The world in 2384:
Is it possible to achieve immortality?

On April 27, 2016, Philip Rosedale launched the idea for a new world, known as High Fidelity, where people could lead a second life through the lens of a virtual reality headset. It would be more realistic and much bigger than the previous parallel world he had created: “As big as Earth and beyond,” he predicted. “We are about to leave the real world behind.”

We’re now living in a time where we can lead entirely different lives from behind a screen in the comfort of our own homes. These new worlds are so immersive that the politics, economy, relationships and emotions behind milestone events are as genuine as if they were occurring in our physical lives. Eventually, some futurists predict we could be existing forever within these virtual worlds, by developing the technology to “upload” our thoughts onto hard drives, allowing them to live and interact in alternate realities. A new original series on Netflix, Altered Carbon, set in 2384, takes this one step further with human consciousness living forever, transferring our memories, thoughts and emotions from body to body as they wear out, universe to universe, so we could live on forever. WIRED takes a look at the next three centuries to explore whether this idea can become a tangible reality.

2018

In the past 50 years, mankind has travelled to the moon, successfully completed the first heart transplant, developed machines that can keep us alive and mapped the DNA blueprint for human life. We have created virtual realities, linked billions of people online, created virtual assistants and the internet of things. Entrepreneur Herman Narula has even built the matrix. His company Improbable has developed Spatial OS, the world’s first large-scale distributed operating system. The platform can be used to simulate potential futures – from relatively small issues such as how to solve traffic, to our generation’s biggest medical problems – by simulating biological systems. In Narula’s vision he is creating a decision-making platform, a “what if machine” where each model could be integrated and built on top of each other, creating a one-to-one virtual representation of the real world that researchers could use to run experiments.

Running prediction machines requires big data, and in 2018 big data is ubiquitous. We know companies use our data – what we buy online, where we are in the world, who our friends, partners, and family are and how we interact, what bills we pay or the games we play – to target us with advertising. But China is taking a less sneaky route by categorising each of their citizens using a Social Credit System. In her new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart, Rachel Botsman details how the State Council of China is planning to implement this scheme by 2020. “Imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government,” she writes. “That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school – or even just your chances of getting a date.”

To make big data possible, first you have to connect with the digital world. In 2007, our relationship with this became hyper-personal. Then CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, revealed the smartphone, and it has since become a necessary part for convenient day to day living. In the same time frame, artificial intelligence has grown to become used in just about every industry. From recognising the faces of criminals and safeguarding our security, to allowing each of us to have our own virtual assistants and widening our access to healthcare, artificial intelligence has even the world’s brightest minds concerned about how it could shape our future. Professor Stephen Hawking is one of them. “The genie is out of the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development, but we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.” In 2017, a bot called Libratus out-bluffed poker kingpins, another had taught itself to play chess without learning from a human how to play first.

We are now also living in a world where our lifespan is double what it was 100 years ago. Where a 40-year-old person was once considered to be nearing the end of their life in 1917, many are now living well into their eighties, with the oldest person to date living 122 years.

Our advancements in health, however, go beyond merely extending our years. Quality of life has improved for the better and babies who might not have survived a few decades ago are given a chance to thrive – those born as early as 22 weeks can see out the end of a normal gestation period outside of their mother’s body with the help of machines. In science fiction film Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), potential children are conceived by genetic manipulation to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. The themes in films such as this are now a reality. For instance, parents struggling to conceive now have the option of in vitro fertilisation, while ethical bodies are debating whether we should be allowed to defy natural evolution in this way.

What’s perhaps most striking is our ability to manipulate machines by the use of our minds. In 2018, a breakthrough that will allow humans to control machines with their minds will go into clinical trials. Stentrode is a matchstick-sized device that can be inserted into the brain through blood vessels. It’s hoped it will help paralysed patients move by controlling their exoskeletons, effectively changing the the quality of life for people whose mobility is inhibited by their conditions.

In the last few decades we have reached a point where serious debate is being held about where the line is drawn between how we teach machines and how much they can learn on their own. In the next 150 years, some of the biggest technological advancements towards linking the two will be made on a massive and personal scale.

