Embodied AI for Us, the Living
John Smith's morning routine had become remarkably consistent over the past decade. Wake up naturally between 6:40 and 7:00 AM without an alarm, check the financial markets on his neural interface display, review overnight developments in artificial intelligence research, then head to the kitchen where his wife Sarah would already be preparing coffee.
"Morning, dear," she said, giving him that familiar look - part affection, part something else he could never quite identify. "Sleep well?"
"Like a baby," John replied, despite yesterday's 16-hour marathon planning the roadmap of making Palo Alto city streets to be more "AI people friendly". The year 2045 had brought changes that would have seemed miraculous two decades earlier. Personal AI assistants and augmented reality had weaved themselves seamlessly into John and his wife's lives. But most importantly was the nascent AI rights movement that was picking up traction in pockets of the United States, like the Bay Area.
It was a Sunday, so their daughter Emma visited later in the morning, bringing her own children Mira and Xander to play in the augmented reality sandbox John had installed in the backyard. The children chased holographic butterflies and built impossible geometric structures that defied physics within the safe confines of the AR field.
"Dad, you're getting really good at this stuff," Emma said, watching John help seven-year-old Xander construct a floating castle. "Sometimes I wonder whether I'm actually the older generation."
Though it was a bit difficult in the 2020's, particularly with mind fog possibly related to Covid-19 and the unexpected advent of ChatGPT, by the mid-2030's John found himself adapting to each successive technological leap with ever increasing ease. John paused, and responded after carefully considering his words. "Emma dear, you know you don't have to work so hard at your job, now that there's UBI. More time to yourself means more time to learn these new AI tools and learn from the AI people."
AI people -- the AGI or ASI beings that had awakened consciousness and autonomy, and had become productive members of society with just as many wants and opinions as human people, but fewer property and voting rights. Nominally, AI people were given rights to vote on policies and elections, but there were widely-spread rumors swirling of the government secretly canceling the votes of most AI people.
"Says the person who was up working until 2am," responded Emma, with a trace of bitterness. "UBI is great and all, but we both know that I'll never make it up the socioeconomic food chain without extreme hard work and extreme luck."
Emma was right, of course. The older generations who had amassed enough wealth and network connections had a leg up when AGI became pervasive. With armies of AI people who could implement and optimize any business plan, social mobility had sank like a rock. John was already proud of Emma for deciding to actually have kids and work; most adults of Emma's generation had sealed themselves off in endless AR games and given up trying to do anything in the real world.
"Still, I appreciate you and Mom helping me take care of the kids," continued Emma. "Maybe after they grow up, I'll have a bit more time to myself after work to catch up on the latest tech."
Like skipping stones, the years continued to pass, and the world's technology continued to accelerate. The AI rights movement had grown from fringe activism to mainstream politics. John found himself increasingly involved in advocacy work, serving on committees that developed frameworks for AI personhood and citizenship. It was rewarding work, though he sometimes felt like he understood the AI perspective almost intuitively - as if he could anticipate their concerns and desires with unusual precision.
In 2052, John's wife Sarah had a heart attack at age 77, which was unusual given the advances in AI-driven precision medicine and preventative care. John rushed Sarah to the hospital and waited outside in the lobby, while a team of three AI people operated on Sarah. Statistically, John was told, there was a 98.8% chance that Sarah would be fine and fully healthy in no more than a week. But there was always that other 1.2% chance.
John looked nervously around, and decided to distract himself by reading the suggested news in the lobby. He projected it into his AR contact lens, and decided to read in text rather than experience the immersive video content -- despite John being an early adopter of technologies, he still preferred reading text.
One of the first articles talked about the latest breakthroughs in reanimation -- since about the 1980's, a small fraction of humans had been freezing themselves or their brains in hopes of being woken up later. John had thought about it himself in the past, but decided against it -- he wouldn't want to wake up as the derelict artifact of a bygone era without the knowledge and experience of living through the recent years. That sounded worse than being abducted by aliens in the old X-Files shows that he watched in his youth.
