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Digital immortality is the key to human eternal life
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
Today, much of the work aimed at achieving eternal life is focused on finding the key to so-called "digital immortality."
"Digital immortality is when you are physically dead, but exist in silicon," a kind of "plan B in case life science fails to achieve true biological immortality," writes Briton Stephen Cave in his book "Immortality." "That is, your brain is scanned, and your essence is downloaded digitally, as a set of bits and bytes," the futurologist explains. "This complete brain emulation can be stored in a computer memory bank, and from there, at any time, brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that will be an exact copy of yourself."
According to Cave, there are currently three main obstacles to the implementation of this program (some believe that they will be overcome within 40 years). First, the problem of reading all the information that makes up the human "I" remains unsolved. Cave believes that this will require removing the brain from the cranium, preserving it and cutting it into thin slices, and then scanning it. Second, there is the problem of storing information, the volume of which exceeds the capabilities of modern computers by "many millions of orders of magnitude." Finally, it is necessary to learn how to "revive" the resulting copy. Theoretically, all this is possible, but Cave doubts whether it will come to practical implementation. Digital immortality remains for him only a surrogate, which, moreover, can "turn into a curse, as always happens in mythology."
Dr Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is more optimistic. "The problems facing digital immortality are purely engineering problems, however difficult and intricate they may be. If you create a program comparable in scale to the Manhattan Project, they could be solved within a decade," he is convinced. He equates digital immortality with immortality itself: "If this avatar or robot is you in every way, then it is you." Armstrong foresees the difficulties associated with the temptation to "pump up" your own copy or reproduce successful clones: "You can copy the five best programmers in the world or the best call center worker a million times, and these copies will simply replace people who have lost their economic value."
Dr. Randall Cohen, founder of the Californian organization Carbon Copies Project, prefers to talk about "substrate-independent intelligence." In his opinion, such an intelligence would be an extension of the subject's personality to the same extent that he himself is an extension of himself at an earlier age. In the future, the recreated person will not know that he is a copy, Cohen believes. He believes that humanity has faced possible ethical problems many times in the past, and digital immortality is the next stage of evolution.