Download Your Brain

Nicholas Roussos writes "Futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson predicts that death will be avoidable in the year 2050 by downloading your brain to a computer. Unfortunately, he is also predicting that the process will be only available to the wealthy for years after its release. I guess we should all start saving our pennies now."

Comments

Re:It's a copy

[Tlosk]

I can't speak to other cells, but the neurons in your brain and the nerve cells in your spinal column are all you've got. They do not regenerate. I suspect that there are other cell complexes in other organs that are probably one-timers as well (ova for instance).

That was the common consensus ten years ago but the last few years has seen that turned upside down.

For example with neurons:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1 /Wall.html

and ova:

http://pharyngula.org/comments/484_0_1_0_C/

Future Incomprehensive

[danila]

It's interesting how the media works. Here we have the head of futurology unit of British Telecom. He isn't some random guy and he clearly did some studies about the future. He makes a speech (was it at Futurex), where he, no doubt speaks at length about the future, about likely developments, about his work, about BT plans, etc. But the media takes two soundbites and rehashes them endlessly, without analisys or as much as a second thought. As a result, we get a bunch (hundreds of, to be more precise) of identical articles titled "Download your brain by 2050" and the text centering around "The other prediction was talking yoghurt by 2020".

This is pathetic. The average reader/viewer/listner has no chance to form a coherent picture of the future, or even our current ideas of it. But sadly, this is typical for news coverage of all topics. And it's actually one of the problems - that we treat such items as "news", where you get a notable person speak, then a few hundreds of nearly identical articles appear, then silence. In the best case the meme of "Playstation 5 will be as powerful as a human brain" will spread and settle in the brains of the public.

Instead of starting a decades-long discussion of all the implications of the future changes, instead of purposefully changing our societies to adapt to the scientific and technological advances, instead of basing our research budgets on the goal of achieving the most desirable of all possible futures, we just live as if nothing important is happening. This is beyond sad.

I don't know how you can change that, may be it's impossible in the world of corrupt democracies and commercialised mass-media, but if you personally want to understand where we are heading, check out the links in the end of this post.

Ian Pearsen is late. I remember the idiotic 21st century forecast that BT produced five years ago. Only now he starts to get things that better thinkers realised a decade ago. For some people the idea of mind uploading is not new and they already managed to present a much more comprehensive picture of the future.

Here are some of the resources outlining it:

• World Transhumanism Association
• Singularity Institute
• KurzweilAI.net
• Extropy Institute
• Transtopia
• Better Humans

• Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
• Transhumanism at del.icio.us