Downloadable personalities will make us immortal, according to expert

Get ready to live forever, says an expert who predicts our minds could be downloaded into avatars within the next century. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku claims we will no longer have to mourn the death of loved ones: instead, they will live on in a hologram.

It may sound like an episode of British TV show ‘Black Mirror’, but Kaku predicted that the memories and personalities of people will be able to be downloaded to a computer. Just as in the film ‘Total Recall’, it will also be possible to place memories into a subject’s mind. Be afraid.

"Imagine being able to speak to your loved one after they died, but it is possible if their personality has been downloaded onto computer as an avatar. You would be able to communicate with them as if they were still here. They would, in effect, become immortal." Kaku said in the new documentary Curiosity Stream.

Kaku believes the downloaded personality will be activated when a person dies, allowing their relatives to communicate with them via an avatar or a robot, assuming the relatives want to.

Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is already at work on the idea with the Avatar 2045 project. Itskov and his team are attempting to develop lifelike robotic copies of humans which the human brain can be downloaded to.

Kaku pushes his prediction for the technology further, saying memories will be inserted into people’s minds, allowing Alzheimer’s patients to “push a button and memories will flood in.”

Speaking to the Mail Online, he said people would also be able to fool themselves into believing they had taken a holiday. Someone would collect memories of a pleasant trip to the beach for example, according to Kaku, before they are downloaded into another person’s mind.

“Feel the wind at your face, hear the sound of the waves, all the sensations – you'll have a memory of a very nice walk on the beach in some exotic location, that's what this person before you felt. These things are within the realms of possibility – it's only a matter of time” Kaku said.
Despite all the positives of advancing technologies, Kaku warned that they could be used for bad, including planting the memory of a crime they did not commit into a person’s mind. It’s only a matter of time until Kaku runs Hollywood.

Born not far from Hollywood in San Jose, California, Kaku’s ideas definitely have cinematic elements. Earlier this month he claimed to have proved God existed through an algorithm that showed we live in a world similar to that seen in the film ‘The Matrix’.