by Terrence Aym

Created on: December 02, 2010

According to Ian Pearson, a British futurist, death will be a thing of the past by 2050.

Pearson is one of many futurists, cybernetic experts and artificial intelligence researchers whose thoughts are converging on the same basic idea: Why not upload everything that's in the brain—everything that makes a person who they are—into a computer and then download it again into a new body? Doing such a thing would make the individual theoretically immortal.

For such a thing to work, more advancements will be needed in the hardware and the software, and better interfaces will have to be developed between the human brain and the silicon brain.

Yet how to get there from here is not insurmountable.

Can brain uploading be achieved within 40 years?

Sooner, say some experts. What's needed are super fast computers with huge memory capacity. They see that happening before 2020 and that's just 10 years away. If there are unexpected breakthroughs with quantum computers the time line will be shortened considerably.

Some are not so ambitious; they're satisfied with the idea of virtual immortality. In that scenario everything that's an individual is uploaded into a digital avatar and survives 24/7 within a permanent, theoretically eternal, Internet.

Science fiction? No. An organization called The Digital Immortality Institute (DII) is researching the possibility of doing just that. DII has determined the three things necessary to achieve digital immortality are: guaranteed Internet access; insure the identity integrity of the avatars for each individual user; and finally, make sure the personality, memory, everything that makes up the person as a unique individual, has been uploaded into the digital facsimile before the actual person dies.

Yet virtual reality holds little interest for Pearson. He wants the real thing, and so does scientist Anders Sandberg. A member of the new transhuman movement (beyond human), Sandberg believes uploading minds and downloading them again into new bodies is a technology that's imminent. He believes it will happen because of Mankind's desire to overcome aging and death, as well as solving the problems associated with overpopulation.

Another transhumanist, AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky is convinced the technology must be developed quickly before a group or government with evil intentions does it first. He sees artificial intelligence as the key to unlock the immortality door. But it must be done in the right way for if it's not, dire consequences

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