Let’s just go ahead and say it, the end of the world will likely begin somewhere in the New England area. Regardless of who came first in the weird chicken and egg argument on whether Black Mirror stories were inspired by tech, or if tech was inspired by Black Mirror, all that really exists is that a lot of familiarly freaky shit all seems to be taking shape in various labs out in Massachusetts.
Whether it’s Metalhead-like robot dogs now being capable of opening doors and actively working together with one another, to some rogue iRobot robots that can basically do moonsaults now, now we’ve got some eggheads up north tinkering around with the idea of being able to digitize human brains so that the people who choose to do this, can essentially live forever.
Basically, kind of like the oft-used Black Mirror concept of digitizing human consciousness and uploading them into other people, tech or inanimate objects; the human vessels might be dead or comatose, but the consciousness still remains, capable of feeling stimulus or having memories.
Yeah, some nerds out in some incubator (man, I hate that phrase, what are we, chickens?) in Massachusetts have come up with this concept of preserving the human brain so that it can be basically accessible and for lack of a better term, backed up, so that it could theoretically live beyond the limits of the human body.
There’s one tiny little caveat though:
The product is “100 percent fatal,”
In order to do this, you will die. There’s no ifs, there’s no gray area. In order to become a thinking vegetable, YOU. WILL. DIE.
Hell of a sales pitch there. Explain the benefits of digitizing your brain, etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah, oh yeah, but you have to volunteer to, y’know, end your life in order to do so. Seems real appealing doesn’t it?
I like how the article quotes that they’re quick to insinuate that this would be targeted towards those with terminal illnesses, whose bodies will definitively end their lives, so why not take back a little bit of control and die on your own terms, and let your brain live forever more, in a preserved catatonic state? You know there are already some insane megalomaniacs out there who are already salivating at the thought of being able to metaphorically live forever, and have already put down entire deposits for this procedure. In fact, according to the article, there most certainly are people who want to do this, and there’s already a fucking waiting list of people who can’t wait to kill themselves and so that their brains can be preserved.
Personally, when reading stories like this, it makes me not really afraid of death. Sure, I don’t want to get murdered or killed in an accident and die completely unexpectedly, but if I were to get a terminal disease or have some sort of time limit on the remainder of my life, I think I would be okay with kind of knowing things are going to end, accept that such is going to occur, and find some satisfaction at doing whatever I can to make as much peace and tie up as many loose ends as possible. But if there was one thing I most certainly wouldn’t want to do is to voluntarily forfeit the remainder of my life so that my fucking brain can be ripped out of my skull and put into some kind of preservation chamber to exist long after the rest of my corpse has rotted away and is decomposing.
I don’t buy the whole idea that while in stasis, the brain will still be able to recollect shit like sensations and memories, or other actual bodily functions . . . without a body. And even if it could, what the fuck would actually happen in the world of the living? My brain twitches with pleasure at a good memory, or maybe it looks like it inhales when some cold weather triggers the sensation of feeling the need to compress myself.
Regardless, much like robot dogs and moonsaulting robots, this just seems like something that the world most certainly does not need. If anything at all, for this to have any clout, they needed to have started this shit on Stephen Hawking or some other mega genius, whose brain might actually be worth preserving for the betterment of humankind, and not inevitably for some rich assholes who just want the narcissistic idea of living forever, with little to contribute but the ability to be disdained.
Even if this stupid idea comes to fruition, what good is it going to do when the rapidly degrading level of intelligence of humanity plummets even further, and then there’s all these brains sitting in stasis chambers, contributing absolutely jack shit to the rest of the living world. There will be buildings like server farms out in the middle of nowhere, but instead be brain farms, where all these preserved brains just sit there.
Or this is all laying down the groundwork for the Matrix, when the machines took over the world and realized that human brains produced more electricity than any other form of power generation, and these fucking New England genius bozos have basically just given the machines a head start to the eventual destruction and extinction of free human life.
Monkey needs a hug. 😢
