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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, @04:36AM
"Those neurons almost certainly don't individually do any recognition,"
What makes you so sure? After all you do say: "Individual neurons do seem to remember and process past inputs, ".
See also:
https://www.braindecoder.com/jennifer-aniston-neuron-redux-memory-formation-study-1226899628.html [braindecoder.com]
For example, one study participant had a neuron that responded specifically to an image of the White House but not to that of beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh. So one of that participant's composite images was Kerri Walsh at the White House.
Next, the researchers tested participants' memories of the composite images by asking them to match a celebrity face to a pictured location or to name the person corresponding to an image of a place. Finally, they again showed the patients the individual images. The researchers found that after participants viewed the composite images, the neurons that had previously only responded to the preferred stimulus now responded to both preferred and non-preferred stimuli: The "White House neuron" began firing not only in response to the image of the White House but also to that of Kerri Walsh.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/health/02-04AffectedNeurons.asp [ucsd.edu]
“I think it’s fair to say that in the past it was generally believed that a whole cortical region would change when learning occurred in that region, that a large group of neurons would show a fairly modest change in overall structure,” said Tuszynski, who is also director of the Center for Neural Repair at the UC San Diego and a neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System.
“Our findings show that this is not the case. Instead, a very small number of neurons specifically activated by learning show an expansion of structure that’s both surprisingly extensive – there’s a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of the affected neurons – and yet highly restricted to a small subset of cells. And all of this structural plasticity is occurring in the context of normal learning, which highlights just how changeable the adult brain is as a part of its normal biology.”
So it seems to me a neuron does a lot more than being a dumb component in a "neural network".