In a later press conference, Putin confirmed the discussion and said that “life expectancy will increase significantly” in the near future and “we should also think about this” in terms of political and economic consequences. (In Russia, life expectancy has actually decreased significantly in recent years, and the overall population is declining.)
The brief snippets of conversation suggest that immortality is on the minds of the world’s strongmen, though it’s interesting to see how it takes a different form than in Silicon Valley, where robots and software are more often seen as the key to longevity instead of, say, recurring organ transplants into an aging bag of skin.
Shows like Upload and Alien: Earth present visions of a world in which consciousness can be scanned by machines and perhaps even loaded into other machines. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi are thinking more about repeated organ transplants and life extension rather than “the Singularity.”
So, which dystopic future are we more likely to get? (Yes, I am presuming, based on the current state of the world, that the near future will be pretty dystopic. I think it’s a good bet.) Clones being raised for organ transplants, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go? Or some kind of “download your consciousness into this machine” situation in which the mind of Elon Musk inhabits one of his beloved Tesla robots for all eternity? Given either alternative, I’m not entirely sure I’d want to live forever.
