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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:53PM (#319129)

    "Do me a favor, boy"
    "What's that, Dix?"
    "This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing."

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  • (Score: 1) by bolek_b on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:23PM

    by bolek_b (1460) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:23PM (#319229)
    Yes, classics! My association was something like: "The point is, if we can store music on a compact disc, why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one? I have the engineers figuring that out now. Brain mapping, artificial intelligence, we should've been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this, and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day. If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. Now she'll argue. She'll say she can't. She's modest like that. But you make her. Hell, put her in my computer, I don't care. All right. You, test subject - test's over. You can head on back to your desk."