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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 TheLink on Thursday March 17 2016, @03:56AM
To me some parts of the brain are probably like a Bingo Hall, with "stream of thought/input" being "called out". So when certain brain patterns appear and various neurons recognize them they yell "Bingo!" and that creates another different pattern which triggers another bunch which creates a different pattern and so on.
Now due to different arrangements of neurons and different history/memory after the immediate sensory bits, the locations of the neurons and what patterns they respond to and create could be very different.
On the other hand, it might be much simpler. It might be that all neurons of a given type function virtually identically - essentially being "standardized" parts whose specific functionality is determined entirely by how they're interconnected with the rest.
But do we even truly know what neurons are capable of? This is what single celled creatures can do: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=450&cid=11384#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
We can predict the behaviour of someone like Stephen Hawking 90% of the time (since he doesn't move very much ), but the 1% of the time when Stephen Hawking talks about something really interesting, we see a big difference, even though the rest of the time he' could be replaced by a robot. :p