Immortality and artificial intelligence 

Andrew Yang, the man behind Venture for America – a leading NGO for entrepreneurship and start-ups – says millions of Americans will end up unemployed in a matter of years. Yang, who is also a nominee for the next US presidential election, argues that large investments in AI, automation and robots could lead the United States to experience the depression from the 1930 century. "One only needs self-driving cars to destabilize society," he recently told the New York Times.

According to Yang, government billions in cash payments to the unemployed will be the only thing that can prevent riots or social disintegration. Within a few years, one million untrained truck drivers will be unemployed, and they will be followed by shop workers, accountants and others in telephone services and insurance. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, a third of all jobs will be automated in a decade.

Can we, 50 years after the 68 rebellion, look ahead and take possible chaos inside us?

The Economist just described today's new workday promoted by a major investment in AI. New and better lie detectors are used in hiring, and the employee can be monitored via AI for efficiency on the keyboard. The company Workday sells 60-factor AI software to predict employee loyalty and potential. In warehouses, you can soon use Amazon's new bracelets that track employees' movements, which vibrate if they are not effective enough. Another AI program allows company management to monitor employees' emails – in case you should do something the company could be sued for. If this is not enough, the Slack program – "searchable log of all conversation and knowledge" – will also analyze how quickly you complete your work tasks. The question one then faces with such a life is: Will one be replaced by a robot or be treated as one?

Humans are obviously too stupid to survive.

Captures the sun. In its new issue, the magazine Vagant addresses the utopias of progress and the relationship between humans and machines. Among the reflective group of contributors, one can read Eirik Høyer Leivestad's thoughts on the philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903) and his "cosmism". For him, and many futurists in his footsteps, it is about survival and immortality. The optimism is clear: "The new superman emerges by capturing the sun." The technologically improved man will become a "time traveler". One colonizes the sky, God is dead, as Nietzsche said, and people and machines take over. Futurists in the 1920s saw the new man as a happy robot – "partially mechanized to perfected performance". And for the Bolsheviks' first five-year plan, there was a sketch for the coal workers: "accommodated in large living and working units, with dormitories, common areas for social life and mechanized food distribution." Precisely regulated bodies with precisely measured minutes. The plan remained on the drawing board at the time, but Stalin later implemented such utopias through large-scale slave projects – he said that technology would decide everything.

Leivestad wanders ("vagrantly" – to wander) backwards in his analyzes of the future: Aleksandr Bodanov's novel Red star from 1908 depicted industrial agriculture on the planet Mars with happy volunteers – a rational system of automatic statistical registration, in which a "central prototype computer distributes information according to the system's needs."

Today, ecological future optimists can once again try to capture the sun by sending out reflectors to counteract the greenhouse effect. And dreamy tech incubators from Silicon Valley with new cyber currencies, blockchain technology and AI spreading more AI have many visions. Elon Musk's Mars rockets with Tesla are just one of them.

In Vagant, in Anders Dunker's interview with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, you can hear about the Martian population as in the 24. century refers to the earth "as a wrecked planet" – from his trilogy about the planet. Robinson claims we are living with "a cruel optimism" – where we say that everything will go well while destroying the world, and the attitude is that humans are obviously too stupid to survive. He recalls that even though nearly two billion live in utopia already, they have at least as many suffering lives. For though most people want freedom and solidarity, old power groups hold on to their privileges.

Digital Returns. AI and progress optimism are based in Silicon Valley. There, an AI expert could be worth between 40 and 80 million, according to The Economist! And as Truls Unholt writes in the latest Vagant, this environment stems from the 68 protests. Today, there is a mix of "technology optimism, idealism, youth rebellion, venture capital, Eastern-inspired spirituality" and a desire for cleaner energy sources.

But what did we get? With ubiquitous sensors, electronic tracks from cradle to grave and now the Internet of Things, AI is spreading many algorithms and forms of "intelligence" into our environment. Our lives are virtualized via smartphone and Big Data into the tech giants' data clouds. There are now also international research programs that try to decode the brain's activities in order to bring out old memories – and create new ones. We will thus see new forms of digital immortality, or a kind of digital permanence, as Unholdt writes. Let me repeat his quote from Thure Erik Lund's book Identity: "Humans continue to die, while their digital ghosts […] continue to live and unfold in digital life structures." Leivestad also mentioned that for the futurist Fyodorov, man faced only one problem from which other problems were derived: death. Fjodorov saw death as a mistake that could be cured. The "big common task" was to strive for immortality. Well, he probably realized that this could also create a space problem here on the planet ...

The new workday is governed by a major investment in AI.

Vagant – with its hard-working editor Audun Lindholm – is the magazine that will not die. Lindholm has good support from many intellectual, Scandinavian vagrants who like to meet in Copenhagen or Berlin. I wonder if they have maintained faith in progress as they look out over the somewhat damaged globe?

Immortal reality. Finally, let me point out how many – despite the desire for immortality – end their lives. In the United States, the baby boom is causing today's funeral industry to increase by more than 125 billion annually. The urn and the coffin are delivered via Amazon's website – the company today uses advanced AI for logistics where they cover one third of all online orders in the US.

It kills 100 people every minute. So, should one bury their survivors or burn them up? According to The Economist, the United States today cremates four out of five dead, while countries such as Ireland and Italy allow four out of five bodies buried. (In Norway, three out of five are buried.) But what about the funeral rituals – such as the ceremony with Barbara Bush in the coffin recently? The time spirit is now rather to choose direct cremation without a chest, as David Bowie chose a couple of years ago. Well, it could save the US alone annually for 70 000 cubic meters of burnt wood. Increasingly large bodies also require energy, and a cremation can send over 300 kilograms of carbon – equivalent to an 20 hour car ride – into the air. Many therefore opt for new flameless "green" environmental methods that dissolve the bodies and crush legs to dust. Others pay to send the ashes 30 miles up into the atmosphere with balloons. If you are not one of those who wants a pair of earrings melted with the ashes of your mother, so you can carry "her" with you everywhere. And if you have 500 dollars, you can get a small stainless steel capsule with the DNA of the deceased preserved.

Facebook has now also introduced Memorialized Accounts, where deceased user accounts can be kept alive, updated with the latest status. The Cake program is also a system in which you will make online wishes at the end of your life – a third choose where the Facebook account is kept alive. Streaming funerals online has also become popular in England, so everyone can be virtually present. And if you want the funeral video to be preserved, then contact FuneralOne and you will get help.

For as Robert Hertz wrote in 1907, one has two lives – one physical in nature, and one life in culture. The latter is becoming increasingly immortal with the internet. Don't forget to ask for long-lit virtual candlesticks. And remember to order a QR code for the tombstone so others can quickly look up who you were on your smartphone.

One thing is certain as death: Both control over people's lives, robots that replace workers, man's technologically enabled pursuit of immortality, and new "life forms" that spread artificial intelligence – are all now realities that will not die.