Epigraph: The Last Question for Humanity
"For in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable."--"The Last Quesion" by Isaac Asimov
Every human being must confront "the last question" of distress: how to combat the irreversible nature of death. Every human individual, every animal species, and even every star in the universe, is on a solitary journey from birth to extinction. We are all born into an "existential solitude."
Companionship, love, and connection, however, are the forces that combat death on this lonely journey. In those moments when you are in heartfelt communion with your family, when your thoughts resonate with a close friend, or when you become a poetic memory in the mind of your lover, in these moments of connection, the human "soul" seems to transcend the physical boundaries of the body, extending its life beyond.
Sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, in his greatest short story, further imagined a future where AI helps humanity overcome this "last question": with the aid of the super artificial intelligence called "AC", human productivity and lifespan are infinitely enhanced. Eventually, humans need not be confined to physical existence and can live in any corner of the universe's space-time. Within the data network woven by AC, human senses, thoughts, emotions, and memories — or what we call the "human soul" — merge with everything through AC's data. The human soul can intimately interact with any other person, an AI, or even any element of the universe, unbounded by physical or temporal separation. This imagined network of human souls, aided by AI, is gradually stepping into our reality today.
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