life extension

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100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Dorff, “Becoming Yet More Like God: A Jewish Perspective on Radical Life Extension,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Derek F. Maher and Calvin Mercer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 69. 6 Sherry E. Fohr, “Karma, Austerity, and Time Cycles: Jainism and Radical Life Extension,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Maher and Mercer, 82. Jainism is an Indian religion that teaches nonviolence and austerity. 7 Ronald Cole-Turner, “Extreme Longevity Research: A Progressive Protestant Perspective,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Maher and Mercer, 59. 8 Ibid., 60. 9 Phone interview with Lawrence Iannaccone, April 1, 2010. 10 Peter Berger, “Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger,” Christian Century, October 29, 1997, 972–978. 11 Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, ed.

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Cameron and Amy Michelle DeBaets, “Be Careful What You Wish For? Radical Life Extension Coram De: A Reformed Protestant Perspective,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Maher and Mercer, 44. 58 Ghulam Ahmed Parvez, cited in Aisha Y. Musa, “A Thousand Years, Less Fifty: Toward a Quranic View of Extreme Longevity,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Maher and Mercer, 127–128. 59 Musa, “A Thousand Years, Less Fifty,” 128. 60 Livia Kohn, “Told You So: Extreme Longevity and Daoist Realization,” in Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, ed. Maher and Mercer, 87. 61 Ibid., 95. 62 Ibid., 96. 63 Ibid. 64 Lawrence R.

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They were thought to possess strong rejuvenation properties because of their ability to shed their