Does anybody really want to live forever? According to the New York Times, Dmitry Itskov sees this possibility in the future. The future he speaks of is in 2045. Itskov has a project called the 2045 Initiative, which is the year that he hopes his dreams will come true.
So what are these dreams of living for hundreds or thousands of years exactly? Itskov has been known to use the word “immortality” when talking about his 2045 Initiative. From all accounts, the multimillionaire is a soft-spoken and somewhat shy person. His passion flairs when he talks about his project.
The 2045 Initiative, as he envisions it, is the mass production of lifelike, low cost avatars. These creations can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain. Included would be all the particulars of consciousness and personality.
Does this sound familiar? Pick a movie! David Hanson who is the founder of Hanson Robotics is working on Dmitry creating a representation of Itskov’s head which will use 36 motors designed to reproduce his facial expressions as well as his voice.
This head will be shown at Alice Tully Hall, in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center on June 15 and 16. It is the 2045 Global Future Congress. The event will showcase the steps that are currently being taken, tiny and incremental as they are, towards melding humans with machine.
In the past couple of years, miniaturization and wearable technology have come a long way. There are exoskeleton suits to help people with disabilities live a more normal life. These suits could also be used to enhance physical strength. We have seen the bionic eye and several devices that are designed to map out areas and give you a visual representation of what is in front of you, even if you cannot physically see it.
Put these all together and what do you have? OK, probably nothing, for now at least. But you can see how individual pieces are coming together. At the Swarm Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, an interesting project is being conducted.
A researcher, Peter Ledochowitsch described a minimally invasive brain implant. The purpose of this implant is to read intentions from the surface of the brain. The hope is to eventually use it to allow paralyzed people to communicate, control a robotic arm, or a wheelchair.
The experiment is currently being conducted on an anesthetized rat. They are working on a prototype that will be implanted in alert animals. You can see how individual areas are being worked on and how they could conceivably be incorporated into one.
Itskov is quoted as saying “We need to show that we’re actually here to save lives. To help the disabled, to cure diseases, to create technology that will allow us in the future to answer some existential questions. Like what is the brain, what is life, what is consciousness and, finally, what is the universe?”
He sees his avatars as not just something that would end world hunger, since a machine needs maintenance but not food, but also as something that would usher in a more peaceful and spiritual age.
To this point, he has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million. This shows how serious he is about the 2045 Initiative. He is prepared to invest more to make his avatars a reality. For those who are curious, the first known use of the word “avatar” comes from Sanskrit. It was used to refer to the human form that a Hindu deity took.
My question is whether this would be a cyborg or an android? Not the OS, but the robot kind. Since a cyborg is a cybernetic organism with both organic and cybernetic parts, an android is a synthetic organism designed to look and act like a human and an avatar is an appearance or manifestation, do we need a new word for what comes from the 2045 Initiative?
