The Madness of Dmitry Itskov
February 29th, 2012Hopefully, consciousness is nonlocal and these lunatics have no chance of success. Otherwise… Well, let’s just say that I don’t want to find out what the Cheney daemon has in mind for me, when it emerges from my virtual bedroom closet, wearing a bozo wig and clown suit.
What could possibly go wrong?
Along these lines, Source Code is somewhat interesting.
Via: Wired:
The Pentagon’s new Avatar project, unveiled by Danger Room a few weeks back, sounds freaky enough: Soldiers practically inhabiting the bodies of robots, who’d act as “surrogates” for their human overlords in battle.
But according to Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old Russian media mogul, the U.S. military’s Avatar initiative doesn’t go nearly far enough. He’s got a massive, sci-fi-esque venture of his own that he hopes will put the Pentagon’s project to shame. Itskov’s plan: Construct robots that’ll (within 10 years, he hopes) actually store a human’s mind and keep that consciousness working. Forever.
“This project is leading down the road to immortality,” Itskov, who founded New Media Stars, a Russian company that runs several online news outlets, tells Danger Room. “A person with a perfect Avatar will be able to remain part of society. People don’t want to die.”
Itskov’s project, also called “Avatar,” actually precedes the Pentagon’s. He launched the initiative a year ago, but recently divulged more details to a group of futurists — including Ray Kurzweil — at a three-day conference, called Global Future 2045, held in Moscow.
Until now, most of the work on Itskov’s Avatar has taken place in Russia, where he claims to have hired 30 researchers — all of them paid out of his own deep pockets. Now, Itskov plans to take the mission global. “I want to collaborate with scientists from around the world,” he says. “This is a new strategy for the future; for humanity.”
First, I smell “investor scam”. If so, more power to them. Whatever.
Second, why wouldn’t these machines be ‘cloud based’ too. Talk about consciousness being non-local. The consciousness would just be an app hanging in the cloud. Download to any machine as necessary. No need for any ‘personal’ machine at all. ‘Personal’ privacy, thoughts, indeed, any real identity at all would cease to exist. You would just be a subroutine in the Borg Cloud. That any ‘moran’ would be the least bit intrigued in any positive sense by this, is beyond me. No it ain’t. Born and raised on teevee explains everything.
In a very real sense, this is just a sci-fi metaphor for the hive mind mediated/medicated mentality that already exists amonst most quasi-conscious meatbots.
But as a literal eventuality, I don’t see this ever happening. They still don’t even know what consciousness really is, and the essense of conciousness may never be understood by the linear rational mind of man. How do they propose to suck it into a bottle ? As I said, I smell matchstick men burning.
I can save that fool a lot of money. Until someone figures out some basic neurological hurdles like reconnecting severed spinal columns within the neck, There is no way to keep the brain fed with blood and oxygen. I suggest he waste his money on media rather than reanimating criminals who have been hanged. Those 100 scientists are taking him for a very expensive ride.
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=447&cpage=1#comment-3656
I agree on the silicon brain, largely because the brain is more than calculation or circuitry, consciousness merely rests on the mechanism of the brain.
Lorenzo’s current post, with other such comments as linked with it above, touches on this topic, and the decidedly non-local aspects of consciousness. not to mention politics.
Itskov’s idea sounds remarkably like the “Old Ones” from Frederick Pohl’s Heechee novels. The Old Ones were formerly living consciousnesses that had been transplanted into a computer. They had no physical ability like a robot had, but did advise on important matters, drawing on their wealth of former life experiences.