SV’s Quest to Live Forever
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever Cal. restriction to #Singularity: Immortalists v Healthspanners, Meat Puppets v RoboCops
QT:{{”
“Immortalists fall into two camps. Those who might be called the Meat Puppets, led by de Grey, believe that we can retool our biology and remain in our bodies. The RoboCops, led by Kurzweil, believe that we’ll eventually merge with mechanical bodies and/or with the cloud. Kurzweil is a lifelong fixer and optimizer: early in his career, he invented the flatbed scanner and a machine that reads books aloud to the blind. Those inventions have improved dramatically in subsequent iterations, and now he’s positive that what he calls “the law of accelerating returns” for human longevity is about to kick in.”
…
“The battle between healthspanners and immortalists is essentially a contest between the power of evolution as ordained by nature and the potential power of evolution as directed by man. The healthspanners see us as subject to linear progress: animal studies take the time that they take; life sciences move at the speed of life. Noting that median life expectancy has been increasing in developed nations by about two and a half years a decade, Verdin told me, “If we can keep that pace up for the next two hundred years, and increase our life spans by forty years, that would be incredible.”
The immortalists have a different view of both our history and our potential. They see centuries of wild theorizing (that aging could be reversed by heating the body, or by breathing the same air as young virgins) swiftly replaced by computer-designed drugs and gene therapies. Bill Maris said, “Health technology, which for five thousand years was symptomatic and episodic—‘Here are some
leeches!’—is becoming an information technology, where we can read and edit our own genomes.”
Many immortalists view aging not as a biological process but as a physical one: entropy demolishing a machine. And, if it’s a machine, couldn’t it be like a computer?
…
“And yet. Last year, the geneticist Nir Barzilai hosted a screening of a documentary about longevity, and afterward he posed a question to the three hundred people in the audience. He told me, “I said, ‘In nature, longevity and reproduction are exchangeable. So Choice One is, you are immortalized, but there is no more reproduction on Earth, no pregnancy, no first birthday, no first love’—and I go on and on and on.” He laughed, amused by his own determination to load the dice. “ ‘Choice Two,’ I said, ‘is you live to be eighty-five and not one day sick, everything healthy and fine, and then one morning you just don’t wake up.” The vote was decisive, he said. “Choice One got ten or fifteen people. Everyone else raised their hands for Choice Two.”
This wish to preserve life as we know it, even at the cost of dying, is profoundly human. We are encoded”
“}}
