InfoCoBuild

Living Beyond 100

Information and Immortality by Professor Paul Cohen. Information and immortality have always been related by the idea that we are survived by the stories told about us. The Information Age provides increasingly sophisticated tools to create and tell these stories, but of course the relationship between information and immortality encompasses more: robotic elder care, uploading oneself to the Web, and the likelihood that in future, one will have biological and computational parts and entirely computational friends. All of which raises the question, what do we want informatics to do for us as we age? Where is the line between assisting and supplanting? This is not a new question: Anyone who sits for a portrait knows that the likeness might survive, and eventually become, the sitter. Informatics will eventually merge one's self and one's likeness into bio-robotic complexes of parts and information, maintained by corporations and governments. Then the relationship between information and immortality will be more complicated than ever.

6. Information and Immortality


Go to the Series Home or watch other lectures:

1. Can We, and What if We Do?
2. The Biology of Aging: Why Our Bodies Grow Old
3. The Aging of the Brain
4. Repair, Regeneration and Replacement Revisited
5. Society, Geographic Change and the New Longevity
6. Information and Immortality