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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 16 2016, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the ghost-in-the-machine dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:39PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:39PM (#319117)

    Indeed - most ideas to "upload" the mind are, in principle at least, non-destructive to the original brain. Even if it works perfectly, you're not transferring your consciousness, you're copying it. It seems to me that having a potentially immortal mind-twin would bring most people precious little comfort as they lay dying as their freshly-minted twin watches on. Might be nice for their surviving friends and family (or not - what are the long term implications for inheritance, wealth concentration, etc.?), but if you can afford such a procedure in the first place, then the impact of your death on them is probably not your greatest concern when facing your death.

    On the other hand, digital immortality is the only form that's actually sustainable. We're rapidly overtaxing the supporting capacity of the planet even with everybody dying after less than a century - achieving population stability with widespread biological immortality would require a near-total moratorium on new births. No more babies. No more children. Do you really think you could convince the young to give up the foremost biological imperative in exchange for immortality? Maybe mandatory sterilization in exchange for immortality, with those who already have children being permanently denied immortality? It might work, but I'd hate to think of the society it would birth.

    Digital immorality though - there's potentially plenty of resources on Earth to support that for some time, and digital beings would be far better suited to colonizing the solar system as well. Still leaves some serious sociological questions to be addressed, not to mention all the normal AI questions as to whether these digital beings would have any long-term loyalty to the species that spawned them. But at least it would be physically sustainable for quite a while.

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:58PM

    by legont (4179) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:58PM (#319133)

    No, the idea is not "copying". The idea is that at some point people will exist directly connected to "internet" 100% of the time with their processing capacity say 99.9999999% on the net. The old body will be in storage somewhere. Is that body still exists? Who cares? Especially if one can have 1000 perfect bodies attached and they are still under 1% of total sensory capacity. Will there be a personality split? It's a question, but probably not.
    That's the idea.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:36PM (#319654)

      Mind is not consciousness. Mind is an abstraction and cannot experience anything. Consciousness is the experience of existence (movement etc) and the mind is part of what the consciousness experiences. Copying a mind does not copy the physical consciousness.

      Until they can figure out how to isolate the physical substance of consciousness and transfer that then a copy of the mind portion of a being is only that. It could be a useful tool for others but the original/actual person will still be completely in their original body and die with it.