How social media is leading us to a strange state of immortality
(A refined transcript of my opening address at Social Media Week Berlin, Sept. 20)
Normally a conference organizer gets on stage to tell you about all the amazing speakers they have lined up for the week. But I’d like to tell you about a speaker who won’t be appearing at Social Media Week. His name is Ray Kurzweil. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll now explain, he can’t be here to tell you about his theories.
Kurzweil is something of a living genius. His main thesis is that technological advance can be measured, graphed, and projected into the future. By charting the exponential improvements over the past fifty years, we can predict developments that are likely to come in the next half-century and beyond. For Kurzweil, many of these developments involve changes to the human body and mind. He predicts we will utilize computer chips to improve our health and augment our natural physical capacity, resulting in an elongated human lifespan and, eventually, immortality.
When I first began organizing Social Media Week Berlin, Kurzweil was top of my speaker wishlist. I did a few searches, found his contact information, and sent him an email requesting his attendance. Within a few days I received a reply from his secretary:
Dear Joel,
Thank you for your interest in having Mr. Kurzweil speak at Social Media Week Berlin this September. I am sorry to report that he is already confirmed to speak at two events in the U.S. on September 20 and 22 and so he will not be able to join you in person in Berlin.
He does give live virtual lectures followed by Q&A either by Teleportec or by standard videoconferencing. Our Teleportec system projects a live image of Mr. Kurzweil behind a lectern with the local back-drop behind him, creating the effect that he is on stage at the event.
His fee for a virtual presentation is $12,000 (this covers technical expenses on his end), plus the cost of technical expenses on the conference end. If you would like to use our Teleportec system, the technical cost would be roughly $9,000 which would cover system shipping and on-site technical support by our technician at the event….
My first thought upon reading about Kurzweil’s holographic presentation was this…
And although it would be fascinating to have Kurzweil’s hologram on stage, the cost was as staggering as the concept. At that price, I’d expect to be able to ask him to recite Princess Leia’s “Help me Obi Wan Kinobi” monologue.
To save costs, I thought I’d skip having Kurzweil speak in person (or in hologram), and instead deliver the talk myself. So here goes.
Part of Kurweil’s vision of the future is that we will upload our thoughts and memories into some kind of giant computer databank, thereby securing our brains against physical decay. How does any of this apply here at Social Media Week?
Well, consider some of the technology that already exists on social media platforms. We’re now all well aware that Facebook (and Google, and many other sites) tracks what we type, and returns advertisements based on our preferences. As Mark Zuckerberg told us last week at F8, Facebook will expand its data collection to track every single action we make on his platform. Every “Like” clicked, every event attended, every comment typed, will all be recorded in a databank that, over time, will become a historical record of our online personas.
This is nothing new. Google has been doing this for a long time. In fact, using its knowledge about your past search preferences, Google now predicts which search result you are going to click and begins loading that page in anticipation of you selecting it.
Given the technological capability to catalogue your behaviour and make predictions about future actions, it can’t be long before Facebook introduces an “autopilot mode” option. It’s conceivable, right? Utilizing its knowledge of your past “Likes”, Facebook could be enabled to go ahead and “Like” things for you, whenever you’re too busy or too offline to do it yourself.
At first this might be clumsy technology, liking only things you’ve liked before, or based on a few keywords. But as Kurzweil tells us, technological advance is exponential. It’s not far-fetched to imagine a world where Facebook is able to select events you will attend, choose new friends, break up friendships, and even write updates for you.
What would happen if you died? This self-automated online persona, created in your image, would go on existing. Is that a form of immortality? Would Kurzweil’s predictions have been fulfilled? Doesn’t that make social media a gateway to a strange form of immortality?
Another person I desperately wanted to invite to Social Media Week Berlin is John Gray, one of my favourite thinkers. Unfortunately I was even more unsuccessful in securing Gray’s attendance than I was Kurzweil’s. He doesn’t have any kind of web presence whatsoever.
Gray is a British political philosopher whose basic thesis is that our belief in constant and irreversible human progress is misplaced. All of our perceived gains can – and most likely will – be lost. He doesn’t see this as pessimism:
“Without diminishing the individual sufferings, what’s pessimistic about the notion that this particular species has demonstrated its incapacity? It’s only pessimistic if you think that’s the site of meaning in the world.” (Quoted in The Independent).
John Gray has a thing or two to say about Ray Kurzweil. He recently wrote a book called “The Immortalization Commission”, which takes a cold hard look at a variety of strange projects to achieve immortality. Of Kurzweil’s predicted computerized databank of human brains, he asks: what kind of “life” would that deliver? It would be a ghostly sort of immortality, a cartoon caricature of our personalities.
So think about that next time you “Like” something on Facebook. You may slowly be creating a caricature that will go on living even after you die.
- Joel Dullroy, coordinator of Social Media Week Berlin, and co-founder of Deskwanted.com
