AI But No Immortality

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars (New York, 1993), a downloaded copy of Anson Guthrie's mind is kept in an artificial neural network after his death. Downloads are rare because most people would not like to be a machine, therefore know that their copy would not like it either. A character comments on downloads:

" 'No deliverance from personal death.' No deliverance anywhere in sight, after it turned out that aging was built into the human genome. You could improve matters only up to a point." (p. 161)

Thus, in this imaginary future there will be neither mutant immortals (see Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years) nor antithanatics (see his World Without Stars) but there could be anti-senescence (the same author's History Of Technic Civilization). As I suggested  in an earlier post about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Anderson almost systematically explores every possible answer to a question and every possible implication to be derived from an sf premise.

Guthrie the download is sceptical about the prospect of AI although he realises that hardware programmed to operate like a downloaded personality would be AI and the latter does come onstage later in the novel but I have not reread that far yet.

So this novel's answers are yes to AI but no to bodily immortality.