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A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is '100 Percent Fatal' (technologyreview.com)
The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp. There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though. From a report: Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?" So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though anesthetized). The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though anesthetized). The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
These preserved brains will at some point just be recognized as what they are (medical trash) and be disposed off. It is far to easy to make more humans, nobody will care to revive some fossils that have fallen out of time. That is if the possibility is even there in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Will they manage to get their hands on the preserved head of Ted Williams to make him Patient Zero?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Darn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So we are to capture and freeze the state of mind right before death. Often from a slow painful process. We keep this state constant for extended period of time.
This doesn't sound appealing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yeah, right because we know exactly how the mind works so we are a great authority to decide whether it "survived" this crude process. Like the cryonics fad, but at least this time they should charge you less because they are not promising to run a fridge for you for hundreds of years...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
If the state doesn't change, it can't experience anything.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That’s wonderful!
#DeleteChrome
What's the point? You (the person being "backed up") is still dead. There might someday be a copy of you, but you, the you alive right now, the one reading this, is dead. You won't wake up in the future. You won't come back. You will be dead.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I for one welcome our new clones of Bob overlords...
http://bobiverse.wikia.com/wik...
Does death sound appealing?
A person frozen in this state is clearly not conscious. So, you won't be experiencing anything at all. There is no way to see the future, so there is no way to know whether or not the technology to resurrect you from this meat Popsicle will ever exist, let alone will actually be used on you. And assuming that all happens, there is no way to know what your existence will be like.
But.......the alternative is to just die.
As I understand, death by natural causes is usually pretty slow and horrible.
This will not benefit YOU. You...will still be dead.
...we could bring back a bunch of random unknown jerks from the 1600s and integrate them into our society while making whatever concessions necessary to make their hopelessly outdated value set feel welcome...said nobody ever. A few dozen to live their 2nd life as a science experiment maybe.
Fortunately for them, my brain can be contained in just 640k of memory.
As I understand, death by natural causes is usually pretty slow and horrible.
It's apparently a popular past-time though, since we're all lined up to it once.
DaveyJJ
with paying customers!
Appy is back!
Let us presume this works as advertised.
What happens if a person has this procedure performed and a forensic analysis of the brain reveals that they have memories of committing a crime? Will they be punished? Should they be punished?
What if the memories are false? Is there a way to know?
Let us presume that the living have control over the systems in which the dead will live. Will the living find what the dead used to do morally repugnant if not illegal? Will they engineer a punishment for those people? What fate would you design for an Alt-Right shitposter who never commits violence while alive? For a communist sympathizer who longs for the blood of the capitalist elites to flow through the streets?
What happens if the dead find a way to subvert the system from inside? Could a sufficiently knowledgeable hacker be perfectly positioned inside the system after death to impose their will, or to burn it all to the ground?
Do you offer gift certificates? I have a few "special" people on my Christmas list this year.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I for one am going to have my brain encrypted prior to uploading!
I will store the key...wait...where will I store the key... hmmmm
It's made out of people....
I already signed up and now worrying what if "I change my mind"?
i'm certain future aliens visiting this planet will appreciate the varied flavors of frozen humans.
Is it Appealing? No, but it is inevitable. Our time on this planet is limited. Artificially extending our lives is really just our own egos getting in the way.
Lets say this is the future were we can restore such minds. Do we really want to take the minds of people a hundred years ago, who are old and stuck in their ways, have outdated morality and limited world view.
Please don't translate this as ageism, as the wisdom of older people is valuable. However you taking the years of wisdom learned from a world that doesn't exist.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...That is all.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
They had me at 100% fatal
Nice try, zombies. We're on to your business model.
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
- Philip K. Dick, Ubik
Ice Cream has no bones.
The assisted suicide law is very predictably being used to exploit the gullible.
I'll pump my magic chemicals into you and freeze your brain, so you can revived in the future!
This is nothing but a scam to deprive the families of dying loved ones their inheritance. This dude is going to cheat these people out of their last days and make off with their cash. Way to go libs.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If the process is truly 100% fatal, that's better than electrocution or lethal injection which have both had survivors.
These guys claim to anesthetize the victim (er, patient) and then execute them by filling their brains with glass. So let's use that for death row inmates. It's humane, and if we screw up, we can boot up the copy and apologize to it in a few hundred years. And since it's a copy we won't even owe it money. Win-win!
I dunno. DAU is pretty constant, but engagement ratings for death are pretty low. Bounce rates are 100%.
Ancient Egypt also had high priests that made a somewhat similar sales pitch...
Before you go under the knife and chem drip make sure to bone up on future skills so as to better help you integrate into future society. I have it on good authority the three sea shells will be super important.
