Handsets maker Huawei is investing in a Matrix type future in which departed owners remain installed at the head of their businesses, orphaned children get advice from their deceased parents and dead lord commanders posthumously order judgment on their murders. Essentially, Huawei wants to have a hand in ascension.
It's a common concept explored in science fiction — the idea that humanity will someday become so technologically advanced that people can ascend from this plane of existence. People can transcend their bodies and upload their consciousness into a machine or a network of machines, the idea goes on.
Kevin Ho, president of the Huawei's mobile devices, recently spoke about ascension during CES Asia earlier this month in Shanghai. The world may have all but solved disease, poverty, hunger and even death in about two or three decades, stated Ho.
"In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world," Ho said.
Ho has been heavily influenced by science fiction, he said. And while he may be optimistic about humanity's ability to solve the world's wicked problems — death, disease, poverty and others — Ho counts himself among the many tech leaders who are wary of killer artificial intelligence.
Pointing to a film in which an AI decides to solve Earth's human problem after reading books on the war-like being, Ho said the world needs "better safety technology."
"We need authentication, better tech protection and remote defense — we are developing all of these now," Ho said.
Huawei is far from alone in its research into curing death, as Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are also interested in doing so. Google is about to invest billions of dollars into research led by its Calico, in hopes of finding that cure for death.
"We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that'll totally change the world," Page said in a 2013 interview with Time. "But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it's very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it's not as big an advance as you might think."
Photo: Tahir Hashmi | Flickr
