App Idea: Upload Your Brain to a Neural Network

Cryonics is pseudoscience. That doesn't stop people from trying.

I remember once I put a banana in the freezer. I forgot about it for an hour, when I took it out, it was all black. Every single cell in that banana that had retained water had exploded as the water froze and expanded. The entire volume of the fruit was in a state of being completely bruised. Apparently people who believe they can freeze their bodies and be re-animated in the future have never had this little life experience of forgetting a banana in the freezer. Or maybe they think the rate at which you can freeze and then thaw their body can prevent catastrophic damage at the cellular level to their brain and all the rest of their body (it doesn't).

The lesson to be learned here: a sufficiently unscrupulous entrepreneur can probably make a fortune off of people's desire to control the exact timing of when the expire from this mortal coil.

So I propose an idea for a web app (or maybe as a product proposal to anyone at Meta/Facebook or Alphabet/Google willing to hire me as a consultant), we can make a billion overnight by letting people upload their brains to a neural network like ChatGPT. Just have them collect everything they have written in their entire lives, especially their e-mail correspondence, their Facebook posts, their Twitter Posts, any blog posts they have written, scans of their hand-written diaries, everything they can find and digitize, and feed it into a neural network. The neural network then, you could argue, would contain a large portion of everything a person has ever experienced, learned, or thought about, and it could serve as their avatar in their absence after they have passed away.

If these massive tech corporations aren't going to take that idea seriously, maybe they can hire me as a PR guru. I would try to make the idea of stealing people's private data — the entire history of everything they have ever written online — less horrifying, maybe even more desirable. I would do this by describing these online services that sell targeted ads as a means of letting people live forever as a chat bot in the digital realm. If Facebook and Google are not creating ad campaigns for this right now, they ought to be.

You could even make the neural network the executor of your estate, entrusting it to carry out your will, making all the same decisions that you would do if you were alive. You can guarantee through legal action carried out according to this artificial executor that if any of your kids or grand kids ever marry outside of their race, marry the same sex, or have gender reassignment surgery, they will suffer appropriately. It is the conservative bully's dream come true! It certainly seems to me that some of the people who care so much about extending their life to such unnatural extents are probably as unnaturally preoccupied with forcing their will upon their unfortunate family members in their absence. And with the current Supreme Court of the US, it would be easy enough to create law that allowed such AIs the legal authority to act as an executor of the estate of the deceased.

Note: I hope it is clear that I was being ironic in that last bit. I wish no suffering on anyone regardless of race, gender, or marital status.