The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
OK. So, can I order that for an enemy of mine?
So we are to capture and freeze the state of mind right before death.
According to this study, neurons shut off upon sensing a diminishing amount of oxygen after heart failure, stopping to generate signals. So, there's no state to be preserved.
I'm not going to invest in a business with no repeat customers.
Offer to post-pile people into the sediment so they become part of the fossil record.
For the fascist the human being is nothing but a number, a value, a sum, a net worth, a figure to be exploited.
Amerikkka's brave new visionaries.. sucking the very souls out of people like Skeksis.
There's a scene in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun where the protagonist stumbles into a jumble of perfectly preserved corpses like this in the woods in a far-future declined Earth. There's little reason to believe freezing your head or being plasticized would result in anything more than being a curio in some far flung future, at best.
Many Black Mirror episodes deal with the results of uploading your brain into a computer. The results are horrifying and also kind of believable. The reason is because the "simulated consciousness" is not respected as a person, but instead is treated as a computer program. Not.good.
Say your moving some brains around in storage, but accidentally drop one on the floor destroying it as it hits the ground. Technically, the person who the brain belongs to is already dead, but clumsy you has destroyed any possibility that the consciousness of the deceased mind will ever be digitized an uploaded to a machine. Was there a crime committed? Are the brains merely property? If they are property and not considered a person, could the digitizing process of the consciousness be altered by owner of the brain to change memories, or personality? What guarantees will there be that the your consciousness will be fully and unalterably intact once its in the machine?
I wonder if they offer gift packages.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As I understand, death by natural causes is usually pretty slow and horrible.
It's apparently a popular past-time though, since we're all lined up to it once.
Always makes me think of the Futurama pilot:
Suicide Booth: Please select mode of death. Quick and painless or slow and horrible.
Fry: Yeah, I'd like to place a collect call?
Suicide Booth: You have selected slow and horrible.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I want to be entombed in my glass block, holding a note that says "I know where 100lbs of gold is buried".
Of course, this means you have to guess what kind of thing will be valuable enough 100 or 1000 years from now for someone to extract your consciousness. You could also try some reverse psychology along the lines of a sign that read "I was frozen believing that God is real. Change my mind".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Abby Normal I believe it was.
These preserved brains will at some point just be recognized as what they are (medical trash) and be disposed off. It is far to easy to make more humans, nobody will care to revive some fossils that have fallen out of time. That is if the possibility is even there in the first place.
It really depends on the social dynamics of the future and on how you are remembered. Do you really think nobody would want to talk to an accurate simulation of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or John D. Rockefeller? Or Shakespeare? Or their own great-great-great grandparents? One day this could be the equivalent of a grade-school family tree project: talk to the simulation of your ancestor.
Real lawyers write in C++
We're a unique company, we KILL people!
They are offering a 100% money back, satisfaction guarantee. All the person whose brain was uploaded and is unsatisfied with the upload has to do is to walk into the office and sign the refund request form.
Fight Spammers!
Imagine that this technology works, and someone can create a perfect computer simulation of my mind ... yay! Success! I'm immortal right? Woohoo!
Who "owns" that simulation data?
What simulation do they decide to put my brain in?
It is an empty black box with no sensory input, but perfect cognitive functions?
So, I'm floating forever in a timeless void...
Or maybe it's just a simulation of my body in a tank of boiling water?
So great, so I'm boiling alive, except my nerve endings never degrade and I get to experience 100% of the pain until somebody decides to turn it off.
And we haven't even gotten into deep psychological torments.
Recall every horror movie you've ever seen, and now imagine living through each of them as each character.
And that's doesn't even scratch the surface of AI remixing and discovering ways to maximize torment.
Think anybody in the future will care about you being in a torture simulation?
Do they care about the characters in the horror movie?
They sure do. They'll line up to pay money to sit down and watch it for hours.
Simulate me in an undying body? FUCK THAT.
Where Riker was discovered to have been cloned by the transporter as the result of atmospheric interference (which they compensated for by essentially adding extra energy/material to the transporter buffer to compensate.)
The question that never got developed or answered was: If it could happen accidentally, why couldn't it also happen intentionally? And if it could be done intentially, how did anyone know that it hadn't and that right now there was a stellar criminal, or a biologically duplicated but reconditioned version of someone high ranking running around impersonating the original? DS9 in fact covered the latter when Lt Cmdr Riker impersonated Commander Riker to help out the Maquis. Another detail that was somewhat ignored: Why didn't Clone Riker also get promoted to Commander, since his Commander promotion had happened as a direct result of that mission?
