How Would You Like to Invest in Immortality?
Russian Internet mogul Dmitry Itskov is looking for backers for the world’s first immortality research center.
Startups devise some fairly clever tactics to sell investors on their business models, but Russian tech entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov’s newest venture sells itself: Invest in his new research and development interest and the payoff could be immortality. A new corporate entity that the Russian multi-millionaire will formally announce at an event in June will allow investors to bankroll research into neuroscience and human consciousness with the ultimate goal of transferring human minds into robots, extending human life indefinitely. Early investors will be first in line for the technology when it matures, something Itskov believes will happen in the 2040s.
Over lunch with reporters last week, 32-year-old Itskov outlined a rough roadmap for the future of his 2045 Initiative, a multi-decade research and development push to understand human consciousness and ultimately how to transfer it from human bodies into robotic avatars. When Itskov first became serious about selling off his Russian Internet concerns to pursue what he calls “the next evolutionary step for humanity” a few years ago, he had hoped to do so in a non-profit manner. But now, he says, he realizes that a business case is the best case for moving the project forward.
“In the beginning I thought once we raised this question it would be obvious to people that this is possible and everyone would be interested,” Itskov says. “It was naive thinking, I have to be honest. I understand now that I shouldn’t neglect those business aspects that I tried to avoid when I started thinking about this idea. We have to create business opportunities in this process or nobody will be interested over the next ten or twenty years, especially the entrepreneurs that could potentially afford to do this.”
More: How Would You Like to Invest in Immortality? - Fortune Tech