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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.
I don't doubt that our descendants will want to revive some of us for an annual punishment ceremony.
Fortunately for them, my brain can be contained in just 640k of memory.
Do you offer gift certificates? I have a few "special" people on my Christmas list this year.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That may very well be true... 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.
Then an imposter was materialized who has all the same bodily molecules, but NOT the same immortal soul.....
Nice try, zombies. We're on to your business model.
Ancient Egypt also had high priests that made a somewhat similar sales pitch...
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
Via the fuck() system call of course.
It will work perfectly and in 30 years time the brains will be revived for sale as childrens' toys. Maybe placed inside some kind of earthenware container so the kids can grow chia on top, or set up with an audio output and made to tell stories like a kind of damp version of alexa.
Maybe it will come with a range of colored hermit-crab like shells or as the controller for a special lego kit with motors and lights.
It can wonder how long it will be before it winds up where the goldfish went.
Nullius in verba