In 2016, Jang Ji-sung's young daughter Nayeon passed away from a blood-related disease. But in February, the South Korean mother was reunited with her daughter in virtual reality. Experts constructed a version of her child using motion capture technology for a documentary. Wearing a VR headset and haptic gloves, Jang was able to walk, talk and play with this digital version of her daughter.
"Maybe it's a real paradise," Jang said of the moment the two met in VR. "I met Nayeon, who called me with a smile, for a very short time, but it's a very happy time. I think I've had the dream I've always wanted."
Once largely the concern of science fiction, more people are now interested in immortality -- whether that's keeping your body or mind alive forever (as explored in the new Amazon Prime comedy Upload), or in creating some kind of living memorial, like an AI-based robot or chatbot version of yourself, or of your loved one. The question is -- should we do that? And if we do, what should it look like?
In Korea, a mother was reunited with a virtual reality version of her young daughter who had passed away years before, as part of a documentary project.
Modern interest around immortality started in the 1960s, when the idea of cryonics emerged -- freezing and storing a human corpse or head with the hope of resurrecting that person in the distant future. (While some people have chosen to freeze their body after death, none have yet been revived.)
"There was a shift in death science at that time, and the idea that somehow or another death is something humans can defeat," said John Troyer, director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath and author of Technologies of the Human Corpse.
However, no peer-reviewed research suggests it's worth pouring millions of dollars into trying to upload our brains, or finding ways to keep our bodies alive, Troyer said. At least not yet. A 2016 study published in the journal PLOS ONE did find that exposing a preserved brain to chemical and electrical probes could make the brain function again, to some degree.
"It's all a gamble about what's possible in the future," Troyer said. "I'm just not convinced it's possible in the way [technology companies] are describing, or desirable."
There's a big difference between people actively trying to upload their brain to try and live on forever and those who die whose relatives or the public try to resurrect them in some way through technology.
In 2015, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of software company Replika, lost her best friend Roman after he was hit by a car in Moscow. As part of the grieving process, she turned to tech. Kuyda trained a chatbot on thousands of text messages the two had shared over the years -- creating a digital version of Roman that could still "talk" to family and friends.
The first time she messaged the bot, Kuyda said she was surprised at how close it came to feeling like she was talking to her friend again. "It was very emotional," she said. "I wasn't expecting to feel like that, because I worked on that chatbot, I knew how it was built."
If this sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, it's because it was. The 2013 episode Be Right Back centers on a young woman whose boyfriend is killed in a car accident. In mourning, she signs up for a service that allows her to communicate with an AI version of him based on his past online communications and social media profiles -- ultimately turning it into an android version of her boyfriend. But he's never exactly the same.
Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot based on text messages from her friend Roman after he passed away in a car accident.
However, Kuyda says her Roman chatbot was a deeply personal project and tribute -- not a service for others. Anyone trying to do this on a mass scale would run into a number of barriers, she added. You'd have to decide what information would be considered public or private and who the chatbot would be talking to. The way you talk to your parents is different from the way you'd talk to your friends, or to a colleague. There wouldn't be a way to differentiate, she said.
The digital version of your friend could potentially copy the way they speak, but it would be based on things they had said in the past -- it wouldn't make new opinions or create new conversations. Also, people go through different periods in life and evolve their thinking, so it would be difficult to determine which phase the chatbot would capture.
"We leave an insane amount of data, but most of that is not personal, private or speaks about us in terms of what kind of person we are," Kuyda said. "You can merely build the shadow of a person."
The question remains: Where can we get the data to digitize people, in full? Kuyda asks. "We can deepfake a person and create some nascent technology that works -- like a 3D avatar -- and model a video of the person," she added. "But what about the mind? There's nothing that can capture our minds right now."
Perhaps the largest barrier to creating some kind of software copy of a person after they die is data. Pictures, texts, and social media platforms don't typically exist online forever. That's partially because the internet continues to evolve and partially because most content posted online belongs to that platform. If the company shuts down, people can no longer access that material.
