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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 acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:17PM
Exactly. A million times this. I honestly don't know why people keep overlooking this fact. The whole computer copy of your brain thing is more analogous to cloning an identical twin of yourself, teaching them your memories and then them acting as your character, then you die. OK, that's not the best analogy (if anything the twin has a lot more in common with you, biologically) but it's about as much use.
Worse it's doubtful anyone could ever prove that any given brain upload technology actually works. Even if you performed it on yourself to validate it, you'd never know whether it had worked and you had become a computer copy or whether you had only ever been the newly created computer copy and the original consciousness unfortunately died.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @08:01PM
You take what you can get. The Russian millionaire is trying to make the most out of a bad situation (certain death). Biological anti-aging and reversal of aging would be more ideal than mind uploading since there is no copy-original problem involved.
There has been no successful mind upload. By the time hardware has advanced enough to make such an attempt possible, what's to say a non-destructive method of scanning the brain won't be possible?
Why do we even need to destroy the original? We can have more fun with this concept. How about networking your biological brain to several copies of your "mind upload". Use anti-aging therapy to keep the meatspace body alive. The results could be far more interesting than the unimaginative "mind upload as the last chance to avoid death" scenario.
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