Sam Altman
A 32-year-old Silicone Valley tech-billionaire, Sam Altman, is
paying $10,000 to be killed so his brain can be digitally preserved
forever in a computer.
According to a report by Dailymail UK,
the entrepreneur is one of 25 people on a waiting list at Nectome, a
startup company that says they can upload the contents of a person's
brain and store it on a computer.
But in exchange for eternally preserving his mind, Sam will have to
die in a process similar to physician-assisted suicide which is only
legal in five US states.
Somewhat ironically, the company Sam founded, Y Combinator, funds startups like Nectome.
The process he's signed up for involves embalming the brain so it
can later be simulated onto a computer, according to the MIT Technology
Review.
The customer, alive, is hooked up to a machine and then injected
with Nectome's embalming chemicals. The company said the method is '100 percent fatal.'
'The user experience 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.'
The business pitch, similarly, said: 'What if we told you we could back up your mind?'
Embalming fluid can keep a body frozen and intact, without the
threat of it starting to decompose, for hundreds or potentially
thousands of years. But in order for the procedure to work, the brain
has to be fresh, according to the Review.
Nectome said it plans to connect people with a terminal illness who
sign up to a heart and lung machine and pump the embalming mixture into
their cateroid arteries in their necks while they are alive but under
general anesthesia.
The practice does qualify as physician-assisted suicide, which is
currently only legal in five out of the 50 states. And even in those
states, an individual must have a terminal illness and have been told
they will only live for six months or less.
The company has consulted lawyers familiar with the law, and said
that if people have a terminal illness they believe this service will be
legal to them.
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