“Preservation can save the world!” by Aurelia

I'm Aurelia Song and I founded the preservation company Nectome. We do planned whole-body end-of-life preservation for future revival. That is, terminally-ill people come to us in Oregon, and we preserve them immediately after their death in the hopes that one day people in the future will welcome them back with love. We want to build a future that celebrates and restores those who are preserved today. I've argued at length in previous posts that properly done end-of-life preservation works today because we know structural preservation is sufficient and we can provably preserve sufficient structure. This post is about some of the consequences of this being true. Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before. tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there's no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work [...] --- Outline: (00:47) Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before. (01:27) How could preservation possibly be relevant to AI this year? (02:48) What are accelerationists thinking? (03:21) I was an accelerationist before AI was even cool (05:16) Why didn't I care about the downsides of AI? (07:59) How I learned personal responsibility in technology. (11:03) Preservation gave me a new, better purpose in life. (12:47) Death makes everyone crazy and preservation can stop it. (12:52) Denial and acceptance, the twin seeds of madness (14:39) Preservation is a new way to directly face death without compromise (16:30) Let's save the world! The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TCpMtoDzC5p5WtQM/preservation-can-save-the-world --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: <a href="https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/6dc22e1bdc2514787f64eeeab77e1c2358107caf636f9b304