The new Neflix original series Altered Carbon starring Joel Kinnaman, James Purefoy and Martha Higareda, set in the futuristic Blade Runner like world, every human was born with a stack which acted as a memory chip for their conscious and memory, people could be ‘re - sleeved’ into another body after they physically died and continue living. Meths, who were the wealthiest population in the the global government Protectorate, made clones of themselves and could keep re - sleeving and avoid physical decay which made them practically immortal. The story began when Laurens Bancorft, one of the most wealthiest meths, re -sleeved Takashi Kovacs, an envoy, in order to hire him to investigate his own murder.
The show shares a similar idea with the Blade Runner franchise, ‘What it means to be human?’ In a world where people could digitalize their consciousness and live forever, where AI was capable of acting like human, one must ask the question what makes human human? Do human have a soul? And if we did, then would people still be people when they were re - sleeved digitally, and if not, then what made us human differ from AI? Poe, who was a hotel AI manger, played by Chris Conner was seen to be capable of human emotions such as joy, anger and sympathy, but yet he was an AI, so did it make him human? Technically no since as human as he was, he was still a computer program, however just like he said, “The most human thing I can do is to die for a right cause.” In the end, being a human is not if there is a physical body or is mother born, is whether we are capable of emotions, having the sense of righteous, the sense of just. Mr. Leung who was played by Trieu Tran, a hired killer working for Reilen Kawahara often used at the catch phrase, “Are you a believer?” Throughout the series, we would think he was religious and believed that human was born with a soul, however in a conversation between him and Kovacs he revealed that he wasn’t a believer of God, instead he believed in the Meths, who he referred to as ‘the living Gods’ since they were wealthy as they were powerful and most importantly they could live for eternity. That brings us to the original question of ‘what it means to be human?’, do our souls goto heaven or hell after death? Or rather if our minds were digitalized, then would us still be us or would it just be a copy of ourselves? Descartes’s once wrote, “I think therefore I am.”As human, if there is one thing we know for a fact is our very existence, we think and reflect ourselves, with new technologies being developed every day, we are starting to become digitalized. We can have technology to be an assistant to our lives but we must not let it manufactures it own interpretation of our lives, we can develop technologies, but not let it dictates us.
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