"It's interesting and of the moment, but it's a great deal more ephemeral than we imagined," Troyer said. "A lot of the digital world disappears."
Memorialization technology doesn't typically stand the test of time, Troyer said. Think video tributes or social media memorial pages. It's no use having something saved to some cloud if no one can access it in the future, he added. Take the story of the computer that Tim Berners Lee used to create HTML on the web with -- the machine is at CERN, but no one knows the password. "I see that as sort of an allegory for our time," he said.
"We leave an insane amount of data, but most of that is not personal, private or speaks about us in terms of what kind of person we are. You can merely build the shadow of a person."
Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of software company Luka
One of the more sci-fi concepts in the area of digitizing death came from Nectome, a Y Combinator startup that preserves the brain for potential memory extraction in some form through a high-tech embalming process. The catch? The brain has to be fresh -- so those who wanted to preserve their mind would have to be euthanized.
Nectome planned to test it with terminally ill volunteers in California, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for those patients. It collected refundable $10,000 payments for people to join a waitlist for the procedure, should it someday become more widely available (clinical trials would be years away). As of March 2018, 25 people had done so, according to the MIT Technology Review. (Nectome did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
The startup raised $1 million in funding along with a large federal grant and was collaborating with an MIT neuroscientist. But the MIT Technology Review story garnered some negative attention from ethicists and neuroscientists, many of whom said the ability to recapture memories from brain tissue and re-create a consciousness inside a computer is at best decades away and probably not possible at all. MIT terminated its contract with Nectome in 2018.
"Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind," according to a statement from MIT. "It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person's consciousness."
It's currently impossible to upload a version of our brain to the cloud -- but some researchers are trying.
Meanwhile, an app in the works called Augmented Eternity aims to help people live on in digital form, for the sake of passing on knowledge to future generations. Hossein Rahnama, founder and CEO of context-aware computing services company FlyBits and visiting professor at MIT Media Lab, seeks to build software agents that can act as digital heirs, to complement succession planning and pass on wisdom to those who ask for it.
"Millennials are creating gigabytes of data on a daily basis and we have reached a level of maturity where we can actually create a digital version of ourselves," Rahnama said.
Augmented Eternity takes your digital footprints -- emails, photos, social media activity -- and feeds them into a machine learning engine. It analyzes how people think and act, to give you a digital being resembling an actual person, in terms of how they react to things and their attitudes, Rahnama said. You could potentially interact with this digital being as a chatbot, a Siri-like assistant, a digitally-edited video, or even a humanoid robot.
The project's purpose is to learn from humans' daily lives -- not for advertising, but to advance the world's collective intelligence, Rahnama said.
"I also like the idea of connecting digital generations," he added. "For example, someone who is similar to me in terms of their career path, health, DNA, genomics. They may be 30 or 40 years ahead of me, but there is a lot I could learn about that person."
The team is currently building a prototype. "Instead of talking to a machine like Siri and asking it a question, you can basically activate the digital construct of your peers or people that you trust in your network and ask them a question," Rahnama said.
In the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan, director Hiroshi Ishiguro has built more than 30 lifelike androids -- including a robotic version of himself. He's pioneered a research field on human-robot interactions, studying the importance of things like subtle eye movements and facial expressions for replicating humans.
"My basic purpose is to understand what a human is by creating a very human-like robot," Ishiguro said. "We can improve the algorithm to be more human-like if we can find some of the important features of a human."
Ishiguro has said that if he died, his robot could go on lecturing students in his place. However, it would never really "be" him, he said, or be able to come up with new ideas.
"We cannot transmit our consciousness to robots," Ishiguro said. "We may share the memories. The robot may say 'I'm Hiroshi Ishiguro,' but still the consciousness is independent."
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro (right) poses with the robotic version of himself (left).
However, this line is only going to get blurrier.
