Not immortal, but virtually immortal.
When the super-rich get these treatments and open the gates to live for ever. It will still be possible to kill them. They will not be immortal.
Maybe humans are not the best electricity generator, but slavery is far from obsolete. In fact, there are more slaves today than ever before in history although it's difficult to define exactly what a slave is (https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/41684/is-it-true...). Humans may not be so efficient but they sure are cheap, in some places as little as $90 (https://socialinnovation.blog.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2015/03/17/moder...). The sole reason slavery is not as widespread at least in the developed world is because of laws caused by some people having a conscious. When profit is in question unfortunately people will go very very far to minimize cost.
machine can work 24/7 and have infinitely more scalability, do you think we can harness planetary level of energy using human ?? I dn't think so
also one biggest part is predictability, human varies by value of work they can provide. with machine you can have one spec sheet and done with the day
I don't get why many folks are missing the obvious issue - even if you manage all that, its at most a copy command, there is never actual move. You yourself would be staring at this other guy, probably being envious since form now on its him / her having the future, while the actual you who wrote that comment is about to be removed for disposal. And whole representation of universe and Earth you have in your mind would die with you.
You would have to move every electron traveling in between each neuron into exactly same place, same momentum etc. All of them in the same time obviously. I stress the word move. In a system that is constantly moving on molecular level at crazy speed. Even that is only valid in case our consciousness is just electron cloud at given moment travelling in the brain. Maybe its more, all interconnected.
How you want to move that. The science for that won't be around for millennia, if ever (there may be quite hard constraints on quantum level in similar way speed of light is hard limit for Star trek utopias, universe doesn't rearange itself and change its laws just because of our emotional wishful thinking). Once we can do that, it means we could mess with telomeres, DNA etc with 100% precision and knowledge so this will be a moot point. Don't hold your breath for this.
The simplest way to "fix" that is killing the original one as a required and atomic part of the process. Make it so that there is no moment in time when both are awake and concious
But that is still asking people to get into the death box so that a clone of them can live on. Personally, I wouldn't accept certain death so a copy of me could live.
Yes. The 10 wealthiest men in the world in 1919 didn't have CT scans, ultrasound, dialysis, pacemakers, knee replacements, CPAP machines, asthma inhalers, air conditioning, or computers.
Not really. Having offspring & re-mixing genes in them, is one way how species (not individuals!) adapt to a changing environment.
Bacteria do that in ~hourly intervals, humans take decades, some plants can span millenia.
So you could say the 'update interval' is tuned to how fast-changing a species' environment is. A balance between energy 'wasted' on re-building individuals from scratch, vs wasting energy by having poorly adapted individuals.
So 'immortal humans' to me reads as: humans optimized for a caveman hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while living in Star Trek like tech-heavy surroundings.
If anything, humanity would be served by shorter lifecycles, until tech advances stabilize somehow (?). Okay a few individuals living way longer could be good. Eg. billionaire tech bros taking that spot? Please nooo!!!
We stopped using evolution for adaptation the moment we started using tools. Our brain size was the last "gift" from evolution. We have been on our own since then.