Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
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.
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 under general anesthesia).
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."
Related Stories
Y Combinator to set up China arm with former Baidu executive Qi Lu as chief
American start-up incubator Y Combinator is setting up shop in China, with a new unit to be led by former Baidu chief operating officer Qi Lu.
Sam Altman, Y Combinator's president, said in a company announcement Wednesday that China had been "an important missing piece of our puzzle" when it came to sourcing new start-ups to take under its wing.
"We think that a significant percentage of the largest technology companies that are founded in the next decade — companies at the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — will be based in the U.S. and China," Altman said. "YC's greatest strength is our founder community and with the launch of YC China we believe we have a special opportunity to include many more Chinese founders in our global community."
Google's back in China. Now it's time to do a search for entrepreneurs.
Also at CNN.
See also: Y Combinator invests in a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant
Related: The Basic Income Experiment by Y Combinator Draws Nearer
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.
Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.
Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.
Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Storing Carbon Dioxide Underground by Turning It Into Rock
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability
Y Combinator Spreads to China
Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture
NASA Announces CO2 Conversion Challenge, With Up to $750k Awards
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:17PM (3 children)
like dead book?
they should fire their branding guy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:24PM
They're going to be sued by Facebook for patent infringement.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
I suggest Nextonomicon.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @06:43PM
Too close to Next-to-no-income which seems more likely accurate.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by cocaine overdose on Monday March 19 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
Hush, little Sammy. Graham gave you the spotlight for your soft and flexible hands, now it's time to enjoy the cash from your failed startup buyout, and shut your pretty, feminine mouth.
Otherwise, it's quite a silly thing to be euthanized when your handlers forget the other nervous tissue! Why, what is a man without his spine? Ah who knows. The important thing is that research into brain "digitization" is sparse. We're much closer to creating an AI waifu-bot than we are from even transplanting a head!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:04PM
You know, if anti-aging doesn't pan out soon, maybe Sam Altman would prefer undergoing the brain preservation w/ death procedure when he turns 35 or 40 instead of waiting until he's 70-something. That way he can get preserved before his brain function and memory starts to decline from old age.
Die sooner, revive later.
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(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 22 2018, @11:07AM
That's a choice quote - looks like some clumsy philosophy going on here. I get the impression this guy figures that if there's a computer simulation of this brain, that means his consciousness is preserved.
It seems pretty clear that's not the case - if I clone you while you're still alive, and then kill you, you still end up dead.
Or maybe he doesn't care about the consciousness question, and just likes the novelty of the idea that there'd be a computer that behaves like he does.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday March 19 2018, @04:37PM (17 children)
How is this different from Cryogenics (not literally) ? A vague promise of one day you'll return when they can cure whatever ails you (old age, horrible disease etc). They are both quite fatal, but then so is living. Alternatively they are both like some really, crazy, religious cults -- once upon death you (or you soul, mind, life force or something) will transcend (or be uploaded) to another plane of existence where you will stay until the one day that you return (or get resurrected).
(Score: 4, Funny) by EvilSS on Monday March 19 2018, @04:52PM (1 child)
Well the major difference seems to be that with this process instead of being a peoplesicle, you end up as a bit of modern art for some future rich guy's bookshelf.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @07:12PM
All these sort of stuff seem like preserving a forest by fossilizing it. Or copying some scans of it into a simulation. Or replacing people with a very small shell script.
But if you're stupid enough then it may work adequately for your case. ;)
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday March 19 2018, @04:54PM (5 children)
Heh, you should start a company that issues 'Certificates of Resurrection'. The idea is that you sell these certificates for $$$$$ while 'developing a time machine'. Then once your time machine is finished you super-duper-promise to come back and bring them to the future so they can be saved.
(Score: 4, Touché) by captain normal on Monday March 19 2018, @05:07PM
The Evangelicals already undercut your price.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:10PM (3 children)
Let's work Roko's basilisk into this.
Or how about orphans? For every Certificate of Resurrection sold, 100 starving orphans from throughout the timestream will be saved by the company. So if you don't buy a ResCert as a privileged rich person, you are condemning 100 orphans to death.
