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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:28PM
> Mind uploading implies you leave your finely aged body behind, if that's your concern.
Putting the same old mind into a new body is unlikely to cure what Stephen Colbert calls [latenightfeud.com] "explosive ennui."
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:33PM
That's somebody else's problem. Solutions include fucking figuring out something to do, or suicide.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:41PM
If a lack of imagination is your biggest crisis, then you have it great.
Anti-aging, biological immortality, substrate independence, whatever, it's all about giving people options (maybe rich people, maybe everybody). If you can't handle being immortal, you can do the ultimate privilege check (nobody has achieved anti-aging/biological immortality in human history) and end your life. Since death is essentially irreversible, having the option of being immortal, at least temporarily, is better than not having the option at all.
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