Dr. Ian Pearson, head of the Futurology unit at BT, believes that humans will achieve a kind of virtual immortality by downloading and saving their consciousnesses into computers within the next 45 years.

Dr. Pearson's background is in applied mathematics and theoretical physics.  The 44-year-old spent 4 years working on missile design and the last 20 working with optical networks, broadband network evolution and cybernetics.

He thinks that today's younger generation will benefit from the advances in technology to the point that death will be effectively eliminated.  He explains his logic with a simple example.

"The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,” he said. “It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.”
He isn't talking about pure data here.  Pearson believes that the human consciousness can be stored in digital format.

"We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis.

Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020." “It would definitely have emotions - that's one of the primary reasons for doing it.”

Pearson also considers the implications of such machines on our lives.  He believes that before the creation of these new "smart" machines, there should be a debate.

"You need a completely global debate. Whether we should be building machines as smart as people is a really big one. Pearson also predicts the popularity of virtual reality taking hold around 2020.  "We will spend a lot of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer generated environments to socialize and do business in. When technology gives you a life-size 3D image and the links to your nervous system allow you to shake hands, it's like being in the other person's office. It's impossible to believe that won't be the normal way of communicating."

Excerpt from www.geekinformed.com, 5/23/05