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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: 2) by devlux on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:57PM

    by devlux (6151) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:57PM (#319339)

    Uh the answer to your question is embedded in it, but the answer becomes pointless.

    If you "think you are someone" then to yourself "you are that someone" and furthermore, "you are that someone to anyone who chooses to believe in you".
    I'm shocked as a cyberneticist that you really believe what you're saying.

    First of all, you are nothing more and nothing less than the "information that is you". Your genetic code is part of the equation, but we know how that works, we clone people all the time. It happens in utero with genetically identical twins and then there are the most extreme cases, conjoined twins.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_and_Brittany_Hensel [wikipedia.org]

    No one with an ounce of sense could argue that Abby and Brittany are the same person, even though their genetic code is identical, even though they have shared life experiences for their entire life including physical sensation. This, even though they share a body.

    I believe that the end result of your dreaded scenario is the computational equivalent of something like Abby & Brittany where deduplication results in hyper specialization of personalities and a generalized sharing of resources, but I have serious doubts that a "cold upload" like you talk about is even possible.

    The most likely scenario is evolution towards our own personal Theseus paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [wikipedia.org]
    We are the first creatures that we know of which can directly control our own evolution through a combination of direct genetic manipulation and enhancements.

    It has started already. It started a long time ago. It began when we got our first pair of eyeglasses or hearing aides or otherwise began to augment the reality presented to our senses. As time goes on we begin to integrate these machines closer and closer with our sensory systems eventually becoming cybernetic organisms or as I like to call it Homo Cyber. In fact if you have a prosthetic of any kind including a smartphone which may as well be an appendage at this point, then you are already well on your way to becoming Home Cyber. Ask yourself this. If you misplace your smartphone, do you panic and begin searching for it? If so then you are already well on your way to becoming Homo Cyber. You can even transmit your thoughts across tens of thousands of miles and project those thoughts into millions of minds. I'm doing it right now as I hit send on this message. Ever like something on facebook that went viral? Just because you take it for granted, that doesn't make it any less real.

    Yet our machines continue to get smaller and despite the limitations of silicon, the true limits of our information machinery probably lay somewhere deeper than even the quantum level. I realize that the term singularity is used to denote a condition in which AI has assumed superhuman characteristics, but most people forget that the entire universe is comprised of information and information when it is packed densely enough does form a singularity. Perhaps one day we will use blackholes the same way we use hardrives now.

    Regardless of whether that level of information density is really something we can achieve or not, the fact remains that we are already replacing bits and pieces of our bodies with machines. There are already machines that are starting to bypass damaged spinal columns to restore motor control, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140625130137.htm [sciencedaily.com]
    There are already machines starting to appear that can bypass damaged or missing sections of the visual system, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830521-700-bionic-eye-will-send-images-direct-to-the-brain-to-restore-sight/ [newscientist.com]

    There is absolutely no reason to believe that within this generation it won't become common place to augment our minds directly with similar systems. At first it will be to treat degenerative neural conditions, but overtime the use will be expanded to allow for enhanced mental function.

    Imagine being able to recall at an instant, anything you've ever experienced from your first scary movie to your first date, to the exact words you wrote in your 3rd grade poetry contest. Instant and total recall of every event from cradle onwards As much as I hate facebook and twitter, it does look like that may be the way we are heading.

    So what about really important information, like knowing for sure if you really did turn off the stove before you left the house?
    We can already do this with our smartphones, there is in fact an app for that!

    Now take that whole concept a step further. You're at the movies, you actually sense that you left the stove on. Rather than check an app on your smartphone and tap a button, you merely think "stove off". You reach out to your home automation system, which by then is really just "your home" and you turned the stove off. Oops, left the lights burning, may as well get those too. Crap it's cold outside, movie's almost over. You tell your car to start itself, turn on the heater and then pull around and pick up you and your date. All of this without ever even taking your eyes off the movie screen or your hands off your date.

    The next step is to chat with your date about the movie via the mental equivalent of texting or a phonecall.
    You share thoughts directly, but you probably never even think about it anymore than you think about texting someone today.

    At this point, you are officially 100% Homo Cyber, much of the biological you has either been augmented or replaced by machinery and you're taking it for granted.
    As time goes on, more and more of the biological you fails or is upgraded away. One day you wake up and all the squishy bits are gone, but you're still here.

    You have literally become a Theseus paradox. Are you really still you? Every single biological part of you that you were born with is now gone. Where does that leave you?