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(Score: 2) by black6host on Monday March 19 2018, @06:11PM
Holy shit, that plus all the kittens I've killed in my lifetime! I simply cannot have that on my conscience. Certificate time for me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @09:20PM (1 child)
fuck orphans
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @09:36PM
There's a Certificate for that.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:58PM (6 children)
It's cryogenics on a computer so it can be re-patented.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:06PM (5 children)
Actually, they just give your brain a big ol' chemical bath. It's up to some other saps to develop the scanning technology to revive the Silicon Valley elites so they can resume world domination.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 19 2018, @06:01PM (4 children)
Ever thought about how Roko's Basilisk can re-create people to torture them? Well, obviously their mind has to be stored somewhere for this to be possible. The customers of this startup might one day wake up to an unpleasant surprise! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @06:09PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=24636&page=1&cid=655006#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
But... but think of the orphans! XD 😂😂😂
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday March 19 2018, @06:41PM (2 children)
But if a mind can be stored anywhere, it would be prudent to have backups, multiple backups. Which raises an interesting question. If you are torturing a copy, are you really torturing the person you intended to torture, or is it just facsimile, a "strawman", as khallow would say, a mere chimera of the original, a shade or an echo? Then there is the Riker problem. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Thomas_Riker [wikia.com]
Now, think, for a moment. What is it that is "you", essentially. You are unique? Repeat after me. "We are all individuals!" ( Life of Brian, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY [youtube.com] ) But other than a continuity of awareness, there really is nothing you can point to as "being" what it is the you are. You are a collection of skhandhas, a result of co-dependant co-origination, and at some point you will, if you can release yourself from the bondage of grasping and desire for existence, reach nirvana, or just cease to think you exist. Nothing has self-being (svabhava) and all is empty (sunyata). So the copies you torture are not the person you desired to torture, indeed the actual person you seek to torture is non-identical to itself, and in torturing them, it is you who are tortured by your tortured need to torture.
Roko's basilsk is from the Avici hell region, not an enlightened being at all.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:15AM (1 child)
Not enlightened? You know the etymology of “Lucifer”?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday March 20 2018, @07:35PM
Wrong religion, different demonologies! And, just because you carry light, that does not mean you are the light you carry.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @04:59PM
Necto could be worse than cryo from certain perspectives.
You could argue about "souls", but when it comes to resurrecting you and your personality, the future scanning process could create an imperfect copy of your brain, rather than preserving a somewhat damaged version (your dead, frozen brainsicle) that could be directly revived using the existing intact tissue. On the other hand, Necto is done while you're still "fresh" and haven't suffered hours of brain damage from the gap between death and cryopreservation.
From an investor perspective, Necto is more likely to face legal issues due to the requirement that the company actually kill people with its procedure. what if right to die laws are rolled back? Now you can't operate the service in California anymore. Better split the state [techcrunch.com] and legalize all vampire [vanityfair.com] and zombie related activities in Silicon Valley.
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 19 2018, @08:19PM
This is a form of cryogenics. At least the article describes it as, "aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation" when talking about a test case that was not viable because it occurred 2.5 hours post death.
However, normal cryogenics are applied postmortem. The summary and article makes it clear that they are looking to preserve detail levels which require the process to be started before death is declared. More precisely, death is delivered by the process rather than occurring "naturally." They actually have a point - if you have waited long enough for the individual neuron cells to die then what good is preserving the remains?
However, my prediction is that it will take exactly one case where there is a family objection to the process to have it prosecuted as murder. Even assisted end-of-life, where it is legal (six states in the U.S.), requires the patient to self-initiate the final process (the patient is actually given a lethal prescription that they have to fulfill and self-administer). And any physicians/nurses/technicians could well assisting (they talk of heart-lung machines while the process is initiated) be charged with conspiracy at minimum as well.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday March 19 2018, @04:51PM (6 children)
What is our consciousness? Can it be resumed after all electrical activity has been lost?
If you brain is like a computer, and your consciousness lives in RAM, you can power down the computer and the electrical connections are all still there, but the 'program' would be lost.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 19 2018, @05:00PM
Unless you're talking about non-volatile RAM, but we've pretty much gone down the volatile RAM path. I assume mostly, because it's cheaper.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @07:21PM
I don't think the math we use in current computers has anything to represent consciousness or qualia.
Consciousness and qualia might turn out to be generated by our computers as an emergent thing due to the laws of our universe, but there's really no reason for it to be generated based on the actual math used.
Imperfect analogy- like doing some math generates heat. The math could in theory be done without any heat being generated in a purely mathematical universe but in our current universe doing enough math on a computer normally generates heat. And that's because of the laws of the universe and not the math itself.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:25AM (3 children)
I believe there have several cases of extreme hypothermia where the brain was basically electrically metabolically dead before revival - and they didn't come back a blank slate.
I think it's quite widely assumed that somewhere between "much" and "all" of the "software" of the brain is encoded in the neural interconnections, your "connectome" - and the fact that vaguely analogous computer "neural" networks can in fact do so many wonderous tasks lends credence to that assumption. Basically the software is encoded in the wiring of the brain itself. That is to say the brain is far more like a traditional purpose-built electronic circuit, than it is like a general purpose computer that runs some kind of software.
Where else could the "software"of personality, memories, etc. reside?
RNA was a popular idea for a while, though its seems to have fallen out of favor. I recall reading that if you train a flatworm to navigate a maze, and feed it to another flatworm, the second worm will be able to navigate the maze far faster than its "unfed" peers. Which certainly suggest that memories can be stored as chemically-encoded data, and RNA is on a short list of candidate molecules. Though that's for flatworms - human cognitive mechanics might have evolved in a very different direction.
Standing-wave neuron firing patterns is another possibility - though those hypothermia patients, and others who have recovered from "brain death" with relatively little loss to personality and memory is a strong counter-argument. Of course the brain might just be *really* good at maintaining the minimum standing wave needed.
That's all I can think of, barring some sort of "soul" or analogous metaphysical element.
To return to the connectome: For a very rough estimate of the information content of your connectome - there's estimated to be ~100 billion neurons in the brain, and around 5000 synapses per neuron. A little combinatorics tells us that just the first neuron alone has (10^11 choose 5000) possible unordered sets of connections, which Wolfram Alpha calculates as ~2x10^38674 possible states - or about 16kB of data. In the synapse-set of one neuron, under the grossly oversimplifying assumption that all synapses are identical. Multiply by 100 billion neurons (that'll overestimate, but I'm too tired to figure out the proper math. Anybody else?) and you're looking at something on the order of 1 PB (1,000,000GB) of data just to map your connectome at the crude level of "A connects to B", before even considering that neurons weight each input synapse differently.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:24AM
However how the neurons are connected to each other is not completely random; therefore one might hope that the data is highly compressible (or in other words, that there's much less than 1PB of information in the brain connections).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
~2x10^38674 is more like 38,675 decimal digits long!
In binary, that's 1.011001110011..._2×2^128473 or a number 128,473 bits long.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:09PM
Exactly. And 128,473 bits /8 = 16,059 bytes, or 16 kB.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 19 2018, @05:28PM (1 child)
So, now instead of the known to cause cancer in the state of california meme, we'll get a lose your mind in california meme?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:39PM
WARNING: Nectome's patented blend of secret herbs and embalming chemicals is known to the State of California to cause cancer in ready-to-scan brains.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @05:46PM (1 child)
Ignore Ignore Ignore.
Do not engage. Do not discuss. Do not commit this dudes name to memory.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:58PM
Come on, at least fund these guys so they can embalm a few SV elite zombies.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by ilPapa on Monday March 19 2018, @07:28PM (2 children)
My wife just joked that she's going to have my brain uploaded and then put it on the 64mb flash drive on her keychain.
That shit isn't funny.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @07:38PM
Yeah. We need at least a 256 GB stick, come on.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @11:19PM
640kb should be enough for anyone.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Monday March 19 2018, @08:01PM (2 children)
Is there a free 30-day trial option?
Asking for a friend.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Monday March 19 2018, @08:06PM (1 child)
Is there a money back guarantee that it is 100% fatal?
If your mind were reconstructed with some future technology, would there be copyright issues because of the music and movies that you can remember?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @11:28PM
Too funny. Your brain is inspected and found to contain some pop song so you can't be resurected. I love it.