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."

Comments

What's the point?

[RatBastard]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[mark-t]

The star trek transporter works by measuring a target's impression on spacetime at a subatomic level, and then creating a 4-dimensional hologram of that impression at the destination point. The inverse of that hologram is then applied to the source point, cancelling out the probability of the target being at the source location, while the probability of it being at the destination rises to certainty.

No disintegration required.