Silicon Valley tech-billionaire Sam Altman has reportedly paid $10,000 to be put on the start-up Nectome’s waiting list which would digitally preserve his brain forever.
However, in exchange for eternally preserving his mind, the 32-year-old will have to die in a process similar to physician-assisted suicide – which is only legal in five US states.
The process, as described in MIT Technology Review, involves embalming your brain for it to potentially be simulated later in a computer.
The customer, alive, will be hooked up to a machine and then injected with Nectome’s embalming chemicals.
Altman is head of startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has provided funding for Netcome.
Nectome, founded in 2016 by a pair of MIT AI researchers, hopes to offer a commercial application of a novel process for preserving brains, called “aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation”.
The process, which results in the brain being “vitrifixed” – a term the company coined which essentially means turning it into glass – is promising enough that it has won two prizes from the Brain Preservation Foundation, for preserving a rabbit’s brain in 2016 and a pig’s brain in 2018.
The company said the method is ‘100 percent fatal.’
‘The process will be identical to physician assisted suicide,’ Nectome’s co-founder Robert McIntyre told the Review.
On the company’s website, it says the mission is to ‘preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favorite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family.
‘We believe that within the current century it will be feasible to digitize this information and use it to recreate your consciousness.’
Another big downside of Nectome is that, similar to most cryopreservation businesses, the company doesn’t have any actual method for reviving or uploading the brains it stores.
It hopes to demonstrate a fully uploaded simulation of “a biological neural network” sometime around 2024, according to its website.
There is no timescale for providing an uploaded brain with anything approaching the ability to interact with the outside world.
