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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 bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:48PM
Immortality is certainly possible, and may be achieved in the near future. Then we might find out all kinds of reasons why it isn't a good idea, at least, not for animals. If plants can live 5000 years, why can't animals? If it was a good idea, wouldn't this trait have evolved at some point? The main reason could be a simple matter of it eventually costing less energy to build a new body than repair an old one. We routinely total cars that can be repaired because repairs cost more than simply getting another car. Another big reason is incorporation of responses to a changing environment. For instance, if seed size changes for whatever reason, then bird beak size needs to change as well. Merely repairing the damage of aging might not be good enough for an immortal bird not to starve.
We're squeamish about death. The way we handle our disabled, sick, and dying elderly is very cowardly. Pack them off to a nursing home and let them rot until they finally manage to die on their own. Sometimes that's hardly better than prison. And there are studies that show being admitted to a nursing home can hasten decline and death. Yet anyone who really believes death sometimes is a gift in such circumstance risks being looked upon as a murderer if they dare try anything more direct. So, the most that can be done is to look the other way while the mere presence in a nursing home nudges the elder along towards death a little faster. Dr. Kevorkian rubbed our noses in our collective denial and hypocrisy about death, and ended up in jail several times. To add to the hypocrisy, the US still has the death penalty. Execution is acceptable, but euthanasia isn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:59PM
If it was a good idea, wouldn't this trait have evolved at some point?
Nonsense. Evolution isn't some sentient being, and it definitely doesn't produce perfect beings. But also, this seems awfully fallacious, because even if humans living for thousands of years had drawbacks from an evolutionary perspective, that would not necessarily make it bad. Morality and the opinions of the individual do not depend on evolution.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:20PM
And we care what Einstein thought about a non-physics topic just because he was a really smart dude and we like to hang motivational posters of him and his crazy hair in schools?
Evolution doesn't select for nigh-immortality because procreation is "easier" than keeping something alive forever with standard cellular processes. Reproduction is also as old as cell division itself, so it is an obvious path to get life forms to spread and consume more resources. That doesn't mean that there aren't nearly immortal animals [wikipedia.org] out there.
Your car isn't a thinking being, so that's one reason why you would be less inclined to spend loads of money on its "health". And yet some people do spend a lot of money to maintain classic cars.
Humanity already adapts to environments that we wouldn't be biologically able to using technology. We learned how to skin animals and make fire and dwellings, allowing us to spread further into colder climates. Today, we can survive spacewalks using spacesuits. Making you immortal won't change the fact that you aren't adapting automatically to new environments. Gene therapy could potentially be used to allow individuals to adapt to new environments though.
As for nursing homes, these might be unnecessary if biological anti-aging reverses the effects of age and restores youthfulness. Certainly, it would not apply to mind uploading (which I'm more skeptical of), unless you consider the datacenter to be the nursing home for uploaded minds.
The right to die will be enshrined in law long before biological immortality becomes feasible. In fact, California will adopt right to die [soylentnews.org] beginning June 9, 2016, which directly impacts a number of SoylentNews readers.
Execution is probably on the way out. The issues in getting the "right" drugs have thrust execution back in the spotlight. Many of the U.S. states that have execution laws on the books haven't executed anybody in years. Finally, the Supreme Court could strike down execution, an outcome that could be highly dependent on the result of the 2016 Presidential election.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @10:22PM
For most of the time, the relevant information was all in the genes, which get passed to the next information, and there was only little information in the brains, which was mostly kept there because it could be outdated quite quickly, and therefore it was more economical to learn it. It's in evolutionary time scales only very recently that the information in the brain got significant in its own way, and started an evolution of its own. Basically the breakthrough was the ability to speak, and thus pass on complex mental information. Therefore most of the time, there was no evolutionary pressure to keep the information in the brain. Moreover, the evolutionary pressure to do so doesn't act on the genetic evolution, but on the mental evolution. Mental evolution already resulted in some quite capable systems of mental information transmission. Painting, writing, mathematics, the printing press, the telephone, movies, the internet, all that are systems of transmission of specific types of mental information. Uploading your mind to a computer would just be a further step in that evolution, a step that finally makes all information of the brain transferable and ultimately frees the mental information from its biological substrate.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday March 17 2016, @01:39AM
If it was a good idea, wouldn't this trait have evolved at some point?
Evolution is not about good ideas, but about survival. Immortality doesn't benefit survival, on the contrary, the environment will eventually benefit those that did evolve instead. In short: all those that happened to be immortal in the past, have all been eaten at some point.