What If I Was Digital Is Now Available on Amazon

It's finally here.

What If I Was Digital, the first book in my Digital Human Inc. series, is now available on Amazon as a Kindle eBook.

The paperback will be following soon.

What If I Was Digital — Available Now on Amazon

Seeing the book actually available to readers feels a little strange after spending so much time living with the questions behind it.

And this book started with one very big question:

What if death were no longer the end?

What If We Could Continue?

Imagine someone could copy your mind into a digital world.

Your memories are there.

Your personality is there.

You remember your family. You remember falling in love. You remember arguments, birthdays, embarrassing moments and ordinary Tuesday mornings.

You can think.

You can talk.

You can continue experiencing the world.

Your biological body dies.

But the digital version of you wakes up.

My question wasn't really whether we could eventually build technology capable of doing something like this.

The question that interested me was much more uncomfortable:

Would the person who woke up actually be you?

I don't know.

That's why I wrote the book.

Meet Diane and Daniel

At the centre of What If I Was Digital are journalist Diane Reeve and her husband, Daniel.

Diane meets a digital Daniel who remembers being her husband.

He remembers their life together.

He thinks like Daniel.

He feels like Daniel.

And he wants to believe that he survived.

Diane desperately wants to believe it too.

Neither of them can prove it.

And I think that's where the question becomes much more interesting.

It's easy to debate digital consciousness as an abstract technological or philosophical idea.

It's much harder when the digital person looking back at you is someone you love.

Digital Immortality Might Be Complicated

There are four people who have crossed over in What If I Was Digital, and I wanted to explore what digital existence would mean not only for them, but also for the families they leave behind.

Because immortality sounds wonderful until you start thinking about the practical details.

Digital humans don't age.

They don't sleep.

They don't get sick.

But somebody still has to host them.

Somebody owns the computers.

Somebody maintains the infrastructure.

Somebody sends the bill.

And somebody, somewhere, has the ability to switch everything off.

Suddenly immortality comes with terms and conditions.

This Is Why I Write Transhuman Fiction

Technology is changing extraordinarily quickly.

I'm still human.

Mostly.

For now.

And I have far more questions about where all of this might take us than I have answers.

That's really what these books are about.

I'm not trying to tell readers what they should think about artificial intelligence, digital consciousness, transhumanism or technological immortality.

I'd much rather explore those questions through people and stories.

Put ordinary human beings into extraordinary technological situations and see what happens.

Then leave you to decide what you think.

The Beginning of Digital Human Inc.

What If I Was Digital is Book One of the Digital Human Inc. series.

So this is only the beginning.

There are more questions coming.

Quite a few more.

But for now, I'm incredibly pleased that the first book is finally out there and that you can read it for yourself.

The Kindle eBook is available now on Amazon, and the paperback edition will follow soon.

Read What If I Was Digital on Amazon

And when you've finished it, I would genuinely love to know your answer to the question that started all of this:

If someone had all your memories, thoughts, feelings and personality... would they still be you?

I have my suspicions.

But I'm much more interested in yours.

— A. Huname