Dmitry Itskov Wants To Help You Live Forever Via an Android Avatar

trendspotter writes in with the latest news about the 2045 Project. "If Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov has his way, the human lifespan will soon no longer depend on the limitations of the human body. Itskov, a Russian tycoon and former media mogul, is the founder of the 2045 Project — a venture that seeks to replace flesh-and-blood bodies with robotic avatars, each one uploaded with the contents of a human brain. The goal: to extend human lives by hundreds or thousands of years, if not indefinitely."

Comments

I agree with Lewis Black

[AbsoluteXyro]

Death is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only way we get rid of old assholes.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[Intrepid imaginaut]

According to who? Will you be the judge of this worthiness? Have you figured out objective good and bad then? Marvellous.

I'm really growing weary of smug misanthropic assholes who quite comfortably apply negative attributes to billions of unique individuals to either excuse their own shortcomings or justify a vague sense of superiority. You know who's "worthy" to explore the universe and live forever? People who explore the universe and live forever.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[stenvar]

what fairytale are you living in? humanity is just as bad as it always has been.

What fairytale are you living in? Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.

developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently

What you call "the seven sins" has important biological and social functions. And competition and self-interest are as important as cooperation for progress. The kind of people you are trying to design would be less efficient than what we currently have.

but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.

Indeed. And you just gave a splendid example of that, because the way you think of human evolution and enhancement is like the old eugenicists.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[stenvar]

couldn't we resort to Instance dungeons [wikipedia.org]? No reason why all the avatars have to coexist in one self-consistent reality

Where do you think you are?

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[ultranova]

Personally, I think that being happy about your own mortality is the most triumphant example of Stockholm Syndrome.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[dcw3]

When you're an old asshole, you'll learn to understand why we all get that way. At 54, there are physically a lot of things I just can't do nearly as well as only a few years ago. Most of us end up in some sort of chronic pain...knee and shoulder for me. We're pissed off that the inevitable end is nearing. And, we have to put up with young assholes, who think they know everything, when they've had very little life experience.

Now, get the fuck off my lawn.

Re:Ok, but...

[bondiblueos9]

Perhaps your consciousness could be transferred into an electronic brain the same way it was transferred from your brain several years ago to your current brain: cell by cell. If you could design an electronic brain that was identical to a biological brain and could replace it piece by piece and continue to function in the same way, then presumably you would never notice the transition.

Re:Copies are not you!

[dinfinity]

This is the only truly insightful comment in this thread.

Everybody is so hung up on the pervasive illusion of a spatiotemporally continuous consciousness that they forget that nothing on any reasonable macro level even exists without a definition.

For some definitions of 'you', you didn't exist a minute ago. For others, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there are multiple instances of 'you'. It just happens that those definitions are not as useful to work with in daily life. It is more effective for an organism to have any instance of consciousness feel responsible for the next one that may arise in it and the ones that previously arose in it. We can't prove that our current consciousness is 'the same' as it was yesterday. We can only define that it is.

Which leads to the only reasonable conclusion: You define whether 'you' die in copy/teleportation thought experiments.