Soon the time may come when, for those who can’t let it go, being frozen and reborn could become an option.
HUMAI is a robotics/medical research company building technology to extend, enhance, and restore human life. Founded by self-described serial entrepreneur Josh Bocanegra, HUMAI’s website boasts the goal of transplanting your brain into an elegantly designed bionic body that uses a brain-computer interface to communicate with the sensory organs and limbs of your new bionic body. In essence, your brain will be able to move on after the death of your organic body. By freezing human brains for extended periods of time using cryonics – a deep-freezing technology that uses extremely low temperatures – before implanting them into artificial bodies, HUMAI hopes to extend and enhance human life.
The Cryonics Institute describes this process as “a visionary concept that holds out the promise of a second chance at life – with renewed health, vitality and youth. By cooling a recently deceased person to liquid nitrogen temperatures in order to keep the body preserved indefinitely, the recently deceased will be able to cheat death in their frozen state.” Though this process is often seen as a leap of faith by those who choose this as an end-of-life option, its popularity is growing among those who do not wish to have their life’s works and accomplishments come to an end once their last breath has been taken.
The first step behind HUMAI’s goal is to launch “Project Soul”, which will create an artificial replica of a deceased person; followed by what is being called “Project Atom & Eve” – creating a bionic body that functions with a human brain, according to a recent interview Bocanegra made with Buzzfeed.
Though this plan is not intended to come to fruition until around 2045 and has been deemed impossible by such groups as the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behavior, Bocanegra remains confident that this concept will one day make resurrection a possibility. Despite the ethical and philosophical debates that will inevitably come with this progression, it does raise one interesting question. Can our brains simply be implanted into a new host much like adding an old SIM card to a new phone?