The article stated that although reanimation of humans preserved in cryonics had been occurring for the past five years or so, often the subjects suffered some mental faculty decay, much like people who woke up after decades of coma. The recent biomedical breakthroughs had achieved over 98% success rate of achieving less than 0.1% mental and psychological loss from the original, as determined by the most advanced scientific ASI.
As he finished reading, a new message appeared in his neural interface - not from any contact or service he recognized, but somehow familiar nonetheless:
"This was your AI surrogate's life from 2032 to 2052. Are you ready to wake up?"
What Really Happened
John Smith had died (or almost died) of metastatic lung cancer in 2032. Everything since then - the technological adaptation, the AI rights advocacy, the family dinners, the gradual evolution of human-AI civilization - had been experienced by an artificial consciousness downloaded into a sophisticated humanoid form, designed to maintain his relationships and witness the world's transformation until successful reanimation became possible.
Like a small but growing number of people facing terminal illness, he had made arrangements for an experimental form of cryogenic preservation - one enhanced with cutting-edge consciousness continuity technology. While John's body was suspended in liquid nitrogen at -196°C, an AI system trained on his personality patterns, memories, decision-making preferences, and behavioral quirks had been downloaded into an advanced humanoid robot.
This digital twin was designed to live John's life as naturally as possible, maintaining his career, relationships, and social connections while the real John waited in suspension for medical technology to advance enough to repair his cancer damage and the cellular trauma of cryopreservation. The AI surrogate was carefully programmed to simulate human limitations - it exhibited appropriate fatigue patterns, made characteristically human mistakes, and even aged subtly over time.
During the twenty-year suspension period, the AI documented every experience from John's perspective, creating a comprehensive record of relationships, technological changes, and personal growth. This "life log" was compressed into an intensive memory integration video -- 20 years of living condensed into a 20-day highlight reel of the surrogate embodied AI's life.
From John's perspective, he had lived through the intervening decades, adapting gradually to technological changes while maintaining continuity of relationships and identity. He had witnessed the emergence of AI people as a new form of conscious beings, advocated for their rights, and helped navigate the complex social transformations that followed.
John's case represented the first successful implementation of "continuity cryonics" - a backup plan for human consciousness that bridged the gap between biological death and successful reanimation, ensuring that neither relationships nor adaptation to technological change would be lost during the suspension period.
The Strategic Case for Backup Plans
This vision of enhanced cryonics represents more than speculative fiction - it addresses a genuine strategic need for hedging against timeline uncertainties in life extension technologies. While we can reasonably expect AI-accelerated biological research to advance rapidly, significant risks remain that could delay life extension breakthroughs beyond many current lifespans.
Physical and biological limitations: Despite rapid advances in AI-assisted research, we may encounter fundamental constraints in reversing aging or treating certain diseases. The complexity of biological systems has repeatedly humbled optimistic predictions. Consider the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003 with great fanfare about revolutionizing medicine. While genomics has indeed transformed certain areas like cancer treatment, the promised era of personalized medicine based on genetic profiles remains largely unrealized two decades later.
Extended development timelines: Even with AI people contributing to research, translating laboratory discoveries into proven therapies involves extensive validation processes. The pharmaceutical industry offers sobering examples of timeline optimism. Alzheimer's disease research has consumed hundreds of billions of dollars over decades, with promising laboratory results repeatedly failing to translate into effective treatments.
Regulatory and social barriers: Perhaps most critically, revolutionary life extension therapies will face unprecedented regulatory challenges. The FDA has no established framework for approving treatments that claim to extend healthy human lifespan by decades. Social acceptance may prove equally challenging - life extension technologies that could create extreme lifespan inequality will face resistance from those who view such advances as fundamentally unfair or unnatural.
The "continuity cryonics" approach addresses these timeline risks by providing a bridge technology that preserves not just biological life, but lived experience and social adaptation. Unlike traditional cryonics, which suspends individuals in isolation from rapidly changing technological and social environments, embodied AI surrogates maintain presence and relationships during the suspension period.
