A Chinese company plans to charge people to store the 'memories' of dead people
Forget about the next smartphone - one Chinese tech company is trying to disrupt mortality.
"Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now," Huawei president Kevin Ho said on Wednesday. "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."
Not clear enough? Ho is proposing a server that could store you, albeit in a digital form, after death.
The idea is simple: Everything in your brain is, essentially, data that can be stored, transferred, and duplicated. But how much data does a human brain hold? That's different for every person, but there's no doubt it would require a tremendous amount of storage to contain. And that's to say nothing of the immense processing power inside a human brain that would need to be matched with the data storage aspect.
The comments were made during a presentation in Shanghai, as reported by Bloomberg. Ho reportedly spoke of "a future where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers." Spooky enough for ya? And that's before we start talking about the ethical and philosophical implications of re-creating human consciousness in a digital format.
But Huawei is a company, and companies are in the business of making money. How does this ultra-futuristic, somewhat terrifying concept translate into profits? Data centers.
Due to the large amounts of storage required and the high rates of data transfer that would need to be in place for this concept to work, Huawei is looking at providing the data centers and transfer capabilities. You didn't think it was out of the goodness of their heart, did you?
Check out the full statements from Ho on Bloomberg.