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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: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:55PM
Our memory doesn't work like a PC, you can't just go through all the addresses and read all the memory values.
No, best guess is it works like a neural network, and computers can simulate those. So the question is, if a future scanning technology could actually map all of the neurons in the brain and their interconnections and that could be simulated on a computer (or some other form of electronics) would the result be conscious? If you did a "destructive" scan would it be "the same person"? If not, what if you incrementally replaced someone's brain with a digital simulation?
Definitely still Science Fiction (... and SF has analysed the shit out of the philosophical/ethical angles of this, particularly if you read Greg Egan*) and current scanning tech certainly can't do it - but maybe not as irrevocably SciFi as, say FTL travel where we know fundamental physical reasons why it may be impossible.
So, confining immortal souls manipulable only by His Noodley Appendage to the realms of non-falsifiability - (A) what about the brain might be uniquely uncopyable by any future technology (Heisenberg to the rescue?) and (B) if so, can someone nice patent it before the MPAA does?
(* or Richard Morgan if you want less talk-talk and more bang-bang-splat-gristle-boom)