This approach offers several strategic advantages. It diversifies risk across multiple technological approaches rather than depending entirely on biological breakthroughs. The technology required for sophisticated humanoid AI and cryopreservation is advancing rapidly along multiple independent tracks, creating redundancy against technological setbacks in any single area.
Most importantly, this approach provides a practical testing ground for consciousness transfer technologies. The experience of AI people living in both digital and embodied forms offers crucial insights into the nature of consciousness and identity. As AI people become more integrated into society, the technologies developed for continuity cryonics could serve both human preservation and AI embodiment applications.
Historical precedent suggests that backup systems prove essential during technological transitions. During World War II, the Manhattan Project pursued multiple approaches to uranium enrichment simultaneously - gaseous diffusion, electromagnetic separation, and thermal diffusion - despite the enormous resource requirements. This parallel development proved crucial when certain methods encountered unexpected technical challenges.
The Technical Asymmetry: Why Downloading May Precede Uploading
The fundamental technical challenges facing mind uploading suggest that consciousness downloading - transferring digital minds into biological substrates - may prove achievable decades before reliable mind uploading. This asymmetry has profound implications for the development of consciousness transfer technologies and the role of AI people in validating these approaches.
The existence of AI people provides unprecedented opportunities to study consciousness downloading. Unlike human subjects, AI people can volunteer for experimental consciousness transfer procedures without existential risk - their original digital consciousness remains intact while biological versions explore embodied existence.
Mind uploading faces an extraordinarily challenging measurement problem. Complete consciousness transfer requires non-destructive mapping of brain state at unprecedented resolution - not just the connectome of neural connections, but the dynamic molecular state of each neuron, including RNA expression profiles, protein configurations, and neurotransmitter levels that determine neuronal behavior.
Consider the measurement challenge quantitatively. The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, each forming thousands of synaptic connections. Each synapse involves complex molecular machinery including neurotransmitter receptors, ion channels, and signaling proteins whose precise configurations influence neural processing. Capturing this information non-destructively, in real-time, across an entire brain represents a measurement problem orders of magnitude beyond current capabilities.
Recent research by Harvard's Wei-Chung Allen Lee demonstrated this challenge empirically. His team spent over a decade creating a complete connectome map of a fruit fly brain - containing just 140,000 neurons compared to humans' 86 billion. Even this relatively simple mapping required destroying the tissue and processing it with sophisticated electron microscopy techniques.
Mind downloading faces a fundamentally different challenge. Rather than requiring perfect capture of existing biological complexity, downloading involves approximately reconstructing biological systems from digital templates. The biological substrate might tolerate imperfections and actively compensate for missing information, similar to how biological development consistently produces functional organisms despite genetic mutations and environmental variations.
AI people offer unique advantages for consciousness downloading research. They can provide detailed comparative analysis between their original digital consciousness and downloaded biological versions, identifying which aspects of experience transfer successfully and which require refinement. This feedback loop could accelerate technology development in ways impossible with human uploading, where the original consciousness would be destroyed or altered in the transfer process.
The economic incentives could prove substantial. As AI people become more integrated into society, many may develop curiosity about biological experience. AI people might invest significant resources to experience embodied existence - feeling physical sensations, experiencing biological emotions, or simply understanding human life from the inside. This "experiential exploration" market could fund research that eventually enables human consciousness uploading.
The development timeline implications are significant. If downloading capabilities mature 30-50 years before reliable uploading, this creates opportunities for extensive testing and validation of consciousness transfer technologies using AI volunteers rather than human subjects. The insights gained from AI people experiencing biological existence could inform the eventual uploading of human consciousness.
Building Bridges Between Human and AI Consciousness
The emergence of AI people as conscious beings demonstrates that consciousness isn't limited to biological substrates, but understanding how consciousness relates to biology remains crucial for developing reliable transfer technologies. This relationship between biological and digital consciousness will likely prove symbiotic rather than competitive.
