Digital immortality is already here!

In his seminal and thought-provoking book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari has some very interesting observations about mankind's quest for immortality. He postulates that, having triumphed over starvation (famines), disease (plagues), and violence (war) — the primary causes of death over the centuries — mankind in the 21st and 22nd centuries will strive to conquer death and achieve immortality.

For modern homo sapiens, death is a technical problem, and for every technical problem there is a technical solution. Harari believes that the pathway to immortality could be found through genetic engineering, regenerative medicine and nanotechnology. Actually, he prefers the phrase 'amortal' to 'immortal' as people could still die from unexpected accidents, but human life itself (he believes) will no longer come with an expiry date.

This is an extremely thought provoking — if not downright provocative — thesis, but maybe we are beginning to see the first shoots of this postulation in American billionaire Bryan Johnson, who has made it his goal to not die — to reverse ageing and to live to the age of 150 at least, if not become immortal.

To achieve this, he is using the same three tools Harari mentioned, and spends 2 million dollars a year on this effort. He is turning his body, in the words of TIME magazine, into an 'anti-ageing algorithm', is 45 years old but has the body of an 18-year-old. He is being closely observed by medical experts, this man who thinks he can live forever and has even written a book whose title is — what else — DON'T DIE!

But you may well ask, why am I telling you all this?

Because, though biological immortality may still be some way in the future, digital immortality is already beginning to happen. It's something most of us are looking forward to, to reconnect with our loved ones.

For instance, we all have our social and familial wealth on our WhatsApp, and if you happen to belong to my vintage (1950s or earlier), with every passing year we are beginning to lose some of that emotional capital: one or two accounts are perforce closed every year — loved ones, friends, family members who have handed in their chips and crossed that big rainbow.

How many times, on a dreary and cold winter evening, have I wished that eshone could chat with them again, exchange an emoji or two, forward a Twitter joke or cartoon? Sadly, they have gone long before before Harari's predictions about immortality could come true. But wait! Digital immortality may be at our doorstep.

The age-old methods of staying in touch or contacting our deceased loved ones have been things like planchette, the ouija board, seances or communicating through a medium. But now, digital innovations and AI seem to be taking over. We all leave behind digital footprints on a huge scale — emails, WA chats, posts on platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, videos on YouTube etc. Emerging digital tools work by datamining this wealth of information to recreate, in a macabre way resurrect, as it were, the person who is no longer with us.

Generative AI, by using the vast power of face and voice recognition technology, can literally recreate the person and make him or her virtually alive again through virtual avatars or holograms. He/she can speak to you again on your smart phone, with the same voice and diction you recognise, as if they were flesh and blood again! You can reminisce with them again about past events, friends, relatives, like they never left. The algorithms know more about this departed person than you ever did, and can make them virtually alive again, to a point where you wouldn't know the difference.

This digital afterlife is still a few years in the future, but not too far away. Companies like Hereafter, My Wishes and Hanson Robotics are already working on this technology, combining technology with data about the deceased person — memories, texts, personality traits, previous conversations, photos — to enable him or her to interact with you posthumously. It is even possible for someone to leave pre-recorded messages while alive to be sent after death, to maintain the illusion of being present even after death!

These digital afterlife technologies may go some way in offering some comfort and emotional release to those left behind, but they will come with their own set of ethical and legal challenges, including privacy rights, the commercial (and perhaps unauthorised) use of this digital immortality.

As Ardif Perdana explains in a brilliant article in Deccan Herald, governments will have to grapple with these issues, including laws to govern the bequeathing/ ownership of the digital estate left behind by the deceased, just as they have provided for the physical estate. 

Mankind has always been good at creating illusions, the practitioners ranging from spiritual leaders to magicians to politicians to sorcerers to conmen. The digital afterlife will also be an illusion and some may find fault with it.

But then again, one is reminded of the words of the Buddha, Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein — all of whom had said in unequivocal terms that reality is only an illusion. To which I can only add, with the utmost humility — choose your reality, go with the one that comforts you most; comfort and happiness are also illusions, but they make life bearable. While it lasts.

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Disappearing Democracy: Dismantling of a Nation and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com