Many companies are focused on making life easy through state-of-the-art devices and technology, but a Russian billionaire wants something more for humanity. Dmitry Itskov wants to live forever by uploading a human brain and people's consciousness into robots.
The Internet billionaire wants to make his goal tangible in the next three decades. The 35-year-old businessman said he left the business world to devote himself to finding ways to help humanity.
"I am going to make sure that we can all live forever," Dmitry Itskov said.
"I'm 100 percent confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he added.
The 2045 Strategic Social Initiative, founded by Itskov in February 2011, involves the input of leading scientists in the field of robotics, artificial organs, artificial systems and neural interfaces in Russia. It aims to develop a technology that will allow the transfer of an individual's personality to a more advanced non-biological body that can live for years and toward immortality.
They will recruit experts and researchers in the field of anthropomorphic robotics through building an international research center. With the help of scientists, death may soon be just a thing of the past.
"The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies," the 2045 Initiative site said.
Itskov is funding the project that can unlock the secrets of the human brain and free the body from biological limitations such as illness and disabilities.
"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," Itskov said. At the moment, death will eventually come to everyone because the body is designed to live for just a couple of decades. The cells in the body lose the ability to repair themselves. This leads to a lot of diseases including cardiovascular diseases and other age-related conditions.
In the initiative's 2015 to 2020 future prospects, they plan to create inexpensive android "avatars" which are controlled by a brain computer. This will enable people to travel in extreme situations, perform rescue operations and work in dangerous environments. This technology can be used by people suffering from disabilities, helping them recover from loss of senses.
His journey toward immortality will be featured in BBC's Horizon documentary, The Immortalist. Though his goal is a bit ambitious, there are other companies who share the same vision. Humai, an Australian startup, wants humans to live forever too.
