Tech • AI • Robotics
Que cache vraiment Merge Labs d'Altman ?
6/10TL;DR
In 2018, a startup offered brain preservation for future revival, reflecting a growing Silicon Valley belief in overcoming death through technology.
KEY POINTS
Brain Preservation for Future Revival in 2018
In 2018, the startup Nectom, part of the larger entity W, introduced a radical service offering to preserve individuals' brains immediately after death. Clients would be anesthetized, their blood replaced with a chemical solution that instantly fixed every neuron and synaptic connection, effectively turning the brain into a glass-like statue. This preserved brain would then be stored for potentially centuries, awaiting future technology capable of reconstructing consciousness in a machine or different body.
The Inescapable Role of Death in the Process
The preservation procedure inevitably required the person to die, making death during the operation unavoidable and integral to the process. Despite this, at least 25 people joined the waiting list to undergo this preservation method, including an individual named Samtman, who paid $10,000 for it. This niche practice highlighted the intersection of extreme technology and the human desire for immortality.
Connection to Sam Altman and Technological Ambitions
By January 2026, Sam Altman launched Merch Labs, a brain-machine interface company valued at $850 million, with significant backing from OpenAI. The company’s name symbolized his commitment to merging human cognition with machine intelligence. Altman’s vision underscores a belief that combining human and artificial intelligence is the only viable path to surviving against emerging superintelligences.
A Personal Investment in Immortality
Altman’s involvement in brain preservation and later in funding relevant technologies reveals a strategic plan unfolding over years. Buying his place for brain cryopreservation in 2018 and later financially supporting brain-computer interfaces suggests his long-term goal is technological immortality by enabling his consciousness to be uploaded and preserved.
Broader Trends Among Tech Billionaires
Altman is not alone in this quest. Other tech icons like Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk are heavily investing in longevity research and AI-human fusion technologies. For example, Musk aims to merge the human brain directly with AI systems. These entrepreneurs treat death not as an inevitable destiny but as a technical challenge to be overcome through innovation.
Philosophical Shift in Silicon Valley
These developments indicate a profound shift in how leading technologists perceive humanity's future. They consider current human biology a preliminary draft, to be superseded by a "post-human" era where consciousness can be uploaded, preserved, and extended indefinitely through superintelligence and advanced machinery.
AI Beyond Productivity: A Quest for Eternal Life
The AI and biotech breakthroughs being pursued are not merely about enhancing daily efficiency or productivity. Instead, they serve a grander ambition: to enable humans, especially their creators, to evade death itself by becoming eternal beings through technological transcendence.
This evolving fusion of neuroscience, AI, and longevity research shapes a vision where mortality becomes a solvable engineering problem, and human consciousness can theoretically escape the biological limits that have defined existence for millennia.
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