A.rtificial I.mmortality: Wishful Thoughts on Cheating Death in a Digital Future
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
There is a thing worse than dying, and that’s dying while alive. That, at least, is what voracious dementia sometimes seems like while it progresses in loved ones – the mind failing before the body does.
Which is why it’s a poignant element of A.rtificial I.mmortality, Ann Shin’s wide-net rumination of the feasibility of loading our consciousness into some digital format and thus cheating death (the opening film at this year’s Hot Docs). It opens and closes with her father, a once-dynamic young man as evidenced by photos, who doesn’t even recognize pictures of his late wife, Ann’s mother. His self is disappearing.
Director Ann Shin and friend.
There’s a touching degree of hope in her assessment of the chances of living forever, right up to her agreement to help create her own very impressive avatar. The fake Ann is able to answer a question from her daughter about her feelings on her birth. It instantaneously accesses a post-partum photo in its database, uses facial recognition technology to assess emotions, and answers that she was relieved, tired and happy. Technically true.
Still the daughter wasn’t convinced, and remarked that her fake mom didn’t have “a soul.” And neither are some of the expert witnesses herein, from a minister who quotes from the Book of Daniel to maintain that artificial intelligence is a sign of the “end times” to a neurobiologist who scoffs at the idea as pie-in-the-sky dreams of digitally replicating the human brain, “the most complex structure in the universe.”
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What is clear in the documentary is that artificial intelligences are reaching a point where they are capable of being better facsimiles of humans than ever. We meet cutting edge AI thinkers like Douglas Rushkoff, and avatars and androids of every sort, including a “Digital Deepak Chopra” who has absorbed all the New Age author’s 100-plus books and speaks in convincing Chopra-esque aphorisms.
But as Shin herself asks, if a facsimile of us is immortal, does that make us immortal?
In fact, anybody giving the documentary serious consideration will end up wondering if these avatars are simply much more sophisticated versions of the footprint we normally leave behind – photos, writings, memories, and, these days, videos. Not included in this film, but an excellent example of this notion, is the AI-based Shoah Foundation project that records and motion captures Holocaust survivors and recreates them as interactive holograms that, even after the original’s death, can answer myriad questions about life and horror in the camps. (The project was profiled last year on 60 Minutes).
We may never live forever (and some of us are not sure we’d want to), but we may leave some beautifully designed life-like corpses that echo us uncannily.
A.rtificial I.mmortality. Directed by Ann Shin. Starring Ann Shin, Douglas Rushkoff, Deepak Chopra. Runs September 24th-October 8th as part of digital TIFF Bell Lightbox, before its premiere on Crave in October.