Would You Become an Immortal Machine?

As I found myself scrolling through my timeline on Twitter today as I usually do, a tweet from NPR caught my eye saying "If, at death, your body was instead preserved for some future revival, would the thing that lives forever  be *you*?". This tweet then led to an article titled "Would You Become an Immortal Machine?". Before clicking it, I found myself nervous wondering if the technology we have discussed over the course of this semester was finally happening. Upon further reading of the article I came to realize it was a promotion of Journalist Mark O'Connell's new book on "transhumanism" titled To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborg's, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, but it got me thinking about the fact that this type of technology may be closer than we think.
Interestingly enough, O'Connell doesn't consider himself to be a "transhumanist", but simply someone interested in this type of progression in science and technology. His fascination led to the discovery of an underground group of biohackers that want to continue advancement into making humans "immortal", as well as the scientists who want to protect humans from the future of Artificial Intelligence. It is obvious that Artificial Intelligence is becoming more prominent in our society with the rise of systems such as Amazon's Alexa or Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg's "Jarvis". Whenever I come across advertisements for these systems I'm always amazed by how we have progressed so quickly from simply having the world at our fingertips (through our phones, computers, etc.) to now being able to essentially access the world through our voices. However, this progression is also unnerving given that we may be very quickly moving towards a society completely controlled by technology. 
As stated previously, the biohackers O'Connell talks about are motivated by the idea that scientific progression can one day beat death and humans can be immortal. This would essentially make everyone "god-like" and while that sounds like a good thing, isn't the idea of "living" influenced by having a finite beginning and end? As O'Connell says in the NPR article, "What makes us human is precisely our fallibility, our connection to our bodies, the existential threat of death. Remove that and we are a huge question mark, something we can't even contemplate". The Biohackers he meets with have the idea of transferring the human "essence" into a machine that way we can live forever. However, that doesn't sound like truly "living". Like the other reproductions we have explored the last few months, it seems like this machine would be missing the human aura. In class we have talked about the relationship between accessibility and aura. Particularly how when something becomes more accessible, that leads to the diminishment of the aura. With immortality life would become infinitely accessible, but our lack of imperfections given that we would be a machine and not human, would also lead to lack of human aura.
To Be a Machine also brings forth the problems we already have regarding technological devices. For example, the attachment to our phones. Many of us (myself included), would feel completely lost without our devices because we have become so reliant on them. As technology continues to progress, it seems that our addiction and reliance will only become stronger. It will be interesting to not only see how as AI systems and robotics progress and become more prominent in our everyday lives, but also how these more advanced systems may potentially overtake our lives the way in a stronger way than our phones have. 
As wonderful as technology is, it is still unnerving to think that our world may one day be controlled by machines and not real living things. So although I love my devices and everything technology has brought us thus far, similar to O'Connell I personally don't think I would ever want to become an "immortal machine". With that, I leave one last quote from the article that I found particularly intriguing about the future of transhumanism, "Is transhumanism the essence of the Resurrection, bodiless souls basking under the eternal light of the Singularity? Or is it the nightmarish dystopia of a machine-dominated future, our humanity lost, our struggles forgotten, our creations left behind as irrelevant?" Only time will tell where technology will take us, but it will definitely be interesting to find out if progress will create a better life for us or if it will eventually lead us further away from truly "living".

This is the link for the NPR article which also leads to Marc O'Connell's page where you can read an excerpt of the book mentioned above: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/22/521059752/would-you-become-an-immortal-machine