Tech billionaire Sam Altman has paid $10,000 to be put on a waiting list to undergo a process so his brain can be uploaded online. Unlike the Christmas episode of Black Mirror where Una Chaplin uploads a duplicate of her conciousness and still goes about her normal day, Sam's procedure will involve being killed. Yikes. For once I prefer a Black Mirror outcome!
Sam is one of 25 people on a waiting list at startup company Nectome, which is promising to upload a persons brain to a cloud. Sam will have his mind ‘eternally preserved’ but will have to die in a process similar to assisted suicide. Nectome’s co-founders, Robert McIntyre and Michael McCanna aim to preserve human brains in ‘microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process’.
Nectome has already won two prizes from the Brain Preservation Foundation, both for preserving animals brains. Nectome says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive. Sam told Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitised in his lifetime. He said:
There is a lot of philosophical debate, but to me a simulation is close enough that it’s worth something. And there is a much larger humanitarian aspect to the whole thing. Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom. You can transmit knowledge to the next generation, but it’s harder to transmit wisdom, which is learned. Your children have to learn from the same mistakes.That was fine for a while, but we get more powerful every generation. The sheer immense potential of what we can do increases, but the wisdom does not.
Technology Review reported that the Nectome team once spent several weeks at an Airbnb in Portland, Oregon, waiting to buy a freshly deceased body. They reported:
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-stabilised cryopreservation, on a human brain.Fineas Lupeiu, founder of Aeternitas, a company that arranges for people to donate their bodies to science, confirmed that he provided Nectome with the body. He did not disclose the woman’s age or cause of death, or say how much he charged.
I don't know whether to be amazed or terrified. Although we are now a step closer to being able to live in San Junipero, which can't be a bad thing!