2118

By this time, it’s predicted the Earth will be home to 10 billion humans, one of the only species to survive a mass extinction event as well as extreme changes in climate due to global warming. Just a century previous, Professor Hawking, advised seeking alternative planets for possible habitation: “We are running out of space on earth and we need to break through technological limitations preventing us living elsewhere in the universe.” A century after SpaceX led the charge to make autonomous vehicles the leading form of transportation, it has now moved on to launch and cultivate space colonies on Mars, while Nasa’s missions have finally broken through the barriers to allow humans to live permanently on other planets. By this time though, the planet’s are only open for development and research.

Futurologist Ian Pearson predicts that by the 2100s, back on planet Earth, the ability to communicate through thought transmission will be as easy as other forms of brain augmentation. “Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net,” he predicted in 2012. He says by this point, we will be wiring our brains to computers to make them work faster. “By 2075 most people in the developed world will use machine augmentation of some sort for their brains and, by the end of the century, pretty much everyone will.”

Experimental philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats believes by this time, AI will have led us to achieve “passive mortality.” “By having a neural network follow everything you do from birth until death, an AI will be able to behave as you would in circumstances equivalent to those you have experienced,” he says. “At first this will be an unanticipated benefit of legacy systems (such as the fraud detection systems used by your bank), which will provide a decent proxy for your personality when artfully combined. By the late 2000s it will be marketed in its own right (immortality-as-a-service). The problem will be that it won’t work reliably in truly novel situations, and rampant climate change will make for an unprecedented level of global unpredictability. As a result, the technology will be used only passively: with your AI-captured personality embedded in an AI agent, you’ll have the option of subsisting as a cloud-embedded planetary observer after your death.”

Science fiction and fantasy writer and historian Ada Palmer, predicts that by 2118 our life expectancy will have increased by another 70 years. “Expansion of the body’s lifespan through medical advances such as gene therapy and other anti-ageing technologies make societies become accustomed to lifespans of 150 years or more,” she says. “The expectation that these can and should be expanded affects culture and identity, making people think of death as a problem to be solved rather than a natural inevitability, galvanising more research into how to expand lifespans even more and transcending the limits of the body. At around the same time, advances in neural network research and other computing advances make it possible to simulate neural systems as complicated as a human brain, though it is not yet practical to duplicate and ‘upload’ a real one.”

The creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, explores the possibility that so-called brain implants will be as essential to everyday life as a tablet or smartphone is in 2018. The implants sit behind the ear and sync up to an electronic contact lens that records and saves everything the body does. This means the history of each person is in their hands and can be accessed over and over again, adding to the collection of big data to replicate personalities.

2218

Herman Narula predicted that eventually humans will take to virtual worlds as an antidote to mass automation. By 2200, its possible that humans could live and work within virtual “gaming” worlds that are resistant to the AI-dominated workforce that would by now have overtaken the physical world. Outside of the virtual worlds, medicine has advanced so much our bodies have become perfectly engineered. Disease has been eradicated and babies are conceived through a series of options chosen by parents and collected from birthing stations nine months on. Continents have shifted and the world map looks unrecognisable. Meanwhile other planets are being established at a pace to accommodate billions more humans that arrive by space elevators, at one time only accessible to the super rich but now as common as cars once were. Lost animal and plant species are being revived by technological advancements and the environments they once lived in are recreated to ensure their survival.

Science-fiction writer Ada Palmer believes that we would be on track to uploading our brains onto clouds and hard drives, at a similar rate to what it was once possible to cryogenically freeze our bodies for long periods of time.

“The brain is mapped in sufficient detail that whole brains can be replicated in digital form, making it possible to create a computer intelligence that effectively replicates a person's memories, decision-making process etc, though in tests (such as puzzle solving or rock, paper, scissors, throw) the behaviour of the digital and original is usually not quite identical,” says Palmer. “People debate whether (A) the differences are caused by the digital and biological beings’ awareness of their own bodies/forms, if (B) this means there is still something about how neurons operate that we don't understand and are not simulating with sufficient detail, or (C) the original has a soul and the copy does not. Different societies and cultural groups have a range of reactions to this technology, and differ on whether a digital version of someone has the same civil and legal rights and status as the original, counts as a child/offspring, or even counts as a human being. Some people have digital copies kept paused to be activated only when they die, while others allow digital versions of themselves to run and collaborate with them while the biological version is still alive. Meanwhile efforts to house biological brains in robotic bodies further extend the potential lifespan of an organic brain, but does not yet make it infinite.”

