Sam Altman is the founder of Y-Combinator, a company that provides seed funding to technology startups. To make it very clear to you that he is neither an entrepreneur nor just any company, you should know that Airbnb and Dropbox are just two examples of many other success stories that have passed through his hands. Now, this young billionaire has some controversial ideas for renewing the world through technological advances, but there is one in particular that is very interesting: digitizing the brain.
Do I have your undivided attention? Well, because you’re going to need it. What Sam wants is to be able to achieve immortality, and who wouldn’t! Although, it seems that the only thing needed to achieve it was a lot of economic resources and, of course, a brain with thousands of brilliant ideas. However, it is possible that the entrepreneur has a very different idea about immortality than most people do, because what he wants is to be able to achieve an immortality that goes beyond the physical body.
Digitizing the brain: immortality in “the cloud”.
So, in order to digitize the brain, resulting in digital immortality, Sam has contacted Nectome, a company made up of several scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who are convinced that the brain can be digitized:
“In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to make a digital copy of the brain that would be housed in the virtual storage space that is ‘The Cloud’.”
And how will this be possible? Well, as you know, mainly, with a lot of financial resources. Altman, paid Nectome a $10,000 advance with the sole idea that when technology allows, they can develop the right procedure to digitize his brain. When this is possible, it would be “dumped” into a computer.
In Sam’s own words, confessed to MIT Technology magazine:
“I assume my brain will be preserved in the cloud.”
However, in order to achieve this digital immortality, “the person must be alive when the high-tech embalming process that will develop the desired digitization takes place,” and it is a 100 percent fatal procedure. What is possible is that even Altman is not sure if he will be alive by the time this digitization of the brain becomes possible, if it will be possible at all.
Will you lose your money? Only time will tell, but what is clear is that digital immortality is an idea that has probably already been implanted in your brain.
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