Huawei executive Kevin Ho acknowledges science fiction has influenced his belief that the absence of disease, poverty and death could occur within 20 years. I’ll (sadly) bet the over on that one–way over.

In time, bioengineering will help ease disease and 3D printers will do the same for the want of material goods, though I think immortality through uploading isn’t arriving anytime soon. If it does become a reality at some point, such a system still won’t duplicate humans: Trading skin for a new casing alters identity in obvious and subtle ways.

From Bloomberg:

Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans.

Huawei is best known as one of the world’s largest producers of broadband network equipment and smartphones. But Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line, told the CES Asia conference in Shanghai on Wednesday the company used science fiction movies like The Matrix to envision future trends and new business ideas.

“Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now,” he said. “In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world.”

He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. All of these technologies would require huge amounts of data storage, which in turn could generate business for Huawei, he added.•