Philosopher Jonathon Keats predicts the fight for immortality will be persistent and categorised by a series of failures that will ultimately leave people isolated and detached from reality. “Experiments in active immortality will persist even after two centuries of failure (from head transplants to synaptic scaffolds). As a result of these persistent efforts – and the eternal ambitions of the ultra-rich – the definition of immortality will change. It will become a matter of genetics (by way of human cloning) augmented by epigenetic therapy, in which your cloned self will be exposed to the same biochemical environment that you were, in order to turn genes on and off in the appropriate sequence. (Otherwise your clone would merely become an identical twin of yourself.) Experiences will also be replayed, since those have an epigenetic impact. These events will be delivered by a fully immersive VR, based on the perfect tracking of your sensory adventures from birth to death (initially a service offered by big technology companies). The problem will be that you’ll need to live in a perfect bubble, sealed off from the present world, which will be radically different and would hopelessly muddle your epigenetics, changing who you are. As a result, a select group of people will end up reliving their lives in isolation, over and over again, until their money runs out – but they’ll be totally detached from the present and ultimately irrelevant.”

2384

By the 2300s the super rich will have finally achieved immortality – death will be a mere inconvenience. They will have left Earth as a dystopian wasteland, filled with sprawling neon cities while they perch above the clouds in mansions filled with relics from “elder civilisations.” In Netflix’s Altered Carbon, its possible to live for hundreds of years, across different universes that have been colonised in the centuries gone by. Human bodies will contain cortical stacks in their spinal columns that digitally store their memories and can be transferred to a new body, known as a sleeve. Re-sleeving will be a process open to everyone, but only the ultra-rich will be able to update over the course of their lives via a cloud storage system, meaning they can bypass the ageing process and choose bodies that are to their liking.

To get here, humans will have been through the typical trials and errors that have characterised their species for centuries. Ada Palmer believes the ultimate motivation to continue will come from humanity’s expansion through the solar system. “The long transit times to asteroids and the moons of Jupiter, will make computer intelligences increasingly desirable since programs can be sent at light speed from point to point in order to make business decisions or interact with friends, while physical bodies – whether robotic or biological – require months to complete the same trip,” she says. “The transformation of society from an Earth-centred to a multi-world system inadvertently creates the conditions for computerised intelligence to become the expected default human state, though some societies and individuals continue to reject it. In this period the most sought-after technology is one to let the ideas and memories of a digital copy be reintegrated into a biological original, so your computer self can do something on Titan and you can then return that version of yourself to your biological body on Mars. This technology proves challenging however, and ignites cultural anxieties, including the fear that the original mind is killed and replaced by the digital one, and concerns about the application of this to insert memories into the minds of others.”

Jonathon Keats sees the world in this century as similar to that of Altered Carbon in that our ability to live on forever will fundamentally shake social laws, morals and politics. “The passive immortals will be rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a century. Millions will be found on legacy systems deep within 24th century server farms. By this point in history, the extent of any environmental crisis will be beyond an ordinary tech fix (partly exacerbated by centuries of tech fixes gone bad). In their desperation, some people will recognise the value of the passive immortals, appreciating their deep observations of long-term change from myriad points of view (since the observations of each, uninterrupted for centuries, will be coloured by their individual personalities). The virtual presence of the passive immortals will cause a sociopolitical schism, in which a society addicted to accelerating change confronts a fundamentally different philosophy of life,” he says.

Altered Carbon explores these new ways of social order through the murder of a wealthy man, Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) and his attempt to solve it himself by enlisting the help of the last surviving soldier, Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee, Joel Kinnaman) from an elite group of interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against this new world order. The values and vices that humans have developed for thousands of years still remain – relationships, wealth, exploration, drugs, consumerism – but exist in spheres that blur natural human ability, machines and digital.

The next few hundred years? “The direction taken by society at this stage will determine whether the story continues into the 2400s and beyond,” says Keats.