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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."
Death is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only way we get rid of old assholes.
Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.
Cybermen. Thats all I am saying...
Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.
Consciousness is already immortal. We are the universe itself, believing otherwise is believing in the illusion of separateness.
How long before existing ransomware is adapted to these bold robotic avatars, and the infected get the exciting opportunity to not have the sensation of full-body chemical burns replayed on loop in exchange for a modest and reasonable payment by Western Union?
ISTM that Star Trek transporters are a type of 3D scanner/printer. But somehow they have to get your hundred-trillion synapses to connect the right cells, and at the right connection strength. Possibly even the current neural firing patterns, since when you get 'printed' you immediately have all your facilities and remember what you were up to when you got into the transporter.
I don't think that's ever going to be possible. But if it was, would the end result still be you, or just an artificial twin?
If transporter technology was feasible, they should be able to keep the original and print the copy using the contents of the refrigerator. I suppose that, like forking a process, it wouldn't be easy for the participants to tell who is the original and who is the copy, but I wouldn't expect them to share a common consciousness.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...and not one question about how long it would take the NSA to get a court order allowing them to copy your memories from whatever system you have them coppied to?
You never know...
Tom Riker
Who'd want to live forever on a someone's smart phone?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.
the idea is a pretty usual one though.
it's the execution that's the hard part - with fundamental problems we can't touch yet.
Someone just found a billionaire willing to part with millions for nothing in return.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's been talked about since before you were born.
I'm glad they are working on it, though you might be surprised why I feel that way.
Even so, if they ever succeed, I'd bet it won't be until long after we and even our great grandchildren are long dead.
When it comes from the United States, it's fringe. When it comes from Russia, it's news. Because Russia itself is considered fringe in the West. Misplaced perceptions account for the fact that the same thing could be news, or not news, depending on its origin.
Meanwhile, transhumanist magazines like hplusmagazine.com make no distinction between the American and Russian contributors. The transhumanist community is genuinely international, and that's a positive fact if you consider it.
...and not one question about how long it would take the NSA to get a court order allowing them to copy your memories from whatever system you have them coppied to?
Interestingly enough, that might not be as big of issue as it at first appears.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem has some interesting implications when applied to brains. It could be impossible to derive the more interesting properties of your brain from simply looking at its data. Gödel showed that such properties hold for mathematics, which likely also apply to brains.
quote from http://www.philosophybro.com/2012/05/godels-incompleteness-theorems-and-you.html :
Looked at this way, Gödel's proof suggests – though by no means does it prove! – that there could be some high-level way of viewing the mind/brain, involving concepts which do not appear on lower levels, and that this level might have explanatory power that does not exist – not even in principle – on lower levels. It would mean that some facts could be explained on the high level quite easily, but not on lower levels at all. No matter how long and cumbersome a low-level statement were made, it would not explain the phenomena in question. It is analogous to the fact that, if you make derivation after derivation in Peano arithmetic, no matter how long and cumbersome you make them, you will never come up with one for G – despite the fact that on a higher level, you can see that the Gödel sentence is true. What might such high-level concepts be? It has been proposed for eons, by various holistically or "soulistically" inclined scientists and humanists that consciousness is a phenomenon that escapes explanation in terms of brain components; so here is a candidate at least. There is also the ever-puzzling notion of free will. So perhaps these qualities could be "emergent" in the sense of requiring explanations which cannot be furnished by the physiology alone.
bullshit..? I'm not saying it's never going to happen but not by 2045, we don't even understand consciousness yet.
The goal: to extend human lives by hundreds or thousands of years, if not indefinitely
Yes, if you don't know how long lives will be extended, it will be indefinite. That's what indefinite means.
If you were to really make a 100% perfect copy of a yourself, which one would be you? Each copy would, certainly initially, feel and think exactly the same, and would object to being destroyed. This, I think is a strong argument against the idea that one can truly "transfer" a person in this way.
echo "Goodbye cruel world!"; rm -rf /
even if you managed to copy my brain and put it into a new body the original is still dead.
Seems exciting, but knowing a little bit about hardware, and even more about software, I think the milestones are a bit ambitious.
Don't get me wrong, it is a really neat idea and covered to various degrees in many sci-fi books and movies. Geeks, rejoice!
But transplanting a human brain by 2020-2025? And a full upload of a human brain including personality by 2030-2035?
What I think is more likely to happen first, and which opens up an enormous Pandora's box of medical/moral/ethical issues, is transplanting a live human brain into a younger or more capable human body. Add to that "body harvesting", and what happens when someone is transplanted into the body of the opposite sex! Obviously, there is a lot of potential for future jobs researching how all of this will be accomplished. If it happens within our lifetime, then....nearly everything will happen within our lifetime. (For those who can afford to have it done.)
Of course to replicate the exact quantum states you have to overcome the uncertainty principle, which in Star Trek involved the Heisenberg Compensator. (Which is always being overlooked in favour of the inertial dampener by people compiling "most transparently token solution to a physics problem" lists.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I wonder if Dmitry Itskov has read Diaspora too..
...can I be the only one who immediately thought of this and got very confused?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
...I'm only half way through Permutation City!
By the same logic, every disease on Earth can be seen as a feature, good luck convincing people to use it.
I think it is good that someone comes up with an idea that seems so outrageous and so far fetched that it is really challenging to aim for.
We need another "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
When you're old enough, you will have had enough of this place.
You get this form these guys. Ellison is like this also. IMHO it's an extension of their narcissism that they think this is a meaningful endeavor which should take priority over other, say, humanitarian concerns.
We're a million miles away from understanding how the brain works for any given function the brain performs. Some researchers think that the brain may be (about, practically )it's own simplest model, that is, to create an artificial brain, virtually every detail of the real brain would have to be not just modeled, but re-created right down to the exact nature of it's physical substrate.
For instance, consider (the conscious experience of ) being able to see as soon as normal level lights are turned on, but having to adjust your eyes to the dark. This comes down to a great fact involving the specific properties of the specific chemicals used by the rods in your eyes (rhodopsin ) and nothing else.
Yet, that shared experience is part of what it's *like* to be human. In some small part to understand the human experience and have it make sense to you and to be motivated under some circumstances the same way humans are, you have to be such a creature possessed of such a limitation.
Now if this seems trivial and leave-outable in any "brain transfer" process, know that this is an example used mostly to motivate this more encompassing fact - *every other human phenomena* is also arbitrarily underwritten by some specific set of chemicals and therefore experienced by us in some specific way.
So for instance, it's like something specific to fall in love and absent any of the underlying contingencies which define that phenomena, you're not feeling it, behaving as though you feel it, , making the same decisions as one who feels it, placing the same relative values on outcomes and tradeoffs and conflicts and risk and *insert everything Shakespeare ever wrote here* as one who feels it in the human way because they have a human brains and body in this particular world. .
There's a reason Romeo loved Juliet, and in just way he did and would not make due with, say, a picture or a poem instead. In fact, every detail of experience of love, every proclivity to act a certain way and not some other is mediated by the arbitrary - from the "love system's" POV - and particular properties of the material systems which subtend it.
This is not a reference to just the chemical basis of love but also of the evolutionary reason for love, which goes to the particular environmental contingencies which pressured life to evolve the mechanisms it did and not some others and which play out in sometimes surprising ways when people fall in love.
What we are is our natural "instincts" and reactions to events and each other, everything involving our goals and values and morality, unfortunate aberrant behaviors and even absence thereof (virtually no one kidnaps people and forces them to eat food until they die.. they kidnap people and rape them) .
We are not these things because they are expressions of our unfettered free will and self interest but rather because of our specific chemical, morphological, and evolutionary histories which have intersected and are intersecting in a meaningful and determining way with the unique, "one time, one way" story we call history . And history itself is a story which is just the way it is because of accidents which could have turned out differently but nevertheless now exert, through the resulting culture, a very strong influence on what makes you human.
The fantasy that you can abstract all this away , or take its end product, "you" and then have done with it and carry on going forward , go on being human (or even *transhuman* which is like human, only better !!) is adolescent nonsense of the highest caliber.
Any "mind" which is insensible to, unguided by, unconstrained by these things is not a human mind at all. It's not that it will be superior to humans, craftier, say or wiser .. more godlike, it's that
That's not necessarily "religious thinking". You're describing "mind-brain identity theory". I happen to believe that too, but only in the sense that you don't have a "soul" which leaves your body upon death. However, aren't "you" just a software program that has been installed on some fancy biological hardware? If there is replacement hardware available, I'm not ready to dismiss the idea of a "download".
It wouldn't be hard... You'd just have to program it to say "What?" and "Where is the the tea?"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Suppose we'd have the chance to upload ourselves into an AI. Let's say, a reasonably powered computer capable of emulating a large and well structured human brain, including backups, spare hardware, etc. Would you do it? Replace your human body and brain for an AI construct?
