Artificial Immortality | Storyteller

[NOTE: Artificial Immortality available until February 19, 2024.]

If you were able to create an immortal version of yourself, would you? This film explores the latest advancements in AI, robotics and biotech with visionaries who argue for a new age of post-biological life. As scientists point us toward a world where humans and machines merge, we have to ask ourselves will AI be the best, or the last thing we ever do?

Director’s Statement

By Ann Shin

A few years ago, I realised my father was losing his memory. It wasn’t just names and people, he was mixing up details of my late mother’s life with his own. He had sat at her side for the last few weeks of her life, but he no longer remembered her, let alone how she passed. I was losing my father in bits and pieces.

I started wondering what it is that makes you, you. Is it your memories that help you shape your sense of self and life? Is it your personality? Is there a way to retain your sense of self even as you lose your faculties?

I spoke with a transhumanist friend of mine who believes so. He claims that those aspects of ourselves we like to think of as being inimitable - our personality, our intuition, our soul - are not only quantifiable, but replicable, and that scientists and thinkers are working to replicate those very things. They believe they can replicate a human through AI and biotech, and eventually transfer consciousness, so that we wouldn’t have to die. I was incredulous and wanted to find out more.

That journey spurred me to make this documentary, Artificial Immortality, where I meet with transhumanists, neuroscientists, AI developers and philosophers. My aim is journalistic, but also philosophical and poetic. I ask each of them, what is it about us that makes us human, and is it replicable? I discover some astonishing things including: 3D mindclone avatars, brain organoids being grown in petri dishes, and android robots who talk about the beauty they see in the universe.

The technology we have created in the pursuit of immortality is startling, even terrifying. We may come to a point where we can choose at the end of our lives to either die or to ‘upload’ our minds into a digital platform. Given the choice, I think I would choose the latter. But like most things in life, it’s not a simple binary decision. Why are we pursuing this? What is lost or gained in the pursuit, and are we perhaps missing the point entirely? This film explores these nuances in our quest for immortality in the 21st century.