"I think in the near future we're going to have a brain-machine interface," Ishiguro said. This will make the boundary between a human and a computer very ambiguous, in the sense that we could share part of a memory with the computer.
"Then, I think it's quite difficult to say where is our consciousness -- is it on the computer, or in our brain?" Ishiguro said. "Maybe both."
Despite what you may think, this won't look anything like a science fiction movie, Ishiguro said. In those familiar examples, "they download the memory or some other information in your brain onto the computer. We cannot do that," he said. "We need to have different ways for making a copy of our brains, but we don't know yet how we can do that."
Humans evolved thanks to a biological principle: Survival of the fittest. But today, we have the technology to improve our genes ourselves and to develop human-like robots, Ishiguro said.
"We don't need to prove the biological principal to survive in this world," Ishiguro said. "We can design the future by ourselves. So we need to carefully discuss what is a human, what is a human right and how we can design ourselves. I cannot give you the answers. But that is our duty to think about the future.
"That is the most important question always -- we're looking for what a human is," Ishiguro said. "That is to me the primary goal of science and engineering."
This story is part of CNET'sThe Future of Funerals series. Stay tuned for more next week.
Continue reading here:
Disrupting death: Could we really live forever in digital form? - CNET
- Inside facility storing hundreds of corpses with the hope of using technology to restore them to full health - UNILAD - March 18th, 2024 [March 18th, 2024]
- Cryonics: Could you live forever? | BBC Science Focus Magazine - April 8th, 2023 [April 8th, 2023]
- Introduction to Cryonics - Alcor - February 18th, 2023 [February 18th, 2023]
- Inside Philip Rhoades' bid to be frozen in a new Australian cryonics ... - February 15th, 2023 [February 15th, 2023]
- About Cryonics - The Cryonics Institute - February 2nd, 2023 [February 2nd, 2023]
- Ted Williams - Wikipedia - November 25th, 2022 [November 25th, 2022]
- Arizona cryonics facility preserves bodies to revive later - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- 200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility - Smithsonian Magazine - October 21st, 2022 [October 21st, 2022]
- Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died - MIT Technology Review - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- 3 Things That Kept Me Up After The Kardashians, Season 2, Episode 4 - British Vogue - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Think Outside The (Titanium) Box: Isochoric Cryopreservation Could Save Lives - Forbes - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- 184 Frozen Bodies Are Waiting To Be Resurrected | History of Yesterday - History of Yesterday - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- The First Person To Be Cryonically Frozen and Preserved for the Future - History of Yesterday - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- Why TV vampires have our undying attention - The Boston Globe - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- David Suzuki: Gaia theorist James Lovelock was always ahead of the times - NOW Toronto - August 10th, 2022 [August 10th, 2022]
- expert reaction to paper suggesting that cellular and tissue function can be restored in pigs after death - Science Media Centre - August 6th, 2022 [August 6th, 2022]
- David Suzuki: Gaia theorist James Lovelock was always ahead of the times - The Georgia Straight - August 6th, 2022 [August 6th, 2022]
- Does Life on Earth Have a Purpose to Ancient Ghost Tracks of the West (Planet Earth Report) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel - August 6th, 2022 [August 6th, 2022]
- Cryonics Technology for Pet Market Is Expected to Boom | Praxair,Cellulis,Cryologics,Cryotherm,KrioRus,VWR,Thermo Fisher Scientific - Digital Journal - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Cryonics company hopes to use legal loophole to freeze people alive - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Russian Cryonics Couple Danila Medvedev and Valerija Udalova's Bad Breakup Led to Heist Of Frozen Brains - The Daily Beast - April 11th, 2022 [April 11th, 2022]
- Buckys 10 Trigger Words Explained - Bucky's Metal Arm - February 24th, 2022 [February 24th, 2022]
- Severance Offers a Surreal, Allegorical Twist on Work-Life Balance - The Ringer - February 19th, 2022 [February 19th, 2022]
- U.S. Cryonics Lab Currently Keeping The Heads And Bodies ... - February 17th, 2022 [February 17th, 2022]
- Preserving Bodies in a Deep Freeze: 50 Years Later ... - February 17th, 2022 [February 17th, 2022]
- Suspended animation - Wikipedia - January 24th, 2022 [January 24th, 2022]
- Delving into the sci-fi world of cryonics - SaskToday.ca - January 24th, 2022 [January 24th, 2022]
- Cryonics Technology Market Overview by Industry Dynamics, Regional Analysis and Forecast 2021 to 2026 Industrial IT - Industrial IT - January 3rd, 2022 [January 3rd, 2022]
- If cryonics suddenly worked, wed need to face the fallout ... - December 13th, 2021 [December 13th, 2021]
- Cryonics Institute - Wikipedia - December 13th, 2021 [December 13th, 2021]
- Frozen for the future: Does Minnesota have any cryonics ... - December 13th, 2021 [December 13th, 2021]
- News - Cryonics: Alcor Life Extension Foundation - November 17th, 2021 [November 17th, 2021]
- Death - Wikipedia - November 17th, 2021 [November 17th, 2021]
- How much would you pay to come back from the dead? The starting price is 60k - The Telegraph - November 13th, 2021 [November 13th, 2021]
- Review: Irresistible and observant realms of science fiction revealed in 19 stories - SF Chronicle Datebook - November 13th, 2021 [November 13th, 2021]
- Humans could 'live forever' as firm offers 'immortality' freezing for 478-a-year - Ammon News - October 30th, 2021 [October 30th, 2021]
- Halloween fun to be had at Metro area haunted houses - Polk.Today - October 30th, 2021 [October 30th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market to Witness Highest Growth In Near Future | Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics, Cryotherm, KrioRus, VWR, Thermo Fisher Scientific... - October 15th, 2021 [October 15th, 2021]
- Fact check: False claim that Walt Disneys frozen body will be thawed in December - USA TODAY - October 3rd, 2021 [October 3rd, 2021]
- Will Walt Disney's Frozen Body Be Thawed in December 2021? - Snopes.com - October 3rd, 2021 [October 3rd, 2021]
- Scorned wife raids ex-husbands cryogenics lab stealing frozen brains of people who hoped to be brought b... - The Sun - September 12th, 2021 [September 12th, 2021]
- Two cryopreservation companies, run by ex-spouses, fight over frozen corpses and one tries to remove the bo... - Market Research Telecast - September 12th, 2021 [September 12th, 2021]
- Could suspended animation send you into the future to become the smartest person alive? - SYFY WIRE - September 2nd, 2021 [September 2nd, 2021]
- Conclusive Study of Cryonics Technology market 2021 forecast to 2027 The Manomet Current - The Manomet Current - August 20th, 2021 [August 20th, 2021]
- UFOs and the Boundaries of Science - Boston Review - August 4th, 2021 [August 4th, 2021]
- Frequently Asked Questions | Cryonics Institute - July 12th, 2021 [July 12th, 2021]
- Is Walt Disney's Body Frozen? - Biography - July 10th, 2021 [July 10th, 2021]
- Jeanette Winterson, stone gods, oranges are not the only ... - July 10th, 2021 [July 10th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market to Eyewitness Massive Growth by 2028: Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics The Manomet Current - The Manomet Current - July 7th, 2021 [July 7th, 2021]
- Corrections: July 4, 2021 - The New York Times - July 5th, 2021 [July 5th, 2021]
