Russian plan for immortality [link]

Because cryonics is not even close to "certain immortality now".

35% of people who read the article and took the quiz right after reading. Admittedly the numbers are larger than I naively expected to get past each stage of filtering. I was thinking maybe 300 people taking the poll total and its over 30k now, with over 10k answering "at any cost". (I would love to see the log files for that page... referring URLs, IP addresses, etc.)

Hey, I'd be more than willing to sign up for a couple hundred years of indentured servitude if that's what it took to pay for several thousand subsequent years. But I can't afford cryonics, and the fact that no one is willing to take up that offer of indentured servitude as payment for cryonics is very strong evidence against cryonics having a noteworthy probability of success.

Isn't it Kurzweil arguing that the singularity is going to happen in 2045 and who cares about confidence intervals?

Quite a bit claiming that consciousness is incapable of being copied, however.

The rest is pretty out there. Brain transplants - into an android body, no less - within 13 years.

They have another interesting plan on their site:

It is supposed that as a result of the planned work at the end of 2015 the project’s team will elaborate the full detailed description of the mechanisms of human brain. It will be possible to use this description to make (in yrs. 2018-2020) a full scale working analog of the human brain, based on technological (not biological) informational elements and devices.

http://2045.com/news/29053.html

So, just wait a bit, and you can get electronic brain. ^^ This reminds me of the predictions about number of genes in human genome:

Only a decade ago, most scientists thought humans had about 100 000 genes. When we analysed the working draft of the human genome sequence three years ago, we estimated there were about 30 000 to 35 000 genes, which surprised many.

After project was finished, scientists found only about 20 000 genes.

Link

I interpret this as pandering to people who cannot presently comprehend how you can be alive without a body. I doubt it is a serious plan. But I think its more likely there is no plan to do anything but get funded.

By "hologram-like" I think they just mean that it would be 3-dimensional and based on simulated physics. Probably what they have in mind is bodies generated with a smart material like Utility fog.

That anyone is claiming the bodies would be hologram based is an extremely uncharitable interpretation. Obviously the physics of holograms does not provide a reasonable framework for human body replacements (at least, outside of Star Trek). But that doesn't mean physical bodies generated by simulated physics are not like holograms in a certain sense.

I have not read the article yet but this immediately makes me much more suspicious of their intentions and odds of success. Solving hard problems like immortality is tricky enough, there is no point throwing in technical constructs which do nothing to advance this goal- unless you believe that having holographic bodies is somehow more important than living forever.

What is most encouraging to me about this is how well it seems to be marketed.

Thus the world will even closer associate futurism or immortality with crackpots and fiction.

While I agree that cryonics (in particular action taken towards its improvement) should be considered more credible than these competing approaches, I wish you would not exaggerate their weaknesses by labeling them complete nonsense. Cybernetic life support and uploading have a lot more experimental science going for them than they did a few decades ago, much as cryonics does. They also serve as helpful thought experiments to people who are still having a hard time grasping that they might survive and thrive as "frozen corpses".

There is room for respectful disagreement and dialogue between camps, and it's worth considering the possibility that this "2045" initiative has a better chance of reaching and changing minds than the visible literature on cryonics -- and will probably serve indirectly to recruit more new cryonics advocates over time.

Some caution and distancing are understandable and advisable. I don't expect this guy to actually succeed at uploading by 2045, and I don't think it would be good for the cryonics community to endorse this claim. However that doesn't mean it isn't a smart marketing strategy for the concept being conveyed (technological life extension) as long as the certainty for them isn't overstated to the point where fun can easily be poked at it.

Specific numbers, scenarios, etc. are well known marketing strategems designed to account for and exploit certain well established cognitive biases. A cursory review of your junk mail should demonstrate that the high pulling ad is the one that says "$1000/day" not "lots of money". Vague hand waving about the dates and scenarios is something that actually makes people more skeptical, at least when we're talking about the initial bid for their attention.

I don't see how number of patents is correlated with science culture.

Jews is just a a group of humans with certain statistical properties. Science could "exist" without them, no test necessary - they are not a magic ingredient. They did constitute very significant part of Russia's science establishment (despite quotas) and Russia was arguably #2 science producer in math and physics, and this % of their scientists and teachers leaving might plausibly knock them down a few levels. But Russians are certainly plenty smart - Mendeleyev, Kolmogorov, Gamow, etc. etc.