Sam Altman, 32, is one of 25 people who are on a waiting list at Nectome, a start-up firm that promises to download a person’s brain onto a computer after death.
But the only way to get the contents from the brain is for the person to be killed in a legal, doctor-assisted suicide – only available in America in five US states.
Mr Altman is head of Y Combinator and OpenAI.
He became a tech superstar in 2014 when he was appointed CEO of YC, a firm which has birthed around $50billion (£35 billion) worth of startups including Dropbox and Airbnb.
Nectome teases those who want to sign up by by asking: “What if we told you we could back up your mind?”
Nectome’s co-founder Robert McIntyre told MIT Technology Review: “The user experience will be identical to physician assisted suicide.”
The business embalms the brain and downloads it to a computer for future use, the publication reports.
Additionally, the company’s website claims that it will be able to “preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favourite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family.
Adding: “We believe that within the current century it will be feasible to digitise this information and use it to recreate your consciousness.”
Embalming fluid allows a body to be frozen in time – and not suffer any signs of ageing for hundreds of years. But the brain must be fresh in order for it to work.
Nectome believes that its business could help the terminally ill who may wish to use the physician-assisted suicide to preserve their memories.
The head of the firm claims that their business model is completely legal.
And scientists believe this type of practice could become commonplace in the near future.
Dr Hannah Critchlow, a Cambridge neuroscientist said in 2015, that it was quite possible for a computer to be built to recreate the 100 trillion connections in the brain, allowing a human brain to be downloaded onto a computer.
She said that the brain worked like a large circuit board. And when pressed on whether it would be possible to download consciousness onto a machine, she said it was, and people might be able to live inside a machine.
She said: “If you had a computer that could make those 100 trillion circuit connections then that circuit is what makes us us, and so, yes, it would be possible.
“People could probably live inside a machine. Potentially, I think it is definitely a possibility.”