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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.
Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.
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
Tom Riker
...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?
Apparently they don't need to get a court order anymore. (Some people are saying that *that* is the real scandal.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
On the contrary, you believe in the illusion of continuity. Has quantum physics taught you nothing? If the universe was stable, your conjecture would hold. As the existence of energy is provably not stable nor absolute, you've been conned into universality. Don't get me wrong, we're definitely stardust. But consciousness is a temporary unstable state. Your consciousness doesn't continue to exist after you die - only the constituent parts of it do. What you're suggesting is akin to "your unspoken dreams exist forever because the energy that comprised them does." Not only does your energy not exist forever, but entropy means your dreams are gone when you are.
On the other hand, if you actually believe in a coherent universal consciousness, then you're just batshit crazy instead.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
There are no fundamental laws that say it cannot be done. It's just an engineering problem. Engineering problems can be solved with a combination of time and gigantic piles of money.
Especially with today's smartphone battery life.
Curiously yours, crip.
That's pretty derp for Slashdot.
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Onsciousnesscay isway alreadyway immortalway. Eway areway ethay universeway itselfway, elievingbay otherwiseway isway elievingbay inway ethay illusionway ofway eparatenesssay.
It's a real shame that the two most common representations of cyborgs in popular culture (The Borg and Cybermen) are really shitty cyborgs, with all the downsides of biological and electromechanical components combined (stuck in a humanoid form, lurching about slowly, with rigid 'logical' thinking. They're basically zombies in tinfoil) without any of the upsides. The third most popular is the 6 Million Dollar Man who is somewhat better, but is still stuck in the idea of prosthetic bodies trying to ape the human body. When was the last time you saw, outside of manga/anime or more obscure science fiction novels, somebody putting their brain in a jar, and putting that jar in a non-humanoid body?
Despite Dan Dennett handwaving the whole matter and declaring that consciousness in an illusion (but fails to define who or what is falling for that illusion), nobody has the faintest clue what consciousness is, which makes it more than an engineering problem.
There's nothing more entertaining than a random collection of chemicals that, according to itself, crawled out of the muck 5 minutes ago in cosmic terms and is now going to lecture the universe on how things are.
You don't know dick. In cosmic terms, the human race is a toddler that has just now learned the lights go on when the switch is up, and off when the switch is down. Our "engineers" are the toddler that flips the light on and off repeatedly while making a noise like "huhuHUHUHuHuHuHUUhuUHUHUhuuH"
Any scientific pronouncements uttered by humanity are chuckled at by the cosmos and the various advanced beings in it the same way adults chuckle at a toddler who marches around the house wearing a pasta strainer on their head.
The human race can't even feed itself and wipe its own ass yet. Get the fuck over yourself.
It's not the brain alone though. It's the sum of you. There is a somatic context. Recreating that somatic context with an artificial construct may be possible but we have no real understanding of what that does to self awareness.
I'm not aware of any broad psychological studies on people before and after accidents where large parts of their body has been lost or replaced. Are those people the same or radically different? Are the known psychological changes a result of the trauma, loss of functionality in the eyes of those around them or a result of physiological impacts on brain chemistry from loss of the body parts in question.
The brain is more than the conscious frontal lobes also. What would the impact be to have no autonomous signals coming from the heart, lungs, etc. We haven't even considered simulating the hind brain or the mid brain which both control our body, receive all sensory input and translate it to signals we are consciously aware of.
It's not just the brain "doing its thing" unless by that you mean, monitoring and aggregating/filtering all stimulation from the body into self awareness. It needs a body to do that. Anything less is likely to cause the brain to shutdown into a coma. So you'd need to recreate that brain body system to have self awareness.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.