Huawei Prepares For Robot Overlords and Communication With the Dead (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on Bloomberg: Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans. Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line said his company used science fiction movies like "The Matrix" to envision future trends and new business ideas. "Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now," he said. "In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world." He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat (Editor's note: WeChat is a popular instant messaging app in China and other Asian markets) to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.For those unaware, Huawei is a major Chinese conglomerate. The company, known for its network equipment, last year got some spotlight for its Nexus 6P smartphone.

Comments

Immortality

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
(Attributed to Susan Ertz)

I imagine that immortality would become quite a bore unless there were things to do in the eternal digital afterlife. Hopefully there would be some cool VR games that would be worth playing for a century or two.

What would be great is to be able to put your consciousness into a drone-body or something where you could go off and do something useful and/or interesting, ala the Iain Banks uber-powerful and capable drone entities.

Re:Immortality

[kheldan]

One of my favorite authors is Larry Niven, and he's covered quite a bit about people who more or less live forever ('boosterspice'), and the effects it has on their personalities and the choices they make. Very often it isn't pretty; some would commit suicide, probably in some spectacular way; some would turn to crime; some would inevitably turn to a neverending quest for power. To be fair about it, some would turn to bettering humankind. But, when you've lived so long that you've managed to conquer and master every single interest you've ever had in your life, what do you do then? 'Idle hands are the Devils playthings' as the saying goes. Imagine someone like Donald Trump, except he never ages, lives forever, is essentially unkillable, and he's getting really, really bored as the centuries roll by; what do you think he's going to do? Don't know about you, friend, but the thought makes my blood run cold.

Re:Immortality

[Qzukk]

Segmentation fault, soul dumped.

Re:This will never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.

Why not? My brother-in-law's consciousness would probably run just fine on a Commodore 64.

"..you may be able to.."

[kheldan]

In the future, you may be able to:

• Download your brain into a computer construct
• Step into a transport booth and instantly be anywhere in the world
• Have Starships that travel many times the speed of light and take you to distant galaxies
• Never age, never be hungry, never get a disease
• Live in a world without poverty, fear, or war
• Discover Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Gods are actually real, you can meet them and sit down and have a drink and talk to them
• {insert other utter fantasy here}

..but it's not very likely any of those things will happen.

Hurr, you have no imagination!

On the contrary, I have a huge imagination, it's one of the things that makes me good at what I do -- but I also have a firm grip on reality and know the difference between it and fantasy -- and this guy from Huawei is spinning fantastic-sounding stuff just to get some attention. I rate it's credibility just slightly above things you hear out of North Korea.

Fun to think about such things though. And, you never know.. but I'm not holding my breath, either; I recommend others do the same.

Re:This will never happen

[kheldan]

Neurological science still doesn't even have the foggiest idea how the human brain does all the things that it does, let alone what causes the phenomenon we refer to as 'consciousness'. Personally, I believe most of the problem there is the lack of ability to observe the machine in operation; our instrumentality is sorely lacking. Too bad it's not like a piece of machinery, that you can stop, dismantle, examine all the pieces and see what they do, blueprint the thing, then put it all back together and see it run again; you stop a human brain, it more or less starts turning into useless mush immediately, and there's nothing to see anymore.

Of course I'm not all that certain that at this point in our social evolution as a species, that we should even be trusted with knowing all the secrets of how our brains work; I'd be afraid of the knowledge being misused.

math will still be a problem

[frovingslosh]

"Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now,"

What kind of an idiotic statement is this? Are they telling us that it is 2010? Any normal person (if a "normal" person were to say such a stupid thing) would say "by 2035 or 2040" or "by 2036 or 2041" or "twenty or twenty five years from now". Mixing dates and durations in the same sentence for different milestones just makes you come across as confused.

Re:This will never happen

[Shortguy881]

Here is a Lamprey eel brain in a robotic body back from 2000. We are making progress.