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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 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next information, and there was only little information in the brains, which was mostly kept there because it could be outdated quite quickly, and therefore it was more economical to learn it.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.