I’m sitting here watching an older movie with Johnny Depp called Transcendence about a tech guru who is shot and has his conciousness uploaded into his A.I. he’d been developing. There are attacks by anti-tech activists and all sorts of mayhem ensues.
Whats wild is how this movie came out in 2014, almost ten years before A.I. was really on anyone’s radar, at least in any real sense. Now, it’s in every single electronic device you can think of. I think my washing machine may have A.I. built in.
This had me thinking of all the stuff we were sold on A.I. when it first launched, all the things it could do and there were people (myself included in curiousness anyway) talking about transhumanism, merging men with machines and so forth. Then we saw the actual products.
I’m not going to lie, I sometimes use ChatGPT for trouble shooting my website and to brainstorm ideas for blogs and topics. I don’t use it to actually create anything, though I did for a time. Playing with A.I. art and Midjourney made me want to actually learn how to draw, which I’m still learning, but I’ve gotten really good at it.
I stopped doing A.I. art when I learned it just scrapes and steals artwork and patterns from original artists and glops them together into a new thing. Plus it all looks kinda the same when it gets down to it. Most things you can figure out its A.I. if you look at it close enough. Though maybe the day is coming you won’t be able to.
Sadly most of the A.I. we see for consumers now is just regurgiated info it scraped from the internet. Lawyers have been censured for using it for legal filings only to have it hallucinate laws and cases that never existed. Its far from what we see in Eagle Eye.
One thing I see a lot of tech people talking about is what we see in Transendence, is using A.I. to cheat death. Now, we already have people like the Osbourne’s wanting to develop an A.I. clone of Ozzie. For one, I think this is plain gross and two, its not what I’m talking about. This will just be a copy based on compiled data of all his info and traits and likeness.
But what if we could upload someone’s conciousness or essence into a machine? Would anyone actually want that? I guess it would be cool if I could become like Ultron and just take over all computers and do whatever I wanted, but it likely would be far more stupid in reality. As is usually the case.
There was a show on Amazon Prime about this called Upload where rich people could be uploaded into a data base right before death and live in this luxurious resort and things. However, it was a subscription service the required ongoing payments and if your family could no longer afford it, you got moved from the resort to a tiny apartment with advertisements and no perks at all.
This may have been the most realistic depiction of A.I. afterlife someone could have come up with. Everything tech has been enshitified and everything is corporate now, so no matter how essential the technology, they must squeeze every nickel of profit out of it for the shareholders.
Even if they could upload your mind into a computer and it wasn’t fully enshitified, I’m not sure I would want that anyway. Since coming into witchcraft, I view death as both natural and a magical transfer of existence. We shed our bodies so that our consiousness or soul can move into the next realm. For me, that is a spirit realm.
It’s a place of comfort and rest. Not like heaven, its not luxurious, I’m not even sure it would be like anything we know or understand here. But it would be a place we can rest and recover from a life of trials and trauma. Over time, when we are ready we will be reincarnated. This could be in a year, five years or thousands of years.
Now, this isn’t based on any religion or text. This is the conclusion I’ve come to after reading about the afterlife among various cultures and religions. I admit its a bit of an amalgamation of things, but to me, this is what makes the most sense. There is no hell, no lake of fire and no judgement day.
Though, I like to think that for truly awful people like Hitler, they don’t get reincarnated, but they simply cease to exist. I just like to think there is some kind of cosmic justice out there.
Then there is Black Mirror which did a few episodes on this theme, but it usually involved someone being uploaded into like a small computer or an Alexa or something and even a video game and being forced to be slaves to the person controlling it. All pretty horiffic nightmare scenarios and all rather realistic.
Either way, as much as I love tech and gadgets, I limit my A.I. use to what I mentioned earlier, and I think there is a beauty in life being temporary. In the show Battlestar Galactica (2003 reboot) the Cylons looked human and when they died they were downloaded into new bodies and were pretty much immortal.
There was a band of rebel cylons fighting to destroy their resurrection technology because they believed in order for their live to truly have any meaning or impact, it had to come to an end at some point. I thought this was a powerful statment, and a valid one. Not to mention, think of the awful people in the world right now. Do we really want Elon Musk or Donald Trump permanantly uploaded into a Super Intelligence mainframe?
I don’t want to say I look forward to death. I want to live a long and happy life with my family. But I have made peace with it, and realize it would be a magical and mystical journey to somewhere I would no longer have to worry about aching joints, weight or paying bills. That alone would make any afterlife a Utopia, I don’t need golden streets or mansions as we learned in Sunday School.
I realize not everyone believes this way and its not up to me to tell someone how to view death. At the end of the day, we all need to come to our own conclusions. When I was an atheist, I was actually rather scared of dying because I felt there was nothing. The idea that THIS is all their is, bills and subscription services and processed food was truly depressing.
I think humans are wired to be spiritual beings and I feel there is a reason for that. I can’t prove anything because I think spirituality is experiential and cannot be proven, nor is it meant to be. Everyone has their personal and spiritual views and different things works for different people. There may even be different afterlifes depending how you believe. I really don’t know, I try to stay open to whatever.
What I do know in my old age, is there is no one path to God or the Universe or whatever you call it, and not one single human can influence your journey to spiritual enlightenment unless you give them that power over you. The truth is, no one has all the answers, and anyone who says they do is full of shit. I don’t care how much money or influence they have.
That’s my thought on the day. I got a little sidetracked, but in the end, if they are able to upload people into some super computer, I definetly do not want that for me. I prefer an analog death and maybe a green burial. Whatever you decide is personal and up to you and your families. I just know I’d prefer to haunt people the old fashioned way, that way they can’t just unplug me.
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