Max Headroom was an 1980s television series that billed itself as taking place “20 minutes into the future.” In 1987, its second episode was titled, “Dieties”. It concerned a new religion, the Vu-Age church, that promised to scan your brain and store it for resurrection.Vanna Smith: “Your church has been at the forefront of resurrection research. But resurrection is a very costly process and requires your donations. Without your generosity, we may have a long, long wait... until that glorious day... that rapturous day... when the Vu-Age laboratories perfect cloning, and reverse transfer.”
That episode suddenly feels relevant now, although it took a little longer tan 20 minutes.
On Quora, which I frequent, I often see people asking about mind uploading. My usual response is:
So I am stunned to read this article about Nectome, which, for the low deposit price of US$10,000, will kill you and promise to upload your mind somewhere, sometime, by a process that hasn’t been invented yet.
If your initial reaction was, “I can’t have read that right, because that’s crazy,” you did ready it right, and yes, it is crazy.
In fairness, it is not as crazy as it first sounds. They don’t want to kill you when you’re healthy. They are envisioning an “end of life” service when you are just at the brink of death. This makes it moderately more palatable, but introduces more problems. It’s entirely possible that people near the end of life may have tons of cognitive and neurological problems that you really wouldn’t want to preserve.
How do they propose to do this? Essentially, this company has bought into the idea that everything interesting about human personality is contained in the connectime:
(T)he idea is to retrieve information that’s present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details.
As I’ve written about before, the “I am my connectome” idea is probably badly, badly wrong. It completely ignores neurophysiology. It’s a selling point for people to get grants about brain mapping, and it’s a good selling point for basic research. But as a business model, it’s an epic fail.
And what grinds my gears even more is that this horrible idea is getting more backing that many scientists have ever received in their entire careers:
Nectome has received substantial support for its technology, however. It has raised $1 million in funding so far, including the $120,000 that Y Combinator provides to all the companies it accepts. It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for “whole-brain nanoscale preservation and imaging,” the text of which foresees a “commercial opportunity in offering brain preservation” for purposes including drug research.
I think it is good to fund research of high speed analysis of imaging of synaptic connections. But why does this have to be tied to a business? Especially one as batshit crazy as Nectome?
Co-founder Robert McIntyre says:
Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom.
If only there was some way that people could preserve what they thought about things... then we could know what Artistotle thought about stuff. Oh, wait, we do, it’s called, “writing.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw a business so exploitative and vile. And in this day and age, that’s saying something.
Update, 3 April 2018: MIT is walking away from its relationship with the company. Good. That said, Antonio Regalado notes:
Although MIT Media Lab says it’s dropping out of the grant, its statement doesn’t strongly repudiate Nectome, brain downloading idea, or cite the specific ethical issue (encouraging suicide). So it's not an apology or anything.
Hat tip to Leonid Schneider and Janet Stemwedel.
Related posts
Overselling the connectome
Brainbrawl! The Connectome review
Brainbrawl round-up
External links
A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
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