Immortality Technologist/Evangelizer ; Dmitry Itskov Interview Transcript

>by dmitry itskov

I interviewed Dmitry Itskov on April 4, 2013, to discuss the conference he has organized with the goal of creating technology that will allow people to become immortal. I was VERY impressed by the calibre of the conference speakers. 

My guest tonight is Dmitry Itskov.  He is the Founder and organizer of Global Future 2045. Dmitry co-founded a successful internet business in 1999 and then evolved it into a diversified online media company, New Media Stars. And now this conference is really why I have Dmitry on this show. This conference's goal is to create receptacles to put our human consciousness into so that people can live forever.

Did I get that right?

D. Yeah, absolutely.

So, I'm not sure how I happened upon your conference, but you've put an incredible array of people together that - I'm very excited to be attending the conference.  And the goal you have is just incredible.  Now, I understand that you call it Global Future 2045 because you believe that by 2045 it's possible to do this.

Global Future 2045  Congress -   June 15-16, Lincoln Center, New York, NY (I'll be there! rk)

D. I even believe that we could do it earlier and it really depends on our effort, passion and our desire to accomplish that.  If you notice some of the milestones of the project, they refer to the earlier days and I hope that as it says in the plan, we will be able to see our first avatar which will be a human-like robot operated by telepresence in just two or three years.

Now, you've put together and assembled a team for this conference.  Is this team working in any kind of a way to make this happen?  Are they speakers or are they a coordinated Manhattan project aiming at creating a way for people to move their consciousness and self into something that can be easily repaired and replaced, unlike the human body?

D. You know, when I created the list of speakers, I tried to identify the best specialists in the world who were known to somehow be involved in the process similar to which I want to realize. Ed Boyden is known for his optogenetics research and for the new generation of the (BCI) Brain Computer Interface technology.  Dr. Theodore Berger was successful in creating the artificial hippocampus, but he obviously has this plan on how to develop the brain prosthesis for humans. David Hansen's dream is to develop the robot which could embody the soul in the future

Now, I don't know every one of these speakers, but among the speakers - the ones that I do recognize, they're geniuses -- they're incredibly brilliant people, so it's a very exciting conference.

D. That's true.

Let's take a step back.  How did you get to this place?  And I've kind of put it in my words what you're trying to do.  Can you put in your own words what you hope to accomplish by this conference and by your longer term goals?

D. Basically, if you're asking me about what brought me to the project -- to the idea -- I would say it was kind of an evolution of my personal world view. You know, I had been successful in business, but I understood that I wasn't happy with just getting and spending money. It was just an epiphany when I realized that I wanted just to be of service to humanity -- to create a project which will be really useful that could probably change the world.  And I can further explain why I want it to be changed. I have always been in the technology business. I've always been connected to technology and I've been interested in life extension technology, but finally it was my personal spiritual quest and the desire to understand the real meaning of life and my place in this universe and that led me to the spiritual side of the project and I started meeting spiritual masters and talking to them - trying to ask them questions about the soul, about the nature of a human being.  And from those meetings came the idea to mix science and technology and to establish a kind of public project which could raise all those questions which are so important to humanity now-a-days; the period when we are facing these numerous crises. In parallel with talking to spiritual masters, I started my consultations with scientists and that was how we created the broad map, which you can find on our website -- the broad map of the Avatar Project.

So, the global goal is to create and realize a new strategy for the development of humanity which could meet global civilization changes and finally lead us to the kind of new world which will be based on five main principles, as I say.  Those principles are high spiritually, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.  And the core of the idea is basically the assumption that now we need two revolutions. Two revolutions which actually plays in two parts:  the first one is a spiritual one that could change the world view of people and the values which could set new goals and second is a technological revolution which could significantly accelerate the progress of the technology which would unite people and probably establish a new mega-project which could make the scientists in the future new super stars in our society. 

The technological project which drives the whole idea is called Avatar, as you probably already know, and it consists of four different stages. First is Avatar A, which is human-like robots controlled through a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and the essence of the idea is to create it very similar to human beings and to use tele-presence technology which can transfer the information from all of our five senses to the robot and back.  With the present technology you can control the robot and you could actually start living in the robot and that technology will help disabled people. Basically, if you finally get such a double -- such an avatar -- and you start using it and if you feel you that are quite good in it and it represents you well, you can think of the second part of the project which is creation of the system which will maintain the vital functions of the brain and which will connect the biological brain of the human being with such an Avatar.  So this Avatar A will work as an artificial body for the Avatar B and I assume that if people have a choice whether to continue living or whether to die, and if their biological bodies are exhausted or if they suffer from some kind of fatal disease, then taking into consideration the fact that have probably by that moment they have used the Avatar A as the copy of their body -- the extension of their body --- I think that having that choice, whether to live or to die, they will choose living in the new artificial body if that body allows them to continue feeling like a human being.

Let me kind of recap what you just said.  What you said is that you're looking to create a kind of a robotic support system that a person could basically go around the world with and that their consciousness would see the world through.  That's part 1.  And then Part 2 is to be able to enable the brain or whatever it is that makes us, be supported in some kind of a technology that can then be eventually be integrated with the first one.  It sounds to me like -- you know, right now we have drones, that are operated remotely and they have cameras and they can see and they have other detection devices -- it's almost like you're talking about some kind of a device -- not like a drone that flies, but that just gets around that lets people see remotely.  Is that correct?

D. Yeah, it is correct.