- The cryonics industry would like to give you the past year, and many more, back - bdnews24.com - June 28th, 2021 [June 28th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market Analytical Overview, Growth Factors, Demand and Trends Forecast to 2027 The ERX News - The ERX News - June 28th, 2021 [June 28th, 2021]
- Cryonics During the Pandemic - The New York Times - June 27th, 2021 [June 27th, 2021]
- Heres what a trend-analyzing A.I. thinks will be the next big thing in tech - Digital Trends - June 27th, 2021 [June 27th, 2021]
- Global Cryonics Technology Market 2021: Size, Application, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies Analysis and Forecasts To 2026 The ERX News - The... - June 27th, 2021 [June 27th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market Pegged for Robust Expansion by 2027 Covid-19 Analysis The Courier - The Courier - June 4th, 2021 [June 4th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market 2021 Is Booming Across the Globe by Share, Size, Growth, Segments and Forecast to 2027 | Top Players Analysis- Praxair,... - April 9th, 2021 [April 9th, 2021]
- Scientist proposes new plan to "resurrect" the dead with a Dyson Sphere, kind of - Boing Boing - April 9th, 2021 [April 9th, 2021]
- Global Cryonics Technology Market Growth in the Forecast Period of 2020 to 2026 With Top Companies: , Buckeye Partners, Shell Pipeline, NuStar Energy,... - April 2nd, 2021 [April 2nd, 2021]
- Cryopreservation - Wikipedia - March 21st, 2021 [March 21st, 2021]
- Will Cryogenically Frozen People Ever Be Revived? - March 21st, 2021 [March 21st, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market Statistics, Facts & Figures, Size, Trends and Forecast 2025 by Leading Companies Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics,... - March 18th, 2021 [March 18th, 2021]
- Dyson spheres: The key to resurrection and immortality? - Big Think - March 18th, 2021 [March 18th, 2021]
- Putting dead heads on ice until the technology catches up - Sifted - February 2nd, 2021 [February 2nd, 2021]
- Global Cryonics Technology Market Detailed analysis of current Industry figures with forecasts growth by 2028 | Top Players; Praxair, Cellulis,... - January 19th, 2021 [January 19th, 2021]
- Cryonic Preservation Technique Lets You Preserve Your Body And Wake Up In The Future - ED Times - January 17th, 2021 [January 17th, 2021]
- Global Cryonics Technology Market (2020) to Witness Huge Growth by 2026 | Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics, Cryotherm, KrioRus, VWR, and more -... - January 17th, 2021 [January 17th, 2021]
- Intelliconnect (Europe) Ltd. - Cryogenics and connecting the cold bits - Design Products & Applications - January 5th, 2021 [January 5th, 2021]
- Cryonics Technology Market Key Trends, Drivers, Challenges and Standardization To 2020-2026 - PRnews Leader - October 20th, 2020 [October 20th, 2020]
- Cryonics - Wikipedia - June 1st, 2020 [June 1st, 2020]
- What Is Cryonics? - How Cryonics Works | HowStuffWorks - June 1st, 2020 [June 1st, 2020]
- The False Science of Cryonics | MIT Technology Review - June 1st, 2020 [June 1st, 2020]
- Here's How Far Cryonic Preservation Has Come in the 50 ... - June 1st, 2020 [June 1st, 2020]
- Research Report, Growth Trends and Competitive Analysis 2020-2026 - Cole of Duty - May 14th, 2020 [May 14th, 2020]
- Why Was Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams Decapitated? - Sportscasting - May 14th, 2020 [May 14th, 2020]
- Does Trump know his own government indirectly bankrolls some key promoters of the Russiagate hoax? - RT - May 14th, 2020 [May 14th, 2020]
- Oxford academic claims future humans could live for thousands of years - Express.co.uk - March 23rd, 2020 [March 23rd, 2020]
- How Long Do You Want to Live? This Technology Could Potentially Help People Live Forever - Interesting Engineering - March 23rd, 2020 [March 23rd, 2020]
- Cryonics, Dakota the Dog, and the Hope of Forever - Gizmodo - March 5th, 2020 [March 5th, 2020]
- Meet the Man Who Looks After Nederland's Frozen Dead Guy - 5280 | The Denver Magazine - March 5th, 2020 [March 5th, 2020]