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Showing posts from March, 2018

Faltered Carbon: Why You Have to Die to Live Forever

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By Jacqueline Leo Ray Kurzweil must have had a good weekend. Finally, someone has taken his notion of merging man and machine and created a company that claims it will preserve the human brain and “back up its contents,” preserving the contents of your mind eternally. The company, Nectome, which sounds like a hybrid fruit, is derived from the Human Connectome Project and is funded by Y Combinator, the prescient Silicon Valley venture capital company that seeds new startups. This new process is not as simple as checking the box on your living will that says you’ll donate your organs in the interest of science.  Nope. In order to participate, you have to die. And you have to pay $10,000 for the privilege of being killed in a humane way so that your brain isn’t starved of oxygen on your way out. You can read the gory details at MIT Technology Review in a story by Antonio Regalado . Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in California under the End of Life Option Act so Nec