Immortality for the rich: New program will place billionaires’ brains into robot bodies
Source: Dateline Zero
Russian entrepreneur has contacted billionaires to offer them immortality: ‘By uploading your brain into a robotic avatar, I can help you live forever.’
According to Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old Russian media mogul, robots could be humanity’s ticket to immortality.
Itskov, who founded New Media Stars, a Russian company that runs several online news outlets, launched a new venture in 2011 called “Avatar.” Ealier this year, he divulged more details to a group of futurists — including Ray Kurzweil — at a three-day conference, called Global Future 2045, held in Moscow.
His plan sounds simple enough. Construct robots that’ll (within 10 years, he hopes) actually store a human’s mind and keep that consciousness working. Forever.
“This project is leading down the road to immortality,” Itskov says. “A person with a perfect Avatar will be able to remain part of society. People don’t want to die.”
Itskov’s project shouldn’t be confused with the Pentagon’s Avatar project, unveiled earlier this year. The Pentagon’s “Avatar” has soldiers inhabiting the bodies of robots, who’d act as “surrogates” for their human controllers in battle. Obviously, Itskov is looking to robots as a more permanent shell for humans.
Since then, according to Katie Drummond in an article at Forbes, Itskov has seen his immortality program forward.
Since February, Itskov has stayed plenty busy working on his “Avatar” plan, which is described in extensive detail on his website. With a lab of scientists reportedly already working on the program in Russia, Itskov has now branched out to the U.S, with plans to open a San Francisco office this summer and host a futurity conference — called Global Future Congress — in New York later this year. He’s even met with the Dalai Lama to discuss the implications of the “Avatar” plot.
His next step: Itskov has published an open letter to the world’s richest people, urging them to back the initiative — and consider volunteering themselves as potential avatars. “I urge you to take note of the vital importance of funding scientific development in the field of cybernetic immortality and the artificial body,” Itskov writes in the letter, first spotted by PopSci.com. “Such research has the potential to free you, as well as the majority of all people on our planet, from disease, old age and even death.”
Itskov goes on to note that the venture could be a profitable one for business-minded folk, emphasizing the potential for “a new and vibrant industry for immortality.”
In the Global Future 2045 conference, Itskov promised that “the next effort of science will be to create a new body for the human being. It will have a perfect brain-machine interface to allow control and a human brain life support system so the brain can survive outside the body.”
According to the Daily Mail, Itskov believes that his project would first be of interest to the “disabled people and people at the edge of dying.”
“The third phase will be to create an artificial human brain,” he says — a computer environment into which human minds can be uploaded.
Here’s Itskov speaking ealier this year, at the GF2045 conference:
