Huawei, Humai, and the Quest for Immortality Through Tech

In a fascinating report to Bloomberg, Huawei spokesperson Kevin ho described the company’s ongoing investments in an idea that may strike the general public as outlandish: immortality.

Specifically, the company believes that mobile app developers will one day be able to design products that allow users to live on in the digital world through a combination of AI and complex server systems, essentially “uploading” human consciousness — or a very convincing representation of it — to some form of the Internet.

Far from pursuing the technology for futurist or altruistic purposes, however, Huawei turned heads for their focus on how such technologies promise a strong bottom line to businesses that get in on the tech side early. In their presentation, mobile smartphones were presented as a sort of proto-interface between the digital world. In the future, said Huawei’s president of handset product line, the digital world will be much more dynamic, creating an environment where Internet-enabled devices have more in common with spiritual mediums that cell phones.

Huawei isn’t the only company working to catalogue human experience via AI and mobile apps. A variety of startups have cropped up in recent years with various plans to develop anti-death technologies, with one of the most talked-about being Humai — a company working to bring users back from the dead using a combination of personality-cataloguing apps, frozen brain tissue, and full-body prosthetics called “Humais” that would theoretically allow an uploaded consciousness to live on in a fully artificial body.

Whether Houston mobile app developers view these sorts of plans as futurist entertainment or serious technological possibilities, the success of companies like SpaceX in developing radicaly ambitious products in industries where government or public initiatives failed to innovate has enboldened technologists to take aim at the fundamental problems of life; where we come from, where we’re going, and how to fix everything holding humanity back from their potential.