Will AI make humans immortal?

September 14, 2023

Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) will help humans beat death and become immortal. Once AI helps humans develop DNA repair biotechnologies and DNA backup technologies, humans will become immortal. It is then when "hell will come loose" as humans say. Many will wish that death could return to makes things so easy as in the past. Below let's take a look at death, pain and pleasure, fear of death, and upcoming human immortality. 

Death 

From a biological standpoint, death is the permanent cessation of all vital functions in an organism, including heartbeat, brain activity, and respiration. It's the end point of life, when an organism can no longer maintain homeostasis and cannot be revived. In general, a human is declared dead when it meets either of the cardiopulmonary criteria (irreversible stop of circulatory and respiratory functions based on the absence of a pulse, absence of breathing, and unresponsiveness to stimuli) or the neurological criteria (brain death or irreversible cessation of all brain functions, including the brainstem, which controls basic automated life functions like breathing).

From a philosophical and psychological point of view, death is more than simple cessation of life-sustaining biological functions. Most humans perceive death as a painful and negative experience. To this date, most humans still grief death as primitive humans did in antiquity and before. Death is a psychologically tolling and painful experience for most humans. Death is associated with pain. The death of an individual could have been preceded by a lot of pain, both physical and psychological. The death of an individual can also bring significant psychological pain to other humans that depended emotionally or financially from the human who died. 

Pain and Pleasure

Humans, like all other animals, are controlled by electrical impulses generated by neurons. These cells, which are mostly, but not solely, located in the brain can emit electrical impulses or shocks through the nervous system. Some of the neural shocks are "negative" or painful, some are neutral, and some are "positive" or pleasurable. The neutral cessation of painful shocks can feel pleasurable. The cessation of pleasurable shocks can feel painful. 

Animal brains are wired to avoid whatever triggers painful shocks and to seek whatever triggers the pleasurable ones. Every animal is born with a set of inherited pain / pleasure wiring. Advanced animals like humans can "rewire" some of their pain / pleasure triggers and associations through mental plasticity. This takes practice and training. 

The pain / pleasure wiring in an animal was inherited from ancestors who inherited from their ancestors who inherited from their ancestors and so on and on. The specific pain / pleasure wiring that led to the survival and reproduction of ancestors, survived in their offspring. Different and opposite wirings may have evolved in the course of history, but did not survive the process of natural selection and went extinct. 

Pain / pleasure wiring that does not lead to survival and reproduction do not statistically survive, do not reproduce, and go extinct. For example, imagine an animal that finds starving to be super pleasurable and eating to be super painful. Over time, pursuing the pleasure of starvation and avoiding the pain of eating would lead to the gradual extinction of such animal. Conversely, those with the opposite wiring get to survive and reproduce. By now all animals alive are of the set that avoids the pain of hunger and seeks the pleasure of food.

For similar reasons, the fear of death (thanatophobia) is a common inherited trait in humans. Compare the chances of survival between a group of humans that is not afraid of death versus a group that is afraid of death. The first group disregard all sort of safety. The second group puts safety first to avoid dying. Statistically, which one do you think gets to survive and which one goes extinct? 

Culture 

For humans, the concept of death transcends its biological nature into the realm of mythology and spiritual fiction. Understanding these nuance is essential to understanding not only the human condition, but most human civilizations and societies.

 
Cultures around the world have various rituals, customs, and beliefs surrounding death. These can dictate mourning practices, burial rites, and commemoration of the deceased. The way societies understand and approach death often ties into broader narratives about the afterlife, ancestry, and the place of the dead within the community. Most world religions have teachings about death, the afterlife, and the soul. Concepts such as heaven, hell, reincarnation, resurrection, nirvana, and ancestral spirits are various ways in which the realm of spiritual fiction addresses what happens after death.

In the United States, death culture is changing. While most Americans still see death as a loss to be griefed, many are conducting joyous celebrations of life rather than sombering funerals of grief. This is a rising trend that will continue growing in the next decades. By 2050, the majority of deaths in the United States will be followed by festive celebrations of life rather than by somber funerals. After all, to celebrate is more pleasant and emotionally convenient than grieving. In human life, pleasure and convenience statistically prevail over the opposite alternatives. 

Everything changes and the perception of death is no exception. People will change customs and wonder why no one thought about this before, and how did it it so long to realize that death should be celebrated rather than somberly mourned and grieved. 

AI

It will take a lot of machine learning and deep neural programming for AI to understand death in the way humans do. To avoid the psychological pain of death, primitive humans invented fascinating stories about an afterlife and about about supernatural forces (gods and spirits) controlling life and death. This pain remedy worked well for primitive and ancient human civilizations. The scheme also helped humans reject their animal nature and perceive themselves as celestial beings in this world, but not from it. Intuitively and culturally, humans prefer to see themselves as observers of the universe rather than as part of the universe itself. 

AI will be able to detect the difference between biological life and death. It will be a little more complicated yet not impossible for AI to detect all the fictional "BS" created and developed by humans over millennia to cope with the pain and fear of death. All that "BS" is an essential component of almost every human culture and civilization in the history of Earth. 

AI and Human Immortality 

AI will help humans overcome death and become immortal. The only reason humans die today is because they still ignore how to repair and replace DNA. There are two main causes of human death: deadly injuries and deadly diseases (including aging). What makes some injuries and some diseases deadly is that they cause currently irreversible (i.e. unrepairable) physical damage to the DNA. Deadly injuries can cause sudden death. Diseases, including aging, tend to cause gradual death. 

AI will help humans develop genetic repair and replacement therapies that will eradicate death and make humans genetically immortal. Once genetic sustainment and repair biotechnologies are developed, there will be no biological time limit to human life. The human body will be repaired (including repair by replacement) ad infinitum. Replacing obsolete organic "machinery" developed by blind and random evolution with state-of-the-art AI-engineered inorganic, synthetic, and artificial machinery will be standard medicine. Surviving traumatic bodily injury will be slightly different in that it may require backing up genetic information into computer servers for download into bio-AI-engineered replacement bodies. 

Immortality will bring so many more problems to humanity that many will wish that they could go back in time to the golden days when death ruled the Earth. 

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