    Yet this has happened to you already. If you are past the age of 10, you don't have a single cell in common with the you that came screaming into the world out of your momma's belly. The only difference between you as Homo Cyber and you as you are now, is that as Homo Cyber you have become "Technically deathless" and take it for granted much as you take living into the 80s or 90s for granted when it was damn near unheard of just 100 years ago.

    Either way, as long as you can keep replacing the batteries and keep swapping out the failing bits you'll go on like that as long as you please.

    What happens when we take a slightly different route? What happens when instead of replacing our biology a piece at a time, we instead receive an injection at birth. It's merely there to strengthen and supplement the immune system. However it's nanotech and can be reprogrammed on the fly.

    Assuming someone doesn't hack it to turn you into grey goo, the scenario becomes more like...
    One day you wake up with a tumor, by the end of the day, the nano tech has deleted the cancer cells, converting them to whatever they are supposed to be. The nanotech does exactly the same job that the larger cybernetic replacements would have done, maintenance and housekeeping tasks.

    You are now Homo Superior though, because at this scale your augments can easily morph and shift to whatever is possible and again you merely take it for granted.

    This means that you can choose to be functionally immortal, and with a little reprogramming the same nanotech that is repairing your cuts and scrapes and deleting infections from the body can go through and reorganize and optimize your systems. You were born a redhead but think that blonds have more fun? Download the blond kit, go to bed and wake up different. You want to increase your recall capability, just download the Watson augment plan. Someone mentioned that you have the body of god and you looked in the mirror realized that they meant Buddha? Download the only body building body plan officially sanctioned by the World Wrestling Federation, go from flab to fab in just a few days. Ever wish you had 4 arms or could breathe underwater perhaps both? No problem!

    Yet in both cases, as the machines replace, repair and augment the biology, we become entangled with the machines and one day, there is no point at which anyone can honestly say that the person ends and the machine begins.

    Overtime in both cases, the machines will continue to shrink to towards whatever limits there are that are fundamental to the universe. That is assuming there is a fundamental limit. Even if there is some fundamental limit, you are still not in a "hell of your own making" as you put it.
    If you can do these things there is no reason you couldn't build a ship and send yourself to the stars and explore everything there is.
    What difference does it make that Mars doesn't have oxygen if you can turn off the cold and your body no longer needs oxygen, you can go visit Olympus Mons or see what the deal is over at Cydonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(region_of_Mars)#.22Face_on_Mars.22 [wikipedia.org]

    In short, the next step for humans probably begins to look more like this https://youtu.be/wOZ9Q99Nfv8 [youtu.be]

    Despite the campiness of his speech, and yes I realize that John is a machine complaining about being human, he makes a fair point about what our future probably holds.

    More than that though, we already are machines and we can be so much more than our current limited biology.
    We are in fact, biological machines that our creator (nature, god, whatever floats your boat) has made extremely limited physically, but for which there are no known intellectual limits.

    It is our prerogative to expand on and enhance whatever we have, with whatever we have at our disposal. If the religious types are right, that we eventually die and pass on to some heaven or hell then it makes no difference since the immortal artifact left behind in this universe only "thinks" it's us. But it can run for as long as the laws of physics allow it to run. If it really is us, then it is far better to begin this process as soon as possible and preserve as much of the information that is us as is possible.
    I like to summarize my views on death like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2qYnj-P37Y [youtube.com]

    I believe that it is through this path that we will find that we are able to transcend the bounds of everything we consider ourselves to be at this time. Moving from Homo Sapient to Cyber to Superior and finally to Homo Transcendent or even beyond. After we have searched out and explored everything there is to know in our own universe, it's likely that we will create either literally or in simulation, new universes.

    As for intellectual limits, the so called final limits of a finite mind? You can dream a thousand universes, you can conceive of so much more than what you are, merely in the form that you are in now. What happens when that form is strengthened and expanded to the literal limits of what this universe allows?

    In otherwords, perhaps the Gods were not a fiction of our bronze age selves, perhaps our bronze age selves are merely a fiction of our transcendent selves.

     

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 17 2016, @06:59PM (#319675)

    So very wrong. Lots of nice words though. Your consciousness is physical and as such separate from others merely due to locality. Mind is an abstraction, a part of your system that your consciousness experiences. Copying your current mind out of your body does not move your consciousness out of your body, you will still experience existence from within your original body.

    So a copy of your loved one's mind is not your loved one at all. It is not experiencing anything at all and your loved one is definitely not experiencing anything through it. You might as well talk to your toaster and call it grandmother, you would be equally as wrong.