Fear of Immortality

This is in reference to a post I recently read which talks about how there will be a boom in Artificial Intelligence which would make it as intelligent as humans and soon after that a lot more intelligent than us. It talks about the exponential growth of intelligence. It shows that AI would actually reach a point where it evolves in the range of earthworm to human in few years, days or even hours. Please read the really well researched post here.

A consequence of this Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is that we would either become immortal or extinct. While this may seem like a piece of fictional fantasy, it is extraordinarily plausible. The top people of the world in AI are not debating on whether it will come or not, but on when it will come. And that too in just the range of this century or the next. Nevertheless, we are almost sure that at least our grandchildren will get to see 'beings' hyperbolically more intelligent than them. Beings which we created. 

While this does not appeal to us as we are not used to AI super-beings other than in sci-fi movies which we dismiss as full-on fantasy, what we might appreciate is that even if we don't reach ASI soon enough, we should, in the near future, be good enough in Nanotechnology and other branches of science which would assist Biology to the point that it won't be Biology any more. We would be making our own blood, our own hands, and our own brains. If you get your hand chopped off, you can order another from Amazon. If you get a brain cancer, you don't go to a neurosurgeon but an engineer who 'repairs' it to as-good-as-new. Our cells won't age. Eternal youth, immortality would not be words we just find in books. Something which Voldemort had to lose his soul for would be available at a drug store in plastic bottles. 

This being a brief summary of (my interpretation of) the attached post, I would like to build on how the world would be when humans are immortal. I hope you appreciate that we are not talking about Elves from The Lord of the Rings, but about a very realistic scenario when "love you till eternity" could be possible literally.

Imagine a world where you just can't die. I'm sorry, you can die, but why would you if you have a choice? Now does this scare you? All our life we have been told how everything is transient and everything dies. But we just saw that technology really knows no boundaries. 

This is of course if you don't decide to dive inside Mariana Trench, or drink a pint of lava, or strap yourself to a human bomb. You can die by (a very destructive) accident, but not by aging. You can't grow old. 

We would not be immortal. We would be roaming around the world like Gandalfs and Dumbledores who can only be killed by underworld demons or cursed Horcruxes (or their counterpart in the real world, whatever that is.) 

Or there would be a RAID 1 'brain' somewhere in Finland which is constantly getting synced to your brain activity. As soon as your body dies, your family buys another and plugs it to your temp brain. And you tell the story about how you almost died by being decapitated by an ISIS terrorist. Heck, you even see the video that they post on Youtube. And treat it like just another Game of Thrones episode. 

Think of what this would do to your relationships. It took me 16 years to realize the true potential of love and how it grows. Imagine if you were living for 1600 years in love with the same person. How intense would that feeling be? Or would you become bored with one person, and the concept of marriage would be dissolved to allow you to have multiple partners. How painful would heartbreaks be? Painful enough that you would give up your immortality? 

Think of how much knowledge you would be able to accumulate. Evolution compounds intelligence, but age compounds knowledge. At one point you could have PhDs in all the sciences in the world. And what inventions could you do with that information. Or rather make machines which invent things for you. But individually you would be competing with other immortals. Such competition. 

We're assuming here that you are one of the lucky few who have been chosen to be immortal, because you can't just give immortality to everyone. But what kind of politics would happen to make the cut. This is not about getting more money or power or land to rule. This is about whether you would die or not. 

There would be a division in the society. The elves and the humans. The humans would still need to reproduce in order to have their 'species' survive, while the elves would not be able to reproduce at all as that would lead to some insane population explosion. You could still have sex, but the joy of having a child would be taken away from you. It would be a choice, between forwarding your life to your children, or keeping it to yourself. 

However, humans with their egos would rather keep their lives to themselves than give it to their unborn children. There would be a revolt by the mortals. And that would lead to inclusion of the human right of "Right to Immortality". 

And then, everyone would be immortal. 

But doesn't this scare you? Or rather limit you? What if there is a soul within us. Would we be trapping it in one body and not letting it fuse with the higher being? Or will we dismiss this as spirituality which doesn't make sense to people who wish to remain humans for eternity. What if there is a heaven after death which we would never be able to experience? Or are we just beings who have the illusion of existence and will continue living in this illusion forever, never being able to find the truth? Or will we become so intelligent and knowledgeable that we would find out the deepest secrets of the universe? 

For all you know, we might just be asking these questions very seriously sometime in this life. Or maybe we would choose to not bring immortality to the world at all. And die like humans. Before some other generation says, "What the heck, let's be immortal." 

While you might have read this like a kid's fable, this might just be the life your children live. 

Or maybe we'd go extinct together.