Reinventing Afterlife – AI Company on a Mission to Bring You Back After You Die

November 27, 2015 – This sounds like science fiction at its spookiest but a Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence company called Humai, short for Human Resurrection Through Artificial Intelligence, is working on reinventing afterlife. The goal is to use artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to imprint our knowledge, behavior and though processes into an artificial body containing a deceased human’s brain.

The founder, Josh Bocanegra describes how this will be done. First the brain of a deceased person will be frozen and then once the technology is developed, implanted into an artificial body which the resurrected person will control using revived brain waves reconnected with legacy, digitized data. The restoration will use nanotechnology to repair and improve brain cell function.

Visiting the Humai website gives you no clue as to the reality of this mission. The founder says he is serious and that it can be accomplished within the next 30 years. In his words the plan is to store data of conversational styles and content, behavioral patterns, thought processes, memories and information about how the person’s body functions from the inside out. The data would be collected prior to death and digitally encoded. Then it would be uploaded into a sophisticated sensor-packed artificial body along with the thawed deceased’s brain. The artificial body project is designated “Atom & Eve.”

When Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity, the merger of artificial machine intelligence and human intelligence he describes it as synergistic. What Humai plans is using machine technology to house a human brain with no synergistic merger intended.

Kurzweil’s singularity event horizon is now 2045, a revision from his earlier prediction of 2030. And Kurzweil doesn’t envision the reviving a brain in the afterlife by housing it in an artificial body. His future has human-machine interfaces co-existing and extending lifespan to 120 years or more based on the medical and technological advances that are coming down the pipe.

Of course, if Bocanegra, can pull off what he intends to do, then what’s to stop a human brain from existing forever, simply replacing its artificial body when the machine wears out, or maintaining the machine forever along with all the nano-repair systems to keep the biology functioning?