Sam Altman A billionaire, American entrepreneur, investor, computer programmer and blogger, , has paid to have his brain chemically frozen when he dies and thus bestow eternal consciousness on him.
Altman, is the president of Y Combinator a company with a net worth of $80bn in market capitalisation. In 2017 he sold another of his companies, Loopt, for $43.4m, making roughly $5m in profit. He is also a co-chairman of OpenAI.
Nectome a technology company renders a service to embalm client’s brain, keeping it from decaying for centuries maybe even a millennia until a time where its contents can be uploaded digitally. The service is priced at $10,000.
However, for the process to work the brain must be fresh so that it can be copied in microscopic detail, meaning that the client must be dead in order to start the procedure.
Altman who is just 32 year’s of age is a Stanford University dropout and 1 of 25 who have signed onto a waiting list at Nectome, for the embalming.
The process, as described in MIT Technology Review, involves embalming client’s brain for it to potentially be simulated later in a computer.
The living customer would be hooked up to a machine and then pumped full of Nectome’s custom embalming chemicals.
The method is “100 per cent fatal,” claims the company.
“The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide,” Nectome’s co-founder Robert McIntyre revealed to the publication.
“Our mission is to preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favourite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family,” writes Nectome on its site.
“We believe that within the current century, it will be feasible to digitise this information and use it to recreate your consciousness.”
Physician-assisted suicide is legal in five out of 50 US states, and individuals seeking it must have a terminal illness, as well as a prognosis of six months or less to live.
However, the idea of uploading our consciousness into a computer has been fast gaining support among scientists and techies.
Dr. Ian Pearson, a futurologist, predicts that humanity will be able to transfer our brains to the cloud (for online storage) in just 50 years’ time.
That way, you’ll be able to “use any android that you feel like to inhabit the real world,” he said.
Altman is best friends with fellow Silicon Valley billionaire/PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel.
The two recently earned public recognition when Altman hinted that they were planning to escape a potential apocalypse by hiding in the bunker in Thiel’s home in New Zealand.