Dmitry Itskov and his avatar.
The organization that Dmitry Itskov founded in 2011 is hosting its second Global Futures 2045 International Congress, this June 15 and 16 at New York City’s Lincoln Center (a venue normally noted for its music, dance, and theater performances).
The lineup of speakers includes some of the best minds in the fields of consciousness, neurological modeling, and anthropomorphic robots.
Like the Singularity propounded by one of the speakers, Ray Kurzweil, the 2045 Initiative is predicated on the idea that it will, relatively soon, be possible to transfer human consciousness into artificial constructs that could theoretically last as long as that consciousness desires.
Telepresence—the technologies for transferring one’s sense of physical presence through cameras, microphones, and haptic feedback devices—has proven itself extremely useful in robotics, such as in robotic surgery.
The question remains: will people eventually prefer to live in their robotic avatars fulltime, as Itskov believes? And is that a good idea?
Read more about Itskov, the 2045 Initiative, and the upcoming conference in my story, The Russian Who Would Build Your Avatar, for Popular Mechanics.
Catching consciousness in an \avatar!\ Seems this would take more than brain implants with thoughts controlling movement. The method appears to require meticulously entering an element to correspond to an activity. Each human being is solitary collective endlessly interwoven links. Where one begins and the other ends is indeterminate. Our computeresque avatar needs each link of every possible movement set one at a painstaking time. James Cameron ordered his legions of computer filmmaking minions to work at forty eight frames per second. The 2045 garage guy will need to overcome the glaring gap Cameron opened with his main character Jake. They could not get him walking as a human, yet his entire consciousness stepped right into the ten foot tall bio-avatar! Keep working!
There’s definitely an element of faith to this stuff. To me, the idea that we can transfer our consciousness (whatever that is) into a machine is the stuff of religion. We can’t yet show that it can be done, only have faith that it can. It seems to me that Itskov and those who believe in the coming Singularity are believers in a techno afterlife.