MIT Technology Review reports on Nectome.

But wait a minute. Quite aside from the fact that they're going to kill you to do the procedure, the procedure only preserves your body "as a statue of frozen glass" and it's merely a possibility that "someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation." It's just the old "cryonics," with an updated preservation method and the bold innovation of murder. Oh, but it's not murder if they start with a terminally ill patient within the meaning of California’s End of Life Option Act.

“The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide,” [says one of the founders]. “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”

I understand what he's saying. It doesn't need actually to work. The benefit is realized at the point of entering death with the belief that you are not really dying.

What is the updated preservation method? They kill the patient with a heart-lung machine pumping a "mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks." This means they're not trying to save the tissue but only to save the "information that’s present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details."

“If the brain is dead, it’s like your computer is off, but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t there,” says [Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who is president of the Brain Preservation Foundation].

A brain connectome is inconceivably complex; a single nerve can connect to 8,000 others, and the brain contains millions of cells. Today, imaging the connections in even a square millimeter of mouse brain is an overwhelming task. “But it may be possible in 100 years,” says Hayworth. “Speaking personally, if I were a facing a terminal illness I would likely choose euthanasia by [this method].”...

Writing in our pages in 2015, the McGill University neuroscientist Michael Hendricks decried the “abjectly false hope” peddled by transhumanists promising resurrection in ways that technology can probably never deliver.

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.”

If it's just very rich people buying comical hope and the money goes to people who are doing at least something technological, what's the problem? Is Hendricks worried about ludicrous rich folk, hucksters of false hopes, or people in the future troubled by stockpiled brains? The biggest problem seems to be the danger of taking something seriously that we already know is not serious. But we do that a lot. And there's harm in pointing that out. Product-market fit is people believing that it works.