INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Futurist Gray Scott

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.