Inside the wild movement to turn us into immortal cyborgs - Western Mass News - WGGB/WSHM

"It would be a huge breakthrough," says Itskov. "The partnership could be different. Businessmen could probably give their name to the project, to save the history, and to have their own avatar once the [science has evolved]."

As if to sell his transhumanist future even harder, out comes real-life cyborg Nigel Ackland, a former precious metals smelter from England, who was fitted with a Bebionic3 artificial hand – the most advanced prosthetic on the market – after half his right arm was crushed in an industrial blender. For Itskov, he's a masterstroke of marketing genius.

Ackland's new hand and forearm contain sensors that detect muscle movement in his upper arm, which translate into movements of the Terminator-like fingers. Depressed and overweight, Ackland once felt like his life was over. The hand, he says, has made him human again.

"… People would tend not to come and talk to me, they would tend to keep away from me, they would tend to move me almost to the edges of society," says Ackland. "Now, everyone just walking around today has wanted to shake my hand."

You can almost see the tear ducts and wallets in the audience open up.

Our elation is soon tampered by a strange announcement: Roboticist David Hanson, who is scheduled to debut "the world's most advanced android" – a robotic head designed to look identical to Itskov, packed with a remote controlled "telepresence" interface – after the lunch break is still "tinkering" on the device at his home, and will not present until the next day.

Tinkering? I recall a conversation I had with Hanson in March, more than two months earlier. "The time schedule is fantastically short for this particular project," he told me. "I mean, we basically received this commission about a little less than two months ago. So we're talking about a very, very short time frame for making a redesign of the human-scale technology to improve it, customizing it to be Dmitry, and then bringing together the best of our technologies available to achieve a remote control version of Dmitry."

But he's coming, I think. He has to. Not only is Hanson's creation one of the primary reasons I'm here, it's the one concrete proof Itskov has to show that his ideas aren't just grand theories and big talk. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow.

The next morning, the King Transhumanist himself, Ray Kurzweil, schools us on all forms of science and technology: Mobile phones, quantum physics, Moore's Law, health care, 3D printing, brain mechanics, the full gamut. Despite all his wisdom and knowledge, however, the most notable thing he says – besides disputing the prominent theory that the brain is a quantum computer – is that rich early adopters, like those who bought the first cell phones, are idiots.

"Twenty years ago, only the rich had [cell phones]. They didn't take it out of their pockets – it was a brick!" Kurzweil explains. "It didn't work very well, but that was a signal that this person was a member of the power-elite. Only the rich have these technologies when they don't work."