Julian Assange is well-known as a computer programmer and the founder of WIKILEAKS. This time he makes the news with is assertion that he has the intel to prove that humans would soon be able to live forever by digitizing our brains.
Julian Assange said this while speaking in London at the Meltdown Festival. He claimed that sources from Silicon Valley, which is generally seen as the tech center of the world, have informed him that they are about to conclude work on creating very powerful AI. When completed, he claims that people would be able to upload their brains into machines that would give them immortality.
He spoke from the Ecuadorian embassy via video link saying asserting that his Silicon Valley sources have confirmed that soon humans would be able to digitalize theur braisn by uploading them into a powerful AIM computer. This will enable humans to continue to live in simulation long after their body may have died.
He added that he believes that one of the downside of this technology would be a drop in productivity. He argues that if people can live forever, they would end up being lazy, since there is immortality means there would be no need for urgency. It describes it “like a religion for atheists.”
If people are able to live in simulation, he believes it would be possible and beneficial to program the simulation to “have endless drug and sex orgy parties.” He compared with the religious belief of nirvana after death.
Believe it or not, Julian Assange is not the first person known to make such claims. Dmitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire had said that he believed that humans would have the capacity to upload their brains to a computer and thus live forever within the next 30 years. He is a strong believer of this possibility that he created a 2045 Initiative, an organization of scientists working to make immortality a reality.
The organization is working to create a program that can map the human brain and make it possible to upload to a computer. Once the brain can be uploaded into a computer, it can then be placed inside a robot or allowed to exist as a hologram. My Dmitry Itskoy once commented in a BBC documentary that he was going to make it possible for humans to live forever within the next 30 years.