And this is the kind of thing that
science fiction has been just fascinated with -- but you are literally taking
the scientists and pulling them together and I give you a lot of credit because
this is a huge, big vision, big goal -- and I don't know if it's possible or
not, but it's not possible if you don't think about it and you don't try. And
what you're doing is bringing together the kind of thinkers who can think about
what it means and even if it doesn't happen, I have to say, that what you're
doing is asking what makes a person a person? What is consciousness, and
looking at it from very pragmatic perspectives and I think that's fabulous. Now,
when I was on that conference call, I asked you a question - and I want to go
into that a little bit again - and that is about, who's going to have access to
this technology -- which it looks like it'll be extremely expensive. And you
replied that you thought the thing to do would be to make an immense amount of
them to bring the cost down. So, I got
to thinking about that and it's already happened with smart phones. There are
billions of people on this planet with smart phones that at one point, if
somebody said that you could have a something that does all the things a smart
phone does, you would say well no -- you have to be a university or the military
and it would cost millions of dollars to have something like that and now you
get it for very little -- so you convinced me.
Do you have economists or business people who are looking at that
dimension of it -- how to take this technology and make it massively
available? Or is there a timeframe that
you expect once the first one is made? I mean, once the first one is made I am
imagining that the first person to go through this is going to take a big risk
but also probably have a lot of money to pay for it.
D: Of course, there's no economist on the team right now because, you know, you cannot count everything until the technology is somehow developed, but it's obvious that if you create something with a mass production, then you can significantly reduce the cost. I think that in the future, which comes to the point when governments will finance those bodies -- finance this kind of life extension -- because I think this will be the most useful social program which ever existed for governments, for non-profit organizations. Because you know -- look now, many people, many individuals, many governments, they donate money to improve human life to bring more quality, to make it longer, to improve infrastructure. But in the future when we create a kind of non-biological body which will be much more capable than a biological one which will not afraid of high temperatures, which will not be dependent on the food, and probably even on the air.
All
of the social programs, all the not-for-profit foundations will be concentrated
just on one big project of how to provide everybody with that sort of body
because this will mean that having that body will allow people to be completely
free from physical substances and from some material limitations and they won't
be dependent on the infrastructure, so on and so forth.
R: Oh, not dependent on food or air. I imagine with
miniaturization too, it might be possible to put such a consciousness if
somebody chose into any kind of shape, too.
If you really want to take this all the way -- if you don't need food or
air, you can live under water, or you can live in outer space, or you can fly
like a bird, like a drone. I mean, if you take this with all the possibilities,
it's fascinating and amazing and at the same time you're gonna need thick skin,
I think because I can see comedians really getting on this, too. It'll be easy to make a lot of jokes about
this as well as science fiction stories.
D: I foresee the headline that we will be able to live like
a bird. I foresee the headline of the newspaper which will say that Russian
billionaire wants to turn people into birds -- wants everybody to be a bird.
R: Or Bird-brained or fish or going under water or -- You know, this is exciting stuff -- it's way
over the top in some ways, but at the same time, it takes people who ask the
biggest questions to get this world going in different places. I think you've
got something very interesting here.
What do you see happening first? You know you said there are a number of
milestones that you got to reach. You're gonna have a conference in June -- what
are some of the early technological steps that you're looking to accomplish
here?
D: First, of course, Avatar A -- the human like robot. The
problem with modern robotics is that most of the scientists are trying to
create the human like robot with artificial intelligence. To create an
assistant of a human being, robotic assistant. But, still there is no good-enough
artificial intelligence. What we want to
accomplish is to create the robot which will be like a glove for him and so it
will use the intelligence of the human being not the intelligence of itself. I
think this is much easier to accomplish and I think that such kind of
technology already actually exists and we need just to integrate it. In a few
years we'll have those avatars similar to those which you can see in the Avatar
movie but probably less functional. So, I think that already, this achievement,
this accomplishment, will change the whole attitude to the idea and will bring
more attention, more interest of people and I think that during these next --
from 5 to 10 years -- will see unprecedented development of the robotics
technologies based on the idea of the avatars.
R: OK, so avatar is like the movie Avatar where somebody is
able to wear -- you say create a robot like a glove -- In the movie Avatar, you
went into a kind of device where all of your body was connected and then you
operated this biological being. You're saying you want to do something like
that where it will be technological.
D: Yeah, because it's easy to create something from scratch,
but not to copy, you know something which we did not create. I believe that
science will significantly advance in life extension of the biological body and
that further we'll understand more about the nature of the biological body, but
in parallel I believe that it will be much faster to create the new body by
means of the technology which will be even more capable than ours.
R: How far along are we right now in terms of creating an
avatar that you can operate a robot by putting on a glove? I know I've seen
videos of scientists literally putting their hands into a glove and it makes
some other robotic arm move like that. So there's a beginning to this already
happening, and exists in some small way. Are there other developments beyond
that?
D: I think that almost every component of the future Avatar
A is ready. We need just to integrate
everything, to pull in the technology to make the product from it -- to make a
kind of cheap product -- a mass product available to everyone. There is a kind
of avatar you can probably get for a price. You saw that movie by Hiroshima Ishiguro's
Avatar: it costs now $300,000. I think
the biggest challenge now is to not to create the Avatar A -- the kind of
technology which we saw the movie Avatar, but to integrate the best technology
in the world and to make it cheaper and ready for mass production. And I think it will take just a few years.
R: And what do you get for $300,000? What is available for $300,000?
D: For $300,000 you basically get the kind of torso
robot. It will look like a full body but
functionally it will be a torso robot which will provide you the telepresence
with the ability to hear what the robot hears and to see what the robot sees
and to probably somehow to control arms and I think that the body which can
walk will cost a few dimes more so that. The real state- of-the-art avatar if it
integrates different technologies, and in case we bring in different scientists,
a fully functional avatar will cost up to one million, maybe more.
R: Ok, now that's definitely not affordable for everybody,
but neither is our health either.
D: I know scientists who claim that in case we set up mass
production the cost will reduce to a few thousand dollars.
R: A few thousand dollars and if you look at that and
compare that to the cost of a heart transplant or a liver, or lung transplant,
or whatever -- those things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're gonna have to wrap, but one thing --
once you make this happen -- it's a one way trip, I think. There's no way, once
you transplanted or beamed or moved - teleported the consciousness to a
technological device and start functioning in that device, I don't think
there'll be a way to put somebody back into a body, right?
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