For that matter, TNG Relics covered this 'mind uploading service' in that Scotty preserved himself as data in a buffer loop inside the transporter (along with the poor sod who didn't make it) awaiting a short term or long term recovery mission (Also a major canonical error: Generations depicted Scotty being at Kirk's first death. Potentially, since I don't think he was dead yet, they could have filmed him at the funeral for his second future death.)
Also: There was an Outer Limits episode covering the 'failed transporter' outcome back in the 90s(ended with the 'originals' death once they were sure the 'clone' made it to the destination planet), as well as Sclock Mercenary with the billion plus Gavs cloned through the Gate Network as a major plotpoint.
Might as well just encase someone in Amber.
> Who is to say the person who stepped out is not a brand new person? The person who was beamed away suffered a death though instant and painless from the dematerialization.
Summa Technologiae, a massive futurology book written by the polish SF author Stanislaw Lem around 1964, has an entire chapter dedicated to the discussion of such technical and moral problems involving teleportation.
I don't know if the book is available in english translation, but I found it an extremely difficult read, being philosophy themed, heavy in use of latin and dealing with topics that likely won't emerge in practice for many millenia, like ethics of stellar engineering or auto-evolution of super advanced species.
Lem later adapted many of its topics for light-hearted fables in a collection of short stories titled The Cyberiad.
I need brains for my science project. Lots of brains. And they need to be fresh. Very fresh. And then this happens. Curses!
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Sounds like someone's been doing a little fantasizing, particularly around the "people will pay a lot for this" part.
This isn't a mind-uploading service. It is a body-preserving service.
Congratulations. Come this way and we'll begin the procedure.
Hey, if you were going to donate your body to science anyways, why not? It could be a treasure trove for the future anthropologists if they have perfectly fossilized brains from the early 21st century to look at. Depending on how far along neuroscience has come along, they might even be able to read some of your thoughts. It's unlikely that anyone would bother to try to revive you though.
A perfectly scanned brain will not work until physics can understand, and thus simulate, the subjective perceptual experience of consciousness.
Until then it would be a brain without something doing experience-feedback or whatever consciousness does, and would not run anymore than a car without pistons. All physics does not describe how this arises.
While exactly what conscious does for the brain is debated, almost cretainly it is vital.
That isn't to say a functioning mind without it couldn't be made, just that it won't magically happen from neural simulation.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Merge with machines by uploading your mind... maybe. By killing yourself. "Technology" created/funded by the technocratic left. That's the kind of whacked out conspiracy theory Alex Jones has been fearmongering for decades. And oh look, here it is, funded by the tech left.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. That's some mark of the beast shit right there. Almost like he wasn't making it up and was truly trying to warn us all.
Hope the technocrats are the first to arrogantly try to immortalize themselves with this method.
captcha: shouted
Fuck everything about this and double fuck the asshole who came up with it.
loaded into expanded mem.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This sounds like it's more based on scifi than science. They do know that Transcendence, with Pirates of the Caribbean star, Johnny Depp, wasn't a documentary, don't they?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
It's already been astablished that someone going through a transporter dies every time.
Given that future scientists will lack motivation to bother uploading your brain I think I know the only potential way to get them to bother. Here's what I'd get engraved on my glassed forehead: "I have buried a large volume of gold and I have memorised the seed for a bitcoin wallet that contains whole integer volumes of bitcoins - wake me up and I'll tell you" Might work. Of course you're powerless if they just turn the server off afterwards.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
If you have the magic tech to raise the dead, you can also have separate real or virtual planets for them to inhabit which will suit their particular outdated desires. And there's certainly no need to give the undead the right to vote on Earth.
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This is mummification from ancient Egypt all over again, just at a slightly more detailed level.
All this can do is preserve the connections between neurons. But that's not all there is to consciousness. Beyond the connectome, there may be 'software' differences within neurons that contribute to consciousness and learning. This technology does not preserve this -- instead, brain DNA degrades and any complexity present there is lost.
Last year, scientists found a surprising amount of genetic diversity in each individual brain neuron. This year, scientists observed neurons passing genetic material, packaged in a virus-like shell, to neighbouring neurons.
The frozen corpses are already dead â" what worse thing could possibly happen to them?
-- Knowledge is power. -- Francis Bacon
The fundamental unexamined assumption these people are making is that the state of a person can be frozen statically. There is just as much evidence that the state of consciousness is dynamic, encoded in the flows of waves of currents in the brain.
Trying to capture the state of consciousness of a person with a static material representation would be like trying to freeze a candle flame. The flame doesn't exist without the dynamic combustion process and the flow of hot gases that feed it.
