ILabs

iLabs is a non-profit Milan-based organization pursuing multidisciplinary research on radical extension of human life-span. It was founded in 1977 by Gabriele Rossi and Antonella Canonico, who advocate the scenario known as “Semi-Immortality”, an elaborate vision of an era of quasi-immortal individuals (“intelligent systems”), that is philosophically linked to other instances of Transhumanism and futurists’ theories (such as Raymond Kurzweil’s).

iLabs led the development of Artificial Intelligence tools in Italy: the first relational database (1984), a self-monitoring and self-modifying application for production planning (1985), programs for data compression (1980), visual recognition (1983), cryptography (1987).

Starting with the publishing of Semi-Immortality^[1] in November 2007, iLabs has also been devoting considerable resources to further improve the impact of the research program and raise the general awareness towards semi-immortality and related topics, resulting in a series of books, articles, interviews and events popular in the Italian transhumanist community and beyond.^[2]

On March 5, 2011 iLabs hosted the iLabs Singularity Summit, featuring speeches from Raymond Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey.