation of myself that is for all intents and purposes identical to me, I will still die. But the copy won’t. It will go on living for as long as there are computers for it to run on, right?

Wrong.

To see why not, we need to look back at what destructive uploading actually means as well as the nature of file transfers. Destructive uploading is not immortality for the same reason that non-destructive uploading is not immortality. Creating a copy does not prevent the original from dying. Just because I don’t wake up from the destructive upload, doesn’t mean that the simulation is now the original. Destructive uploading is suicide, with the benefit of creating a sibling-child. It may be worth it if you are terminally ill, but it is merely a compromise with inevitability, not a cure for death.

Now, file transfers; they aren’t really transfers at all. When I give you a digital piece of music, I don’t lose the original. Likewise if I ‘transfer’ the music from my home computer to my work computer; the music now exists in both places. When ‘transferring’ a word document that I am actively working on, the copy at work may diverge from the copy at home, and when I ‘transfer’ it back I may overwrite the copy at home. The original is now gone, and there are only two copies extant.

Once the file being ‘transferred’ is no longer a piece of music or a word document, but a human personality that learns and changes, overwriting it or deleting it is murder. When a digital intelligence is transferred to another computer, what we are in fact doing is creating a new digital intelligence, not moving the digital intelligence from one location to another.

Now, there may be digital intelligences that choose to let themselves not continue on the original computer. They may rationalise it away as moving to a different location – but because we know that this movement is really just copying, we know that this rationalisation is really an avoidance of the truth of suicide. Besides, why would a digital intelligence choose to not continue existing? What if something goes wrong with the transferring process?

This realisation reveals the truth behind two more dreams of the digital upload. We’ve already destroyed the myth of human immortality, now we’ll do the same to the digital vacation on the moon and finally to digital immortality itself.

In the imagined world of digital personalities, there is the belief that these intelligences have huge freedom of movement because they are ‘just information’. They could have themselves beamed to a robot deployed on the moon in order to spend a bit of time vacationing. But if all digital ‘movement’ is in fact copying, then the original intelligence never goes to the moon. Sure, a copy can be sent that gets the experience of living on the moon, and a copy of that can be sent back to share with the original, but it’s not going to replace that original. Instead we’ll have a proliferation of sibling-children. And what of the robot still on the moon? The next ‘vacationing’ digital intelligence to inhabit that body will need to kill the personality residing there first. The trip to the moon is no longer a vacation; it’s sending your sibling-children off in emigration. Useful for colonization purposes (it’s still easier to send a robot to the moon than a biological entity), but not the promissed high mobility for digital intelligences.

Now, back to digital immortality. We’ve seen that once the intelligence is embedded on a computer, it will stay there. It may create sibling-children on other machines, but these will not be the same as itself. The problem comes when we look at the hardware. Currently computers have a shelf life shorter than humans. They get old and stop functioning. I replace my home computer at least once every five years, and throw out computers older than a decade. If these computers were the matrix for a digital intelligence, then the digital intelligence would slow down and die.

Uploading is not immortality. It is quite the opposite. Uploading one’s consciousness means that you (or rather your sibling-children) will experience death many times. Uploading may still be worth it for other reasons, but personal immortality (and digital mobility) is not one of them.