The startups disrupting what happens when we die
It’s not all about preserved brains, AI resurrections or living forever. Australian ‘death tech’ startups can change the way we deal with mortality – even if in more prosaic ways.
Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s premier startup accelerator program, is well known for its relentless output of tech unicorns, trailblazed by now-household names like Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit.
A less familiar alum, though, hailing from Y Combinator’s class of 2018, is Nectome. The once MIT-affiliated – then firmly unaffiliated – startup offered to preserve your brain with a cocktail of embalming chemicals and upload a full digital replication, down to the last synapse.
The catch – beyond the $15,000 price tag – was that the procedure was “100% fatal”, and the startup was met with a wave of condemnation for pushing an assisted suicide procedure in the name of hypothetical science. That didn’t deter a 32-year-old Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s then-president, from signing up to Nectome’s initial 30 person waitlist.
“I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he told MIT Technology Review, shortly before the company halted sign-ups and pivoted to memory preservation research.
