Roundtable on Cognitive Immortality: Before Uploading Your Brain to the Cloud, Figure Out Who Pays the Server Bills

On Tuesday, November 17, 2026, MIT Technology Review will host an online roundtable themed "Cognitive Immortality". The event is scheduled for 17:00 GMT, 12:00 PM Eastern Time, 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Registration is required to attend.

The discussion gets straight to the point: how to keep the brain operating, even beyond biological death. Two distinct paths are laid out for the conversation: incremental brain replacement, and uploading memories to the cloud. The first approach envisions replacing brain tissue bit by bit with new components to maintain unbroken continuity of consciousness; the second converts memories into storable, transferable data. While they sound like two separate technical routes, both are stuck on the exact same core question: what proof do you have that the entity left after the process is still you?

The speakers are Mary Beth Griggs, Science Editor at MIT Technology Review, and Antonio Regalado, Senior Biomedicine Editor at MIT Technology Review. Regalado has long covered biomedical startups, and has reported on ARPA-H researcher Jean Hébert's plan for incremental brain replacement, as well as controversial projects like "brainless human clones". Griggs works as a science journalist. Together, the pair will pull the topic out of the realm of science fiction, and anchor it in real-world experiments, regulation, and funding.

Antonio Regalado, Senior Biomedicine Editor, MIT Technology Review.

Mary Beth Griggs, Science Editor, MIT Technology Review.

This type of roundtable is well worth attending, but do not mistake concept art for a formal product roadmap. For memory uploading, you first need to address questions of bandwidth, storage format, access permissions, and the right to erasure. For incremental brain replacement, you have to resolve issues around surgical risk, immune rejection, and how to verify continuity of personal identity. Cloud services have formal SLAs (Service Level Agreements), but consciousness does not. If that future ever arrives, the question of who foots the server bill will likely become a mainstream public issue far earlier than debates over "immortality" itself.

Register for this roundtable

Related Reading:

• 6 Wild Ideas for Extending Your Mind to Achieve Cognitive Immortality
• A Low-Profile Startup Is Marketing Brainless Human Clones
• The Technology That Lets Deceased People "Speak" Is Here — Are We Ready?
• This Researcher Wants to Replace Your Brain Piece by Piece

If you just want to get a clear sense of how far this field has actually progressed today, read through the specific projects in the Related Stories section first, then tune into the roundtable. Right now, cognitive immortality is far more a set of unsolved engineering problems than a commercially available service. This takeaway is not romantic, but it saves you a huge amount of wasted time.