Says it all .. they should simply be sent for life to a dangerous criminal mental hospital and join the ranks of Mengele and other monsters of our times.
No need to give them any rights at all and they could be useful as a replacement for artificial intelligence if it doesn't work out. Everyone could have their own resurrected brain running their household.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I think we have found a product for you!
This will make you immortal and an online entitie rather than living in your mom's basement trolling on /.
All you gotta do is go to summer camp! You are always saying this and that are not AI, well think about it you can be an AI !
Do it, the hot chicks at camp are waiting for you!
So, TFS calls this a mind-uploading service.
There is no upload. There is an offer to kill you with the hope that in the future someone solves the problem of un-killing you by then uploading your mind.
Basically they're offering the easy part, and failing to do the hard part. Assuming of course that they've miraculously solved all of the problems of destroying your cells by freezing you. Which I'm going to confidently say they haven't.
This is 100% bullshit snakeoil, like every other cryogenics scam that came before hand.
Then again, if you're stupid enough to pay these clowns to kill you via some untested process for which they've not solved the other side of the equation ... then, please, get the fuck in line for this shit.
This is either an incredibly ingenious scam, or ... no, wait ... there is no or.
As I tell vendors, it isn't a backup until you can prove you can restore the data.
I don't need anybody or anything to 'run my household.' I just need somebody to change the cat litter box(es!) more often.
So we are to capture and freeze the state of mind right before death. Often from a slow painful process.
We're at the point on /. where comments get +3 that get the summary completely wrong.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If that were true, everytime someone on Star Trek stepped through a transporter they would be dead too.
Jesus Christ, Trek people go to agonizing lengths to drive home the point that transporters are analog to avoid this issue precisely, but most people still get it wrong.
I'd think that /. would be the kind of place where those using Star Trek as evidence would have at least read one of the tech manuals.
Anyway, the whole point of the annular confinement beam and the phrase "Energize" is that Trek uses a matter-to-energy conversion system that actually moves atoms from point A to point B - it does not copy-and-delete and Geordi even says that even their computers do not have the capacity to duplicate all of the quantum states in the replicators. Roddenberry was very concerned about his plot device implying the absence of a soul.
By contrast, check out the episode of Outer Limits with the gal who goes to the sentient dinosaur planet from the Earth Moon station, to get a sense of the implications of a digital process. Spoiler alert: grim.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If anyone has read the Manga all the way through, the parallels there are pretty obvious. Iron Jim gets the task of bringing it to the big screen it seems: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437086/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
I read it all 20 years ago, so theres a lot I don't remember, but preserving and resurrecting consciousness (in the form of peoples brains-- or brains turned into FPGAs quite honestly) was a huge part of the series. At the time it really made me question what it meant to be human. It was the series that introduced me to the prospect of having multiple brains, something I had never even considered. Great Sci-Fi if you don't mind more than a touch of gore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Angel_Alita
/* * pope1 */
How was Scotty stuck in a transporter buffer for centuries? How did riker get cloned by his transporter beam getting reflected by a planets atmosphere?
Appy is back!
I miss the cows mooing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
When someone announces a specific, feasible plan for "uploading" the 302 neuron brain of a Caenorhabditis elegans marine worm I'll start paying attention. They won't even have to actually do it. I'll be happy with just the plan.
Until then all this talk of "uploading" a human consciousness is simply a faux-scientific religion -- a way to try to deny the finality of death.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Step 1: Billionaire Freezes Brain.
Step 2: Donate all assets to a Trust that uses the managed growing interest to fund technologies to revive frozen brains.
Step 3: Repeat.
Bonus Step: Be the guy that manages said fund.
Hello Mr. Brown, welcome to 2089
It worked I can't believe it worked
Mr. Brown you were revived to for punishment for crimes against humanity.
Crimes? What crimes? I never got a conviction
Do you remember something called global warming...
Twat
Robot Nixon.
You can't keep a cryogenic frozen brain on your desk as a paperweight.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Of course, this means you have to guess what kind of thing will be valuable enough 100 or 1000 years from now for someone to extract your consciousness.
Just make sure you have enough lawyers for them to keep arguing that you're technically not dead.
They'll also have to chase down all those profits from your art floating around for all those centuries.
I suggest making something simple, like a children's book.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Silicon Valley isn't even trying to hide it's sociopathology anymore.
What won't you people do for a buck? You are truly disgusting.
In regards to the Star Trek disintegration discussion, remember that Barclay is conscious in the transporter stream when he sees those worms.
the answer would be 42 $die to live again , IF you got the money fi ; ... \n is a colon too i dont get that discussion , rated O for off-topic
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?