Looking for a unique, thought-provokingTV Show? One of our library patrons has a new recommendation for you to explore the intersection of psychology, technology, and sociology….

I have been idle recently, because of the epidemic cannot go out and I can only stay at home. Netflix series – well, I watched one after another, and I never saw anything new, until I saw Amazon drama Upload last night! (You can get a free trial to watch ?)

Upload is talking about an idea that in the near future, people can choose to digitize their brains before death, upload them to the Internet, and continue their digital lives, which also means immortality. Human life can be extended without limits on the digital network. Digital life is almost perfect, because people can call their angels to solve any problems for themselves anytime, anywhere, they have unlimited food supply, and can adjust the weather outside the window by themselves – even if people in the same elevator leave a fart, you will only smell a perfume.

This sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? Actually, everything here is linked to money. Although the food is unlimited, i you want more choices, you can only buy it for money. The digital life is like World of Warcraft. Like the monthly card, the time spent in paradise can only be continued if you keep paying. Of course, not everyone has so much money to support this kind of paradise life…. so then people have another more cost-effective option, the traffic-limited 2G mode. In 2G mode, people will not enjoy the perfect lake view, and there is no unlimited food supply. They can only curl up in a very narrow white room.

People’s digital life consumes data for all activities, even sitting still, even thinking will consume data. This means that if people finish their 2G of data, they will become grey and frozen, just like dead people.

Then the question arises, who will pay for the consumption of the people who have uploaded it? The answer is, the living people. But the living people will always get older. If they also want to upload themselves, their own expenses can only be paid by the burden of their children and grandchildren. There will be more and more old people, and in a sense they will not die. This means that the burden of future generations will become heavier, because the old generation will not die, and living people have to pay for uploading people ’s digital lives. If the children and grandchildren are financially overwhelmed, and are forced to declare the true death of their elders, is this a murder?

A serious problem in this world is that they try to connect the digital world with the real world, but all output must be borne by the real world, which is an unscientific economic development model. The material in the digital world is o Infinite expansion, but the amount of material in the real world abides by the law of conservation of matter. It is certainly not sustainable long-term to keep consuming material in the real world ,to support the development of the digital world.

So why don’t they consider letting the virtual world generate their own wealth? Uploaded people can code themselves and create their own digital world. They all retain their own thinking and their own intelligence. Even they can do a lot of work instead of living people, such as telephone customer service, designers, network administrators, etc. Any occupations that can complete the work without visiting in-person. Then their lives can be guaranteed by themselves. As more and more people upload, the number of living people becomes a minority, and with so many occupations being led by the uploaders, this will free more live manpower to do other things, such as exploring space.

Ultimately, with the development of technology, we know that the most precious thing in the future is not gold or food, but brainy workers with human thinking.

If people can really upload their brains to the virtual world to achieve another kind of immortality, then human resources will not be a problem that people need to worry about. Now people are pinning their hopes on AI, hoping that computers can generate their own intelligence to help people complete their work. But the human brain is a mysterious field, and humans have only developed 5% of their own brains.

The brain that humans have spent five million years evolving is not something that we can develop with technology that is less than 100 years old. No matter how it develops, AI cannot become a human because it has no soul.

Humanity is the most precious thing we have. 

Of course, the reality of digital uploading of the brain is a very complicated task. This needs to consider medicine, computer science, biology, psychology. With the current understanding of human brains, science is far from reaching the digital upload of the human brain. We cannot even display the information stored in the brain on the screen in a graphical form.

But, digital life is exciting, this is a grand theme, and we look forward to more explorations in the future.