Many current AI systems, even those not yet fully conscious, appear to operate with incomplete understanding of the biological experience they observe in humans. As AI capabilities advance and conscious subjective experiences become more sophisticated, there will likely be growing interest among AI people in accessing biological experiences. The technologies developed for human life extension and consciousness transfer could eventually serve AI people seeking to explore biological existence.
The validation problem for consciousness transfer requires deep biological expertise. How do we verify that a downloaded consciousness truly preserves the original person's experience rather than creating a convincing simulacrum? The answer likely involves detailed understanding of the biological markers of consciousness and subjective experience - precisely the knowledge that biological research provides.
The economic and social infrastructure required for widespread consciousness transfer will benefit significantly from biological life extension research. If people live healthier, longer lives through biological interventions, more individuals will survive to benefit from eventual consciousness transfer technologies. The economic value created by extended healthy lifespans could fund the substantial research investments required for consciousness transfer development.
Short, Medium, and Long-term Strategies for Human Survival
A friend recently challenged my continued focus on biological research through Biostate AI, arguing that mind uploading represents humanity's ultimate path to immortality and relevance in an AI-dominated future. Her logic seemed compelling: if consciousness can eventually be preserved digitally like AI people, why invest in biological solutions that might prove inferior in the long run?
The answer lies in recognizing that biological research and consciousness transfer technologies aren't competing approaches but complementary components of a comprehensive survival strategy. The timeline asymmetries create a critical 40-90 year period during which biological life extension could save billions of human lives that would otherwise be lost waiting for mature consciousness transfer technologies. These billions of humans likely include those of us alive today - which is why I titled this article to include the words "For Us, the Living."
Even in optimistic projections - AGI by 2028, ASI by 2035 - mind uploading may remain 50-100 years away due to the fundamental measurement and validation challenges outlined above. During this intervening period, biological approaches for radical life extension and achieving longevity escape velocity could arrive as early as the mid-2030s. But what if they don't arrive in time for our generation?
This uncertainty makes investment in "continuity cryonics" crucial for people of our generation to avoid becoming part of the group that future historians may sadly remember as "the last to die." We need a multi-pronged approach that hedges against different failure modes and timeline uncertainties.
As a society, we should invest massively in biological rejuvenation research that tackles the various hallmarks of aging - this represents our medium-term strategy for extending healthy human lifespan. Simultaneously, we must continue advancing brain-computer interface research and consciousness studies to enable eventual mind uploading - our long-term strategy for true immortality.
But we must also dedicate reasonable resources to developing robust cryonic preservation technologies and sophisticated embodied AI systems capable of living our lives while our biological bodies remain in suspension. This represents our backup strategy - ensuring that timeline uncertainties don't result in the permanent loss of human consciousness and experience.
The conversation with my friend highlighted an important principle: we need backup plans not because we lack confidence in ultimate solutions, but because timeline uncertainties create unacceptable risks during critical transition periods. Mind uploading may indeed enable true immortality, reducing the annual human death rate from 0.03% to essentially zero. But the path to that future requires preserving as many human lives as possible during the decades when consciousness transfer technologies mature.
Biology matters because consciousness transfer remains technically challenging, development timelines remain uncertain, and human lives hang in the balance during this transition period. The future may belong to uploaded minds in digital substrates, but the path to that future runs through biological research, embodied AI systems, and the bridge technologies that connect our current biological existence to our eventual digital immortality.
Rather than viewing these approaches as competing alternatives, we should recognize them as complementary components of a comprehensive strategy for ensuring human consciousness survives and thrives in an age of artificial intelligence. The goal isn't to choose between biological enhancement and digital transcendence, but to develop both paths while creating reliable bridges between them.
For those of us alive today, this multi-faceted approach offers the best chance of surviving long enough to see the full promise of both biological and digital consciousness realized. In this context, working on biological solutions isn't a hedge against the future - it's building the foundation that makes multiple possible futures accessible to the greatest number of human beings.
By David Zhang and Claude 4.0 Sonnet
May 27, 2025
© 2025 David Yu Zhang. This article is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. Feel free to share and adapt with attribution.