SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."
It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.
"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771
Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer
Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:31PM
Let the Russian man spend his wealth. Maybe there will be advancements in neuromorphic computing to show for it.
Certainly the biological aspects of human intelligence, like hard-coded neurons or an endocrine system, would be difficult to emulate in software or hardware. But it probably won't be impossible. Any system should be possible to simulate given enough time and resources, and a human brain is a lot smaller than say, the universe. And if you use brain-like hardware to mimic how neurons work, it may be much easier that trying to copy the "memory values".
Will it happen within this Russian millionaire's lifetime? Maybe not, but he shouldn't put all his eggs in the mind uploading basket when the anti-aging approach is more down to Earth.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]