I'm not quite sure I would. I think it's best asked the other way: If you were an AI in a mechanical body with an external computer for a brain, would you trade in all that for the experience of being human? Breathing, living, being excited, ultimate fear of death, ultimate joy of love, etc.
I imagine it could sound intriguing to an AI.
Maybe we aren't to bad of as humans as we are after all.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Good news everyone: Futurama has been doing exactly this, for many years. So if this Russian guy tries to patent it, Matt Groenig can claim prior art.
However, aren't "you" just a software program that has been installed on some fancy biological hardware?
No, that's very outdated. Computationalism has been dead for a while now.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Robert Sawyer has a few books that cover this topic. Sawyer has a great way of showing how technological advances might impact today's (western) society. He seems like writing about immortality as he has several books on the topic. "Mindscan" is about a man who undergoes a somewhat common process to create of an android replica, and how both the replica and the human live on after the process (the human is required by contract to permanently retire to a colony on the moon). The book "Rollback" is about a technology that makes you young again. This one is probably the most realistic as the technology is only for the extremely wealthy, at first. Over time as efficiencies advance, the technology becomes more affordable, as we would likely see if Itskov is ever successful. Regardless of the scenario, I suspect most of us alive today won't live long enough for this process to become affordable.
Really, not s single Battlestar Galatica, Cylon or Caprica quote? And if that's too low brow for you how about Farscape? If you make a copy, but then loose track of who is the original and who is the copy, is it really you are just an identical twin? I've always wondered how many identical twins must get switched at some point in their lives while they're still infants. Anybody who has raised even 1 kid thru the sleep deprived years of infancy knows its hard to remember even that 1 childs name. I'm sure today there are bands and things done in the hospital to keep them identifed but what about 100 or 1,000 years ago?
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs36/i/2008/252/b/5/Cybermen___upgrade_now_by_tibots.jpg
He needs to put the crack pipe down and back away slowly. We can't even replace a knee or hip joint artificially and get a 100% replacement and those are just mechanical devices. Yes, they help people but they are still not going to be 'good as new' and he think the brain/conciousness/soul can be replaced in 2045. Again put the crack pipe down.
Downloading the browsing history of a person is not the same as downloading the personal history of a person.
I'm sure my digital android clone will be very happy with this. Meanwhile squidgy, slowing decaying meat-me will be sitting in a rest home wishing he'd been able to evolve into an energy being faster. Sorry, but this is the same problem that exists with teleportation in any of its proposed forms. Destructive brain downloading processes or atomizing my... stuff to re-assemble out of different atoms at another point aren't really helping me that much! We need to go full-on Cyberman. That's the only compromise that'll work.
In Soviet Russia computer download YOU!
Kiln People
Damn good read, BTW.
"a Russian tycoon and former media mogula venture that seeks to replace flesh-and-blood bodies with robotic avatars, each one uploaded with the contents of a human brain"
But will it be really you, or a highly sophisticated simulacrum, a rehash of transhumanist, yet another quest for immortality going back to Gilgamesh.
--
Arthur Dent: I'm sorry, did you just say you needed my brain?
Fook: Yes, to complete the program.
Arthur Dent: Well, you can't have it, I'm using it!
AccountKiller
And then our new robot friends will realize quickly that they are living gods and enslave us all. Great plan.
Excerpt:
The "Professor Jameson" series by Neil R. Jones (early 1930s) featured human and alien minds preserved in robot bodies. Reprinted in five Ace paperbacks in the late 1960s: The Planet of the Double Sun, The Sunless World, Space War, Twin Worlds and Doomsday on Ajiat
--- end excerpt ---
On a more serious note, yeah, right, once you can demonstrate the technology to literally allow one to localize their consciousness outside of their body, in a computer, then I'll take this for more than blue-sky and/or great little money-maker he's got going there.
mark
The little girl becomes YOU!
Or smart enough to steal it.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Am I the only one who immediately thinks of all the heads in jars from Futurama? Essentially that's what this is, in a virtualized form. Just like the disembodied heads, these virtual people would be recognized as being "dead" in a sense but yet still alive in a sense... It would be interesting to note that some time after this becomes possible, the virtual brains would actually start being faster than the real originals. It could become commonplace for humans to have a second life that was better than the first, at least intellectually.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
n/t
you had me at #!
...1970's that entailed the removing of human brains, or maybe just their consciousness, and transplanting it to a spacecraft. Could be an interesting way to spend eternity.