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

Posted by samzenpus on from the brand-new-body dept.

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."

16 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. I agree with Lewis Black by AbsoluteXyro · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      Hypothetically, if we were implementing immortality-by-simulation, couldn't we resort to Instance dungeons? No reason why all the avatars have to coexist in one self-consistent reality, when we could instead fork the annoying ones off into an eternal 'The Good Old Days' where they can live out their crabbed fantasies in fuzzy black and white forever...

      (Of course, if somebody's reality is dependent on simulation, and the requirement of self-consistency across all the simulants is dropped, you could could also theoretically cut the priority of everyone within a given instance, and run the in-sim passage of time at less than real time. As long as they don't have access to external timebases, they shouldn't even be able to tell.

    2. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What would that mean and is there any reason why both goals are mutually exclusive? Certainly not every great rocket scientist would be great at psychology or ethics. The good thing about living forever is that you have a lot more time to fix the problems.

      I just hate this "we aren't worthy" atitude. We sure haven't done everything right. Far from. But life has only become more peaceful and in general a lot has improved. Many deaths in the stone age were actually from tribal wars. We no longer solve our problems through violence as often as we used to do. It has however become much more public. We will hopefully continue to improve.

    3. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by TemperedAlchemist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In a somewhat inspirational essay This is Water, David Foster Wallace deconstructs this kind of thinking into what it really is: a limited and narrow worldview where only you are the focus and others are "in your way".

      Humorously, xkcd points out that everyone else tends to think the exact same thing. That they're the brilliant, smart one and everyone else is a stupid and mindless automaton. It can only stem from a complete lack of empathy. Perhaps that driver who is going ten mph below the speed limit has general anxiety disorder and is only trying to get to work to the best of his ability.

      Everyone else is stupid and you're the brilliant one... Except you're not.

      Sir Ken Robinson lays out a pretty convincing reason why. Or I can simply fall back on an old Einstein quote about judging fish climbing trees.

    4. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by stenvar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by stenvar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    7. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by ultranova · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    8. Re:I agree with Lewis Black by dcw3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
  2. Ok, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.

    1. Re:Ok, but... by bondiblueos9 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Sigs are Dangerous to Your Health
    2. Re:Ok, but... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.

      Spending your waning years of weakness, decay, and degradation, plagued by the constant cruel mockery of your ageless immortal doppelganger is just a fun extra feature!

    3. Re:Ok, but... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      FYI, brains don't progressively replace themselves like some organs do. You have almost all the neurons you'll ever have when you're born. There was a story here a few days ago about the discovery of a small region of the hippocampus that does generate new cells, unlike most of the rest of the brain.

      Your post also brings up another interesting thought, a question raised by ancient philosophers. Suppose Jason comes home on the Argo and props it up on blocks to keep for a souvenir. As the years go by, whenever a plank rots he replaces it with a new one. Does it stop being the Argo at some point?

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  3. Re:Copies are not you! by Bremic · · Score: 5, Funny

    More than this, if you copy yourself to a different vessel, your memories get copied. This will include the movies and television you have seen and the music you have listened to.

    Copying of movies, television and music in any format is big bad evil according to the wonderful US legislators who take lots of money from record companies and movie studios - so backing yourself up is a copyright violation.

    This will be important to remember when the uber wealthy (probably the executives of the same record companies and movie studios) back themselves up. Because then we charge them with illegal copyright violations and get them to vacate their new bodies. Of course by then they will give each other free distribution rights and use it as a hammer to stop the "irrelevant plebs" from ever being able to save themselves.

  4. Re:Hmmm... by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's pretty derp for Slashdot.

    FTFY.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  5. Re:Copies are not you! by dinfinity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.