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.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
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.
Strangely, I also read a lot of science fiction and I see it coming true. A common theme was that people would travel around in their own private pods, requiring no physical effort. So this led to people losing the use of their legs. This is very true today but I don’t remember predictions that people would gain a lot of weight because of their inactivity.
I can remember. We were supposed to develop big giant heads to contain our superior brains while our nearly useless bodies withered into stick-men.
Which is pretty much the opposite of what is happening.
Absolutely spot on! I think I am older than you and I see around me a life that I don’t actually like. There is family all around me but I am an alien because I have seen things which others can’t even imagine.
This life, where everyone can’t stop looking at their phones is basically stupid – although I am very computer literate and have been for many years. I message people in order to be polite when they send me their pics, which are not special. Their phones have fabulous cameras but the pics are not really very good. So, everyone is using the technology to the limit – for no reason. Life is based on communicating with as many people as possible – for no reason. As you can see, I would not like to live on and on and on …. for no reason.
Surely the reason for living is living itself and seeing the interesting things that happen around you if not to you.
Excellent point!
I am sure the nice governments will help them out with same easy to get euthanasia.
Oh wait, they are already doing that……
You’re on a roll today,
First (for me) concerning the UK Power Supply story and now this comment.
I like your brain! More, please!
A really interesting reflection; thank you.
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.
“These people are nihilists. There’s nothing to fear.”
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.
I read recently that the energy requirement to power new AI programming (such as chatGPT) will exceed the out energy output of India soon. I wonder if the energy requirement to power the calculations for AI singularity is even possible. Or what we have to sacrifice to make it happen.
Is that not just during the training of the model? Of course when it is self-innovating it may need to perpetually keep training large parts of its model. Chomsky made the point that Brains in that sense are far more efficient than machine learning ‘AI’. So apparently our minds work intrinsically different and that probably has its reasons. Anyway, there are quite some physicists and engineers who have pointed out fundamental problems with the idea of singularity, as I stated, Moore was one of them.
for the vedic philosophers, consciousness was the underlying ground of the universe, rather than some kind of emergent property of material interactions in individual brains.
Correct, as far as I know it is a common view in Eastern philosophy that consciousness exists prior to matter or that the ontological differences between the two (i.e. dualism) is an illusion. Of course Descartes also arrived at the position that, in the end, your thoughts are the only thing you can be certain about. The external world is conceptional.
The idea that what exists outside of our thoughts is not certain seems a somewhart arrogant belief to me.
Yeh, the ‘uploading of consciousness’ relies on materially replicating some materialist idea of consciousness as an emergent property, which seems completely unsatisfactory to me.
Also, a criticism from a materialist perspective would be that whatever upload systems & business/tech systems are required to perpetuate the uploaded consciousness would also exist in their own limited material terms too, and would themselves be subject to real world change – war/ infrastructure collapse etc — & themselves finite and mortal.
Of course we now know what consciousness is, it just takes 7 billion numbers to describe, to the dislike of all those who wanted it to be either undescribable or easily broken down into simple components. AIs nowadays easily pass the turing test and do useful work at speed unimaginable. They even replicate the frailties of people, with AI being known to be lazier when you tell it its December.
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’ “?
The quote I used is the meeting with Ten Bears, yours (another great one) is when he faces off against a bounty hunter.
Monco : [counting reward sums of outlaws he just killed] Ten thousand… twelve thousand… fifteen… sixteen… seventeen… twenty-two. Twenty-two?
[a wounded Groggy comes from behind and raises his gun; Monco whirls and shoots him dead]
Monco : …Twenty-seven.
Col. Douglas Mortimer : Any trouble, boy?
Monco : No, old man. Thought I was having trouble with my adding. It’s all right now.
Anti-aging is medicine’s Tower of Babel. It’s never wise to play God.
Perhaps all medical interventions should cease then as most could be reasoned to be playing god and interfering with nature.
Or perhaps its Tower of Siloam
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.
They know not what they do.
I watched the video – he does not really look young the way young people look. He looks like a prematurely aged boy.
Vampire is what comes to mind for me, when I see him.
Looks like a 47 year old man, but a particularly clean-shaven one.
You get the sense that as well as shaving thoroughly, he has also been vigourously scrubbing his face.
We are now in an era when wrinkles can be, more or less convincingly, smoothed away.
But he does also have something of an “uncanny valley” aspect to his appearance, eliciting the sensation one gets upon seeing a puppet, or a robot.
The major question is “Do you want to live forever?” – Me not!
You probably think that in the same way I used to be unable to imagine being over 30 – or if I did, I pictured myself as some desiccated husk of a person. It’s a lack of understanding of how you’ll feel when you get there, but also probably a lack of perspective on what older age might look like if certain things are enabled.
For example, I would absolutely take the option of assisted dying if I were to develop dementia, having recently watched my father rapidly decline and die with it, knowing I don’t want that to be how my life ends. But if I knew I could remain “me” for quite a while, I might not mind the idea of going on longer than I might currently imagine. It all depends on what it looks like.
There are always positives and negatives to technological progress – we don’t need to focus solely on the dystopian elements. I bet in 1900, when life expectancy was no more than like 50 years, it was hard to imagine the quality of life many enjoy now well into their 70s and beyond. We shouldn’t let skepticism turn into too much cynicism.
If you had dementia, under the current legislation moving through Parliament, you would surely not be able to give consent because you would not be of sound mind.
Of course that, and the requirement for self-medication, removes the right for many others.
So it will begin, the constant extension of the “safeguards” for those whose suffering does not fit the rule.
Are the cognitively impaired necessarily suffering, though? I don’t think dementia necessarily means one is unhappy.
What you are saying sounds great, but I am absolutely convinced that we must give way to the young.
One of the most shocking things for me during the pandemic was the fact that the young and children were mandatory vaccinated, although the virus was completely safe for them.
For the first time, I emphasize this, for the first time in history, the lives of children were put at risk to prolong the lives of the elderly.
The bigger question as always (even when it’s not broached): what do we do with the extra timespan?
Every aspect of our humanity is predicated (consciously or not) on no longer being alive at some point. Without age, there is no youth. No machine, indeed no human, can provide answers to this question. The search, the yearning for a God is built upon our mortality. As an atheist, i understand all religious discourse in terms of this yearning.
We won’t acheive God-like powers because to do so would require us to answer these questions, to which there are no answers.
Yes, but at a certain point, it would no longer be slightly embarrassing to have a much younger partner. A 97 year old shouldn’t have to fret about dating a younger woman.
Or perhaps a younger woman would be 97 years old.
Bryan Johnson looks about 47 to me
A nasty guy. The only good thing is he will croak anyway.
I need this.
What were we talking about?
Poppy, I’m not really sure of you, but if you just keep skipping lightly over random themes we will never develop any concept of your instincts or intellectual heft.
How exactly is the word ‘vaccine’ being defined here? Is it now any injectible?
Ah the search for the Fountain of Youth! Hardly a new endeavour.