The Answer to Immortality: Avatars?

Want to live forever? You might get your chance in a few years/decades. Earlier this year, Dmitry Itskov announced that he plans to disembody our conscious minds and upload them to a hologram by 2045. So, like an avatar. Matrix anyone?

In other words, what he’s planning to do is to achieve immortality by removing the human mind from the physical restraints of our bodies. Apparently, he’s offering up this service to the world’s richest people.

“Many of you who have accumulated great wealth by making success of your businesses are supporting science, the arts and charities. 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 wrote in the letter. “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.”

To achieve this, Itskov has planned 4 phases of this 2045 Initiative:

Avatar A: By 2015-2020- have a robot of the human body, controlled by the human brain
Avatar B: By 2020-2025- have an avatar in which the human brain can be transplanted into at the end of the person’s life
Avatar C: By 2030-2035- have an avatar with an artificial brain in which human personality is transferred into
Avatar D: By 2040-2045- a holographic avatar

All this sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? I mean, this sounds completely sci-fi. And yet, phase one has already been done. Think about the robotic arm and other mechanical equipment we’re creating for people to control with their brains. DARPA is also already working on something similar via a program called “Avatar”. The Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds.

There are still so many things we have not learned about the brain. Will Itskov or anyone else for that matter be able to do all this one day? Maybe, but probably not for awhile yet. And if he is successful, not for a price I could afford. If you had the money and the technology was already available, would you sign up for this type of program? Would you put your consciousness into an avatar-like you?