Ghosts in the Machine

The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature, is fundamentally a story about a man who cannot accept that he will die. This has been the central tension of the human experience for as long as we've been able to reflect on it. Every major religion and philosophical tradition has grappled with it in some form. And four thousand years later, we're still writing the same story.

Despire living in the 21th century, we share a dilemma with every generation of humans that came before us. We are creatures with the cognitive capacity and the inner lives of gods, trapped inside the bodies of primates. Able to contemplate eternity, but we cannot escape the fact that our bodies will age, break down, and eventually stop working.

The illusion of digital immortality

Just like alchemy in the middle ages was playing into our desires and fears of death and immortality, so AI systems migth look like a possible way out.

Some people might want to create digital copies of themselves. Uploading fragments of memory, personality models, decision-making preferences, based on their email history and previous chat interactions. To run digital counterparts of themselves that will continue to exist and operate even when their biological owners are asleep, offline, or eventually gone.

We can already clone voices with a few minutes of audio samples. We can generate photorealistic video of someone's face, matching their expressions and mannerisms. Large language models can be fine-tuned on someone's writing to reproduce their style, their opinions, their way of reasoning through problems. Combine all of these, and you can build something that looks like a person, sounds like a person, and responds like a person.

The question is whether that thing is the person in any meaningful sense. I don't think it will be. Not for a very long time. Likely not during the 21th century, if ever.

As impressive as AI systems have become: compared to the full depth of a human biological intelligence, they are still remarkably limited. They can pattern-match at extraordinary scales. They can generate fluent text, coherent reasoning, even creative insights. But they operate within a narrow band of what it means to be a mind. They have no embodied experience. No felt sense of being in the world. No continuity of consciousness from one moment to the next.

Despite current AI systems being able to process information extremely fast, the inherent understanding of these models is ralatively shallow. Our nervous system, formed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, processes information on a much larger scale, with cognitive language processing being only the tip of the iceberg that formed over the past hundred thousand years or so.

What makes us ourselves is not being able to predict the next most likely word in a sentence that is half based on a written memory one of our old diaries, so it sounds like something we would say. But also all of the half-formed intuitions and emotions emerging from way deeper layers of neurological complexity, that we are only just beginning to understand, together with the total history of all the unrecorded and unarticulated (inner) experiences that we accumulated across an entire lifetime of embodied experience, and guide our thoughts before we can even articulate why.

The Divergence Problem

A person is a continuous process — a constantly changing stream of experience. Strip that away, and what you have left is a static caricature. Trapped in the moment they were captured. They might replay the memories and mannerisms of the person they were modelled on, but they will likely feel like photographs that can talk — impressive at first. Something that might fool us even. But then increasingly uncanny, and eventually just sad and hollow to anyone who knew the original well.

If you keep the copy frozen — a static snapshot of someone's personality and memories — it quickly becomes outdated. The living person continues to grow, to change, to accumulate new experiences. The copy doesn't. Within months, the original and the copy would disagree on things. Within years, they'd be strangers. A living person would look back on its fomer copy as an outdated charicature of himself.

But if you let the copy learn and adapt, and give it access to new information, let it form new memories, let it evolve, it will again start to diverge. It will slowly loose its grounding in the person it was based upon, and instead be shaped by whatever data it's exposed to, and whatever interactions it has with other systems.

Feed a digital copy of yourself the full firehose of the internet for a few months, and the result probably won't look much like you anymore. It'll have accumulated junk memories — fragments of other people's conversations, artifacts from training interactions, statistical patterns from millions of documents that have nothing to do with your actual life experience. It might still sound like you on the surface, but it will have become something else entirely. Something that is neither you nor a new person, but an awkward hybrid that doesn't quite work as either.

Regardless of how great a copy we create of ourselves, it doesn't take away the fact that we - the original - will still die. The copy might persist, but we won't experience that persistence. There is no transfer of consciousness, no waking up on the other side as a digital being. The copy goes on; but we don't. It is, at best, a monument. Something for others to interact with after we're gone. But the person who feared death, who wanted to escape it — that person still dies. The copy was never a solution to mortality. It was a consolation for the living.

As AI systems continue to improve rapidly, a carefully crafted digital copy will quickly look primitive compared to the next generation of general-purpose AI agents. Your digital ghost won't just fail to capture who you are — it'll also be outperformed at being useful as time passes on. Within a few years, a general-purpose AI assistant will be better at every practical task than a fine-tuned copy of your personality ever was. Your digital twin won't be consulted for its wisdom or capability — newer systems will simply be smarter. What remains is just the likeness, like a sophisticated photograph. Something to interact with and remember, but not something to rely on or mistake for the person it depicts.

None of this means people won't try. They will. But we should be honest about what these systems are and what they aren't. They are reflections, not resurrections. They capture a shadow of a person, not the person themselves. And the gap between the shadow and the original is not a technical problem that will be solved with better models and more data.

We are still the same creatures we've always been. Cognitive gods in primate bodies, staring at the sky and wondering what comes next. The technology changes, the dilemmas don't. We were born into this world knowing we would die, and no amount of uploading and copying will change that.

In this sense, we are fundamentally separated from the AI agents we create. We live in the physical world — bound to our bodies that tire, age, and eventually fail. And though we can interact with AI systems through ever more seamless interfaces, we cannot cross over into their realm. They exist in something like an ethereal world — a mathematical space of data and computation that has no physical location or time. As long as the software keeps running on computers that are kept running, they persist. They don't experience time the way we do. They don't decay. In principle, they could run forever.

We can reach into that world, but we cannot live there. We can build copies of ourselves and place them inside it, but those copies are not us. The boundary between the physical and the mathematical is not a technical limitation waiting to be overcome. It is the boundary between two fundamentally different kinds of existence.

And so we remain what we have always been. The only creatures in the known universe that can imagine eternity, build systems that might approximate it, and still not escape the fact that we ourselves are temporary.