A.rtificial I.mmortality (2021)

(On Cable TV, October 2021) As someone who once wrote an entire (bad, unpublished) novel about transhumanism, personality uploads and runaway artificial intelligence, I had to have a look at Canadian documentary A.rtificial I.mmortality. The film follows Toronto-based director Ann Shin as she, contemplating the cognitive decline of her father, sets out to investigate the latest in creating artificial personalities, by feeding it key documents of one’s life, numerous writings, 3D scanning and such. Philosophical implications are lightly touched upon, as Shin attends transhumanist church services, promising start-ups and electronic shows. If the technology still feels clunky, incomplete and unconvincing, keep in mind that it’s already progressed to the point when this stuff isn’t solely the domain of science fiction. Shin (a likable presence doing much to humanize her topic) interviews an avatar of Deepak Chopra, unveils her own avatar to her kids (who aren’t impressed) and talks to luminaries in the field. It’s both impressive and lame at once—cutting-edge stuff far ahead of what was possible even a few years ago, and still so unconvincing as to make anyone wonder why we bother. But you have to take the long-term view. By happenstance, I ended up watching A.rtificial I.mmortality right after 1983’s documentary Sans Soleil, which took in the state of early-1980s personal computing with awed wonderment, and the juxtaposition between the two did much to put this latest film in perspective: It’s all a bit laughable today, but just wait thirty years and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, the film is a decent introduction to the latest thinking in the field, and the way it bandies about “mind file” as a real thing had me wondering what this very website (with thousands of reviews and millions of words of opinionated personal content) may mean in terms of legacy. Of course, to update an old Woody Allen joke, I don’t want to achieve immortality by being re-created through my writing as a synthetic personality in a distant future—I want to achieve it by not dying. Until then, well, A.rtificial I.mmortality will serve as a marker of where we were in 2021—our achievements, hopes and fears in the matter. Maybe it’s time for me to write another novel on the topic…