Our Project Director Ian Daniel
interviewed Gray Scott, a futurist/neuro-technology-philosopher,
as part of our broad investigation into death,
dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The
Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale Center in Ft. Greene
Brooklyn. Details HERE.
Gray is also the editorial director of SERIOUS WONDER.com the
online futurist philosophy, technology and consciousness magazine produced by
his media company SERIOUS WONDER MEDIA™
based in NYC.
Learn more about Gray's work HERE.
Check out some excerpts from Gray's
interview:
Uploading your consciousness is going
to happen. Everyone is uploading every single moment
of their life, like what they had for breakfast, on social networks. That's the
first stage of uploading consciousness.
I do
think there will be consciousness factories so that just like on your cloud
server you will back up your consciousness, however, we will do it more like a
brain to computer interface--like a headband you wear. And every day you
download everything that happened to you in your computer and it all just goes
into this cloud, and if you’re in a car accident or die of old age, they
can replicate that consciousness into a machine. You literally just jump from
body to a machine without a separation.
I think what we are going to see in the future is an organism that
is part machine and part organic. So you could take your stems cells and
literally grow a brain. And if we could learn how to upload our consciousness
into the substrate of an organic brain then we have a whole other scenario--even if our physical body dies, that consciousness goes on forever as long as the machine works. You
still have to maintain the machine but if we can capture that essence of who
you are, who I am, then we potentially could live forever, and we could go
anywhere in the universe. We don’t need to breathe, a machine doesn’t need to
breathe. As long as you have a power source and we can do that with
solar, as long as you’re plugged into a star, we’re talking. You could choose to leave earth and go explore deep space for
eternity as long as you’re close enough to a star for energy.
Isn't the drive to create artificial intelligence, isn't it a cry against death? I don't want to die so I'm going to create an artificial representation of myself in case I do. I mean it's a very deep psychological process.
Personally, I'm greedy and I want to live forever. I
do. Because it's heartbreaking and inefficient to only live 80 years. It’s such a short time, I feel cheated. All of the work
that you do throughout your life, all the preparation that you do for your
intelligence, for your body. Think about how many times you go to the gym or
think about how many meals you've cooked for yourself and just to have that
swept away in one moment. That bothers me.
Thanks so much to Gray and Ian for sharing. To hear more of Gray's interview come to "Be The Death of Me" June 28/29.
To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE.