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."

I agree with Lewis Black

[AbsoluteXyro]

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

Copies are not you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[Anonymous Coward]

And also the young ones. Being an asshole has nothing to do with age!

Re:Ok, but...

[bondiblueos9]

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.

Re:Copies are not you!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.

What if you implemented the copy by gradual replacement [wikipedia.org]?

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[sahonen]

Yeah, I think the effort of space colonization and life extension would be more appropriately put toward making the human race *worthy* of exploring the universe and living forever.

Re:22 posts...

[Black Parrot]

...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.)

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[Cryacin]

The matrix is just part of a bigger matrix.

Re:Hmmm...

[black3d]

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.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[Hognoxious]

You verbed stylish!?!?

Re:Copies are not you!

[Dexter Herbivore]

Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.

Define "self".

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

Re:Copies are not you!

[dinfinity]

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.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[stenvar]

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.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[stenvar]

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?

Re:thats the idea..

[lxs]

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.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[ultranova]

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

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[dcw3]

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.

Re:thats the idea..

[The Cat]

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.

Re:I agree with Lewis Black

[AgentSmith]

The matrix is just part of a bigger matrix.

Hey! You are not authorized to know that!

[talks in wrist microphone]
Spawn another agent to take care of this.