How do you want to be remembered? As Simon Parkin
discovers, we may eventually be able to preserve our
entire minds for generations to come – would you?
A few months before she died, my grandmother made a
decision.
Bobby, as her friends called her (theirs is a generation
of nicknames), was a farmer’s wife who not only
survived World War II but also found in it justification
for her natural hoarding talent. ‘Waste not, want not’
was a principle she lived by long after England
recovered from a war that left it buckled and wasted. So
she kept old envelopes and bits of cardboard cereal
boxes for note taking and lists. She kept frayed
blankets and musty blouses from the 1950s in case she
needed material to mend. By extension, she was also a
meticulous chronicler. She kept albums of photographs
of her family members. She kept the airmail love letters
my late grandfather sent her while he travelled the
world with the merchant navy in a box. Her home was
filled with the debris of her memories.
Yet in the months leading up to her death, the
emphasis shifted from hoarding to sharing. Every time I
visited my car would fill with stuff: unopened cartons of
orange juice, balls of fraying wool, damp, antique
books, empty glass jars. All things she needed to
rehome now she faced her mortality. The memories too
began to move out. She sent faded photographs to her
children, grandchildren and friends, as well as letters
containing vivid paragraphs detailing some experience
or other.
On 9 April, the afternoon before the night she died, she
posted a letter to one of her late husband’s old
childhood friends. In the envelope she enclosed some
photographs of my grandfather and his friend playing as
young children. “You must have them,” she wrote to
him. It was a demand but also a plea, perhaps, that
these things not be lost or forgotten when, a few hours
later, she slipped away in her favourite armchair.
The hope that we will be remembered after we are gone
is both elemental and universal. The poet Carl Sandburg
captured this common feeling in his 1916 poem Troths:
Yellow dust on a bumblebee’s wing,
Grey lights in a woman’s asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing sunset embers:
I take you and pile high the memories.
Death will break her claws on some I keep.
It is a wishful tribute to the potency of memories. The
idea that a memory could prove so enduring that it
might grant its holder immortality is a romantic notion
that could only be held by a young poet, unbothered by
the aches and scars of age.
Nevertheless, while Sandburg’s memories failed to save
him, they survived him. Humans have, since the first
paintings scratched on cave walls, sought to confound
the final vanishing of memory. Oral history, diary,
memoir, photography, film and poetry: all tools in
humanity’s arsenal in the war against time’s whitewash.
Today we bank our memories onto the internet’s
enigmatic servers, those humming vaults tucked away
in the cooling climate of the far North or South. There’s
the Facebook timeline that records our most significant
life events, the Instagram account on which we store
our likeness, the Gmail inbox that documents our
conversations, and the YouTube channel that
broadcasts how we move, talk or sing. We collect and
curate our memories more thoroughly than ever before,
in every case grasping for a certain kind of immortality.
Is it enough? We save what we believe to be important,
but what if we miss something crucial? What if some
essential context to our words or photographs is lost?
How much better it would be to save everything, not
only the written thoughts and snapped moments of life,
but the entire mind: everything we know and all that we
remember, the love affairs and heartbreaks, the
moments of victory and of shame, the lies we told and
the truths we learned. If you could save your mind like a
computer’s hard drive, would you? It’s a question some
hope to pose to us soon. They are the engineers
working on the technology that will be able create
wholesale copies of our minds and memories that live
on after we are burned or buried. If they succeed, it
promises to have profound, and perhaps unsettling,
consequences for the way we live, who we love and
how we die.
Carbon copy
I keep my grandmother’s letters to me in a folder by my
desk. She wrote often and generously. I also have a
photograph of her in my kitchen on the wall, and a
stack of those antique books, now dried out, still
unread. These are the ways in which I remember her
and her memories, saved in hard copy. But could I have
done more to save her?
San Franciscan Aaron Sunshine’s grandmother also
passed away recently. “One thing that struck me is how
little of her is left,” the 30-year-old tells me. “It’s just a
few possessions. I have an old shirt of hers that I wear
around the house. There's her property but that's just
faceless money. It has no more personality than any
other dollar bill.” Her death inspired Sunshine to sign
up with Eterni.me, a web service that seeks to ensure
that a person’s memories are preserved after their death
online.
It works like this: while you’re alive you grant the
service access to your Facebook, Twitter and email
accounts, upload photos, geo-location history and
even Google Glass recordings of things that you have
seen. The data is collected, filtered and analysed before
it’s transferred to an AI avatar that tries to emulate your
looks and personality. The avatar learns more about you
as you interact with it while you’re alive, with the aim
of more closely reflecting you as time progresses.
“It’s about creating an interactive legacy, a way to
avoid being totally forgotten in the future,” says Marius
Ursache, one of Eterni.me’s co-creators. “Your grand-
grand-children will use it instead of a search engine or
timeline to access information about you – from photos
of family events to your thoughts on certain topics to
songs you wrote but never published.” For Sunshine,
the idea that he might be able to interact with a legacy
avatar of his grandmother that reflected her personality
and values is comforting. “I dreamt about her last
night,” he says. “Right now a dream is the only way I
can talk to her. But what if there was a simulation? She
would somehow be less gone from my life.”
While Ursache has grand ambitions for the Eterni.me
service (“it could be a virtual library of humanity”) the
technology is in still its infancy. He estimates that
subscribers will need to interact with their avatars for
decades for the simulation to become as accurate as
possible. He’s already received many messages from
terminally ill patients who want to know when the
service will be available – whether they can record
themselves in this way before they die. “It’s difficult to
reply to them, because the technology may take years
to build to a level that’s useable and offers real value,”
he says. But Sunshine is optimistic. “I have no doubt
that someone will be able to create good simulations of
people's personalities with the ability to converse
satisfactorily,” he says. “It could change our
relationship with death, providing some noise where
there is only silence. It could create truer memories of a
person in the place of the vague stories we have
today.”
It could, I suppose. But what if the company one day
goes under? As the servers are switched off, the people
it homes would die a second death.
As my own grandmother grew older, some of her
memories retained their vivid quality; each detail
remained resolute and in place. Others became
confused: the specifics shifted somehow in each
retelling. Eterni.me and other similar services counter
the fallibility of human memory; they offer a way to fix
the details of a life as time passes. But any simulation
is a mere approximation of a person and, as anyone
who has owned a Facebook profile knows, the act of
recording one’s life on social media is a selective
process. Details can be tweaked, emphases can be
altered, entire relationships can be erased if it suits
one’s current circumstances. We often give, in other
words, an unreliable account of ourselves.
Total recall
What if, rather than simply picking and choosing what
we want to capture in digital form, it was possible to
record the contents of a mind in their entirety? This
work is neither science fiction nor the niche pursuit of
unreasonably ambitious scientists. Theoretically, the
process would require three key breakthroughs.
Scientists must first discover how to preserve, non-
destructively, someone's brain upon their death. Then
the content of the preserved brain must be analysed
and captured. Finally, that capture of the person’s mind
must be recreated on a simulated human brain.
First, we must create an artificial human brain on which
a back-up of a human’s memories would be able to
‘run’. Work in the area is widespread. MIT runs a course
on the emergent science of ‘connectomics’, the work to
create a comprehensive map of the connections in a
human brain. The US Brain project is working to record
brain activity from millions of neurons while the EU
Brain project tries to build integrated models from this
activity.
Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute
at Oxford University, who in 2008 wrote a paper titled
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap , describes these
projects as “stepping stones” towards being able to
fully able to emulate the human brain.
“The point of brain emulation is to recreate the function
of the original brain: if ‘run’ it will be able to think and
act as the original,” he says. Progress has been slow
but steady. “We are now able to take small brain tissue
samples and map them in 3D. These are at exquisite
resolution, but the blocks are just a few microns across.
We can run simulations of the size of a mouse brain on
supercomputers – but we do not have the total
connectivity yet. As methods improve I expect to see
automatic conversion of scanned tissue into models
that can be run. The different parts exist, but so far
there is no pipeline from brains to emulations.”
Investment in the area appears to be forthcoming,
however. Google is heavily invested in brain emulation.
In December 2012 the company appointed Ray Kurzweil
as its director of engineering on the Google Brain
project, which aims to mimic aspects of the human
brain. Kurzweil, a divisive figure, is something of a
figurehead for a community of scientists who believe
that it will be possible to create a digital back-up of a
human brain within their lifetime. A few months later,
the company hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer
scientist who is one of the world's leading experts on
neural networks, essentially the circuitry of how the
human mind thinks and remembers.
Google is not alone, either. In 2011 a Russian
entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov, founded ‘The 2045
Initiative’, named after Kurzweil’s prediction that the
year 2045 will mark the point at which we’ll be able to
back up our minds to the cloud. While the fruits of all
this work are, to date, largely undisclosed, the effort is
clear.
Neuroscientist Randal Koene,science director for the
2045 Initiative, is adamant that creating a working
replica of a human brain is within reach. “The
development of neural prostheses already demonstrate
that running functions of the mind is possible,” he says.
It’s not hyperbole. Ted Berger, a professor at the
University of Southern California’s Center for
Neuroengineering has managed to create a working
prosthetic of the hippocampus part of the brain. In 2011
a proof-of-concept hippocampal prosthesis was
successfully tested in live rats and, in 2012 the
prosthetic was successfully tested in non-human
primates . Berger and his team intend to test the
prosthesis in humans this year, demonstrating that we
are already able to recreate some parts of the human
brain.
Memory dump
Emulating a human brain is one thing, but creating a
digital record of a human’s memories is a different sort
of challenge. Sandberg is cynical of whether this
simplistic process is viable. “Memories are not neatly
stored like files on a computer to create a searchable
index,” he says. “Memory consists of networks of
associations that are activated when we remember. A
brain emulation would require a copy of them all.”
Indeed, humans reconstruct information from multiple
parts of the brain in ways that are shaped by our
current beliefs and biases, all of which change over
time. These conclusions appear at odds with any effort
to store memories in the same way that a computer
might record data for easy access. It is an idea based
on, as one sceptic I spoke to (who wished to remain
anonymous) put it, “the wrong and old-fashioned
‘possession’ view of memory”.
There is also the troubling issue of how to extract a
person’s memories without destroying the brain in the
process. “I am sceptical of the idea that we will be able
to accomplish non-destructive scanning,” says
Sandberg. “All methods able to scan neural tissue at
the required high resolution are invasive, and I suspect
this will be very hard to achieve without picking apart
the brain.” Nevertheless, the professor believes a
searchable, digital upload of a specific individual’s
memory could be possible so long as you were able to
“run” the simulated brain in its entirety.
“I think there is a good chance that it could work in
reality, and that it could happen this century,” he says.
“We might need to simulate everything down to the
molecular level, in which case the computational
demands would simply be too large. It might be that the
brain uses hard-to-scan data like quantum states (an
idea believed by some physicists but very few
neuroscientists), that software cannot be conscious or
do intelligence (an idea some philosophers believe but
few computer scientists), and so on. I do not think
these problems apply, but it remains to be seen if I am
right.”
If it could be done, then, what would preserving a
human mind mean for the way we live?
Some believe that there could be unanticipated
benefits, some of which can make the act of merely
extending a person’s life for posterity seem rather plain
by comparison. For example, David Wood, chairman of
the London Futurists, argues that a digital back-up of a
person’s mind could be studied, perhaps providing
breakthroughs in understanding the way in which
human beings think and remember.
And if a mind could be digitally stored while a person
was still alive then, according to neuroscientist Andrew
A Vladimirov, it might be possible to perform
psychoanalysis using such data. “You could run
specially crafted algorithms through your entire life
sequence that will help you optimise behavioural
strategies,” he says.
Yet there’s also an unusual set of moral and ethical
implications to consider, many of which are only just
beginning to be revealed. “In the early stages the main
ethical issue is simply broken emulations: we might get
entities that are suffering in our computers,” says
Sandberg. “There are also going to be issues of
volunteer selection, especially if scanning is
destructive.” Beyond the difficulty of recruiting people
who are willing to donate their minds in such a way,
there is the more complicated issue of what rights an
emulated mind would enjoy. “Emulated people should
likely have the same rights as normal people, but
securing these would involve legislative change,” says
Sandberg. “There might be the need for new kinds of
rights too. For example, the right for an emulated
human to run in real-time so that they can participate
in society.”
Defining the boundaries of a person’s privacy is already
a pressing issue for humanity in 2015, where third-
party corporations and governments hold more insight
into our personal information than ever before. For an
emulated mind, privacy and ownership of data becomes
yet more complicated. “Emulations are vulnerable and
can suffer rather serious breaches of privacy and
integrity,” says Sandberg. He adds, in a line that could
be lifted from a Philip K Dick novel: “We need to
safeguard their rights”. By way of example, he suggests
that lawmakers would need to consider whether it
should be possible to subpoena memories.
Property laws
“Ownership of specific memories is where things
become complex,” says Koene. “In a memoir you can
choose which memories are recorded. But if you don't
have the power of which of your memories others can
inspect it becomes a rather different question.” Is it a
human right to be able to keep secrets?
These largely un-interrogated questions also begin to
touch on more fundamental issues of what it means to
be human. Would an emulated brain be considered
human and, if so, does the humanity exist in the
memories or the hardware on which the simulated brain
runs? If it's the latter, there’s the question of who owns
the hardware: an individual, a corporation or the state?
If an uploaded mind requires certain software to run (a
hypothetical Google Brain, for example) the ownership
of the software license could become contentious.
The knowledge that one’s brain is to be recorded in its
entirety might also lead some to behave differently
during life. “I think it would have the same effect as
knowing your actions will be recorded on camera,” says
Sandberg. “In some people this knowledge leads to a
tendency to conform to social norms. In others it
produces rebelliousness. If one thinks that one will be
recreated as a brain emulation then it is equivalent to
expecting an extra, post-human life.”
Even if it were possible to digitally record the contents
and psychological contours of the human mind, there
are undeniably deep and complicated implications. But
beyond this, there is the question of whether this is
something that any of us truly want. Humans long to
preserve their memories (or, in some cases, to forget
them) because they remind us of who we are. If our
memories are lost we cease to know who we were, what
we accomplished, what it all meant. But at the same
time, we tweak and alter our memories in order to
create the narrative of our lives that fits us at any one
time. To have everything recorded with equal weight
and importance might not be useful, either to us or to
those who follow us.
Where exactly is the true worth of the endeavour? Could
it actually be the comforting knowledge for a person
that they, to one degree or other, won’t be lost without
trace? The survival instinct is common to all life: we
eat, we sleep, we fight and, most enduringly, we
reproduce. Through our descendants we reach for a
form of immortality, a way to live on beyond our
physical passing. All parents take part in a grand relay
race through time, passing the gene baton on and on
through the centuries. Our physical traits – those eyes,
that hair, this temperament – endure in some diluted or
altered form. So too, perhaps, do our metaphysical
attributes (“what will survive of us is love,” as Philip
Larkin tentatively put it in his 1956 poem, ‘An Arundel
Tomb’). But it is the mere echo of immortality. Nobody
lives forever; with death only the fading shadow of our
life remains. There are the photographs of us playing as
children. There are the antique books we once read.
There is the blouse we once wore.
I ask Sunshine why he wants his life to be recorded in
this way. “To be honest, I'm not sure,” he says. “The
truly beautiful things in my life such as the parties I've
thrown, the sex I've had, the friendships I’ve enjoyed.
All of these things are too ephemeral to be preserved in
any meaningful way. A part of me wants to build
monuments to myself. But another part of me wants to
disappear completely.” Perhaps that is true of us all:
the desire to be remembered, but only the parts of us
that we hope will be remembered. The rest can be
discarded.
Despite my own grandmother’s careful distribution of
her photographs prior to her death, many remained in
her house. These eternally smiling, fading unknown
faces evidently meant a great deal to her in life but
now, without the framing context of her memories, they
lost all but the most superficial meaning. In a curious
way, they became a burden to those of us left behind.
My father asked my grandmother’s vicar (a kindly man
who had been her friend for many years), what he
should do with the pictures; to just throw the
photographs away seemed somehow flippant and
disrespectful. The vicar’s advice was simple. Take each
photograph. Look at it carefully. In that moment you
honour the person captured. Then you may discard of it
and be free.
