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Silicon Valley billionaire Sam Altman, 32, has paid a company, Nectome, $10K to kill him then have his brain uploaded to a cloud. No, this is not the next episode of Black Mirror. This really happened.
Altman, the president of Y Combinator, an American seed accelerator, is one of 25 people on a waiting list for the privilege of having Nectome connect them, according to MIT Technology Review, “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.” Sounds pleasant.
The product is “100 percent fatal,” says Nectome’s cofounder, Robert McIntyre. “That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies.” That’s certainly one way of describing it.
The reason for why Netcome has to hook you up to a death machine is because the brain needs to be “fresh” in order for them to upload it.
Nectome’s storage service is not yet for sale and may not be for several years. Also still lacking is evidence that memories can be found in dead tissue. But the company has found a way to test the market. Following the example of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, it is sizing up demand by inviting prospective customers to join a waiting list for a deposit of $10,000, fully refundable if you change your mind.
So far, 25 people have done so. One of them is Sam Altman, a 32-year-old investor who is one of the creators of the Y Combinator program. Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says.
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Now here’s a fun story about how Nectome went about testing their idea.
The Nectome team demonstrated the seriousness of its intentions starting this January, when McIntyre, McCanna, and a pathologist they’d hired spent several weeks camped out at an Airbnb in Portland, Oregon, waiting to purchase a freshly deceased body.
In February, they obtained the corpse of an elderly woman and were able to begin preserving her brain just 2.5 hours after her death. It was the first demonstration of their technique, called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, on a human brain.
Not at all creepy, right? Well, hang on, there’s more to the story.
“You can think of what we do as a fancy form of embalming that preserves not just the outer details but the inner details,” says McIntyre. He says the woman’s brain is “one of the best-preserved ever,” although her being dead for even a couple of hours damaged it. Her brain is not being stored indefinitely but is being sliced into paper-thin sheets and imaged with an electron microscope.
So will Nectome’s idea of being able to upload your brain for future use actually ever come to fruition? Not surprisingly, there are a few doubters.
One of which is McGill University neuroscientist Michael Hendricks, who wrote in MIT Technology Review in 2015, that “any suggestion that you can come back to life is simply snake oil.” And by you, he means your current consciousness.
No one who has experienced the disbelief of losing a loved one can help but sympathize with someone who pays $80,000 to freeze their brain. But reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the “cryonics” industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt.
Or, in the case of Netcome, raise $1 million in funding and win a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. One of those things.
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