Sam Altman Paid $10,000 To Upload His Brain, But He Has To Die To Do It. Is It Worth It?

Back in 2018, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman paid a $10,000 deposit to ‘Nectome’, a tech startup looking to preserve people’s brains in the hope that they can one day be uploaded to a computer.

Unlike cryogenic freezing, which is designed to preserve the whole body, Nectome plans to embalm just the brain with aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation. The brain can’t be unfrozen, but by freezing the neurons in place, Nectome hopes that the brain’s ‘connectome’, and therefore the person’s mind, can be recreated digitally in the future.

As Nectome describes it, they are “archiving your mind.”

But the controversial part is that, unlike cryogenics, the process isn’t done once the person’s dead; the process is done while the person is alive, and it’s “100 percent fatal.”

The company’s co-founder, Robert McIntyre, said the process would feel “identical to physician-assisted suicide.” But, err, how does he know?

More like, Sam Altered-man

According to early reports, Mr. Altman joined a 25-person waiting list with his investment. That deposit is refundable; however, perhaps if Sam decides he doesn’t want to live forever, actually.

However, later reporting clarified that the “waiting list” was in fact 30 “early supporters” of the project who hadn’t been promised anything. However, as McIntyre candidly explains, “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”

‘Belief’ is the keyword there because if it doesn’t work, they’ll never actually know and literally kill themselves for no reason.

For reference, scientists have only been able to recreate the complete connectomes of fruit flies and worms. But Nectome investors are clearly hopeful that the upward trajectory of the research will one day enable scientists to recreate an entire human mind digitally.

It’s a massive gamble, but hey, the other option is certain death, so maybe $10,000 is a worthwhile bet.

Either way, we’ll probably never know if it pays off.