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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."

8 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 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

  2. 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
  3. 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!

  4. 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.