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January 10, 2025 - 2:15pm
In 1802 the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, burnished by the success of the third of his five-volume Celestial Mechanics, was asked by Emperor Napoleon why his work made no mention of God. He is said to have replied: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
In modern science, whose credibility is rooted in its earthbound Enlightenment provenance which privileges empiricism over superstition, we might recognise Laplace’s confidence. But what happens when technology becomes so advanced that they abandon terrestrial, human purpose? This is already in the post. At an Israeli university, research is under way to develop a vaccine which stops the ageing of the brain. In an announcement which this week turned the heads of national newspapers, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science spoke of an “immune-targeting approach to reduce the threat from our internal enemies that cause our decline with ageing”. Described less soberly by MailOnline as a “Benjamin Button vaccine”, the research suggests a perplexing possibility: that humanity can be shielded from time itself — and specifically, the devastating diseases associated with mental decline.
The reason why this story gained so much traction was not because of its implications for dementia, but because of its place within a technological culture of Promethean ambitions. The American “biohacker” Bryan Johnson, who has gained a certain notoriety on X for his bizarre accounts of attempts to reverse his biological age (which include transfusions of his son’s blood and monitoring his erections) is among those pushing the envelope with increasingly grand declarations. This week, giving an interview which you might just want to listen to, for fear of being distracted by his oddly airbrushed, age-ambiguous looks (he is 47), Johnson said: “We told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God”.
The interviewer, clearly perturbed, warns that previous “utopias” did not always go to plan; Johnson brushes this off. Defenestrating the whole of theology in a discussion about machine learning, he claims that the characteristics of superintelligent AI — that it “exceeds our capacity in all things, even our capacity to understand” — mirror those of supposed divinity.
The gloss of mysticism here is important: the tech vanguard is not simply interested in advancement, but philosophy. Elon Musk’s ambition to make humanity a “multi-planet species” integrated with computers via Neuralink is just one example. The computer scientist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that AI will reach singularity by 2045, leaving “no distinction … between human and machine”. The Google offshoot Calico is another life-extension project hoping to redefine biology; OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s Nectome venture revives that very Sixties sci-fi dream of uploading brains to computers in the name of digital immortality.
If these projects prove successful, innovation can offer us not just better lives, but infinite ones. Decades ago, another scientific idealist was nicknamed the “American Prometheus” and lived to regret the atomic consequences of his triumph. One wonders what Robert Oppenheimer would think of this new crop of tech gods; will they feel similar remorse? We shall see if they cause similar destruction.
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SubscribeIt is said the past is a foreign place and they do things differently there. It is also true that the future is a crazy place and they do mad things there.
Our plastic brains are shaped by experiences when we are young and informed by learning from the past before us. The further we live into the future, the less comfortable we find ourselves. I can imagine a lot about my life would be distatesteful or worse to my great grand parents and their forebearers. I’m sure there’s a lot about the future I’ll find distasteful or worse.
So, while technology might extend my total life, it doesn’t extend the 20 or so formative years that largely dictate my adaptation to this life. As the world changes ever more during my ever longer life, I increasingly become less and less well adapted to the new world brought to me by the future. Those who open the pandorean box of bodily immortality might well find their mortal minds haunted and tortured by a future beyond adaptation.
I grew up reading a lot of science fiction. I’m finally starting to feel like the world around me makes sense.
They are not Promethean but rather Icurian. They think they are flying to bring fire down from the gods but they instead will find the heat too much for their wings.
I think they are Faustian.
Every once in a while these stories pop up. Anti-ageing, room temperature superconductors, infinite energy sources, super batteries, colonization of the solar system, faster than light travel, (thinking) machines taking over all jobs. We have been hearing it for most of the 20th century. They make good headlines and popular books, and it is interesting to think about it for sure. But we also have to remain realistic.
There are often deep, fundamental challenges, and we lack the same drive for fundamental science and engineering that existed during the Cold War. Nevertheless, modern medicine is basically already anti-ageing in action. We live a lot longer on average in the West, although life-expectancy in the US has been regressing. When it comes to living forever, there are difficulties such as Telomeres. Biohackers cannot get around that and some of them seem a bit like modern alchemists to me.
Singularity means that technological progress gets out of control because we have been able to develop a “super intelligence” able to improve itself ever more rapidly. This is not the same as post-humanism, although it would make some sense that we merge with machines at that point. However, some scientists like the late Moore himself have raised fundamental objections. I would think that even an AI has to abide to the laws of complexity in relation to entropy.
As for uploading consciousness, that is utter science fiction. We don’t really understand that much about the brain on a fundamental level and we don’t actually know what consciousness is. In fact, an Elegans worm has only a few neurons, which we have mapped, and we still don’t really understand it. Nobel laureate Penrose suggests stuff might be going on beyond our current physics.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is essential to dream. Many ‘impossible’ dreams have been realized after all.
Life expectancy is dropping in other countries too. I strongly suspect current generations with their more sedentary lives and worse diets than the wartime generations might get a shock regarding their life expectancy, regardless of medical progress.
Entropy always wins, there will be some syndrome that will occur over time, new diseases to find cures for. How about Theseus’ paradox (aka Trigger’s Broom) where we cease to be original beings, organics replaced by mechcanics like the Star Trek Borg where individualism and humanity is stripped from existence.
Paraphrasing the line from a Clint Eastwood film, The Outlaw Josey Wales “Dying is easy, it’s living that’s hard”, another paradox.
Would that be a paraphrase of my all-time favourite movie quote ” dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ “?
Anti-aging is medicine’s Tower of Babel. It’s never wise to play God.
Seems a re-reading of “Frankenstein” is in order. These transhumanists aren’t so much creating God as playing God. Whether funding an ideology that treats the material fact of sex as just some abstraction, or research that attempts a similar end-run around aging — another innate biological reality — their arrogance and shortsightedness in asserting their supposed intelligence over that of Nature is apparently depthless.
I watched the video – he does not really look young the way young people look. He looks like a prematurely aged boy.