For 3 days in late February, Russian businessman Dmitry Itskov gathered 500+ futurists in Moscow for a “Global Future 2045 Congress” – the latest manifestation of his “Russia 2045” movement. The Congress featured an impressive roster of Russian scientists, engineers and visionaries, along with American and West European futurist leaders like Ray Kurzweil, Randal Koene and John Smart.
As Kurzweil noted when I asked him about the conference, “The reference to ‘2045’ comes from my date for the Singularity. The conference was forward looking and was based on my ideas.“
The occurrence of a conference like this in Russia is no big shock, of course. Russia has a huge contingent of great scientists in multiple directly Singularity-relevant areas; and it also has an impressively long history of advanced technological thinking . My dear departed friend Valentin Turchinwrote a book with Singularitarian themes in the late 1960s, and the Russian Cosmists of the early 1900s discussed technological immortality, space colonization and other futurist themes long before they became popular in the West.
On the other hand, the overall social atmosphere in Russia is not so optimistic these days. In fact Russia is seeing a brain drain of sorts – around 1.25 million Russians have left the country in the last decade, including a large number of educated individuals. This is fairly dramatic for a country of 142 million with a death rate significantly higher than its birthrate.
The global economic crisis of 2008 reduced Russia’s GDP to a persistent 3% or so per year, compared to 7-8% beforehand. Russian polling agencies estimate that 20% of Russians are thinking of leaving, with the figure nearly 40% in the 18-25 age bracket.
So on the one hand there’s a struggling economy and brain drain; and on the other hand, a massive brain trust of brilliant scientists and a long tradition of visionary futurist thinking. Taken together, quite an interesting backdrop for Itskov’s event….
And, like the Russian Cosmists before him, Itskov has no lack of grand ambitions. As he told Sander Olsen in an interview last year:
[T]he most important thing is that we want to eliminate death and disease for all—to overcome the limitations of our protein-based body; to find a way out of the chain of various crises our civilization is facing.
As regards the Avatar project … this is a project to create a robot copy of a human that can be operated through the brain-computer interface.
We just talked about the Body B project, which is to create a brain life support system in order to extend human life by 100-200 years.
The Re-Brain project is a purely Russian project to create a computer brain model and a model of the human psyche using the method of reverse engineering, and to develop a way to transfer personality to an artificial carrier.
And Body D is our vision of the evolution of a personality carrier: a body that is like a hologram. This technology is not yet able to be made, but that is how we envision future human bodies.
Exciting visions indeed!
I’m splitting my time between Hong Kong and DC these days, so I’m fairly aware of Singularitarian happenings in the US and China (see e.g. my 2010 article, The Chinese Singularity, and followup comments in this interview). But Russia is largely unknown territory for me – so the Global Future 2045 conference piqued my interest particularly, and I regret I was too busy with work to attend. But I did my best to keep up to speed on the proceedings from a distance.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: The Russian Singularity Scheduled for 2045”
