Now there’s a misleading headline!

According to CBS Denver, “Startup Offers ‘100 Percent Fatal’ Procedure To Upload Your Brain“.

Even a cursory reading of the article, something the headline writer must have neglected to do, reveals quite a different story.

What Nectome is actually offering to do is plasticize not-quite-dead people. Or maybe “glassticize” would be a better word; the article says the process will turn a body into “a statue of glass” that will last for centuries.

Regardless, there’s no cloud upload involved. The founders of the company are just hoping to preserve bodies at the instant their process kills their clients in the hope that someday there will be a way to read the memories locked in the glass brains and computerize them.

Assuming this isn’t a hoax–and it wouldn’t be the first time a news agency has been fooled–it’s still a horribly speculative notion. Reaching their goal would require at least three major and separate medical and technological breakthroughs:

There’s no evidence that memories are preserved in the brain after death. Nobody is anywhere close to reading memories out of a living brain, much less a dead one. And AI technology capable to preserving a human mind is even farther from realization.

I only see only significant difference between Nectome’s approach and the bizarre idea of cutting someone’s head off after they die and freezing it in the hope science will eventually be able to unfreeze it intact and grow it a new body: if you get Nectomed, your heirs can stand you up in the corner of the living room, instead of paying thousands of dollars to a cryogenic facility.

Someone needs to remind Nectome’s founders that it’s only in the performing arts that you can legitimately suggest that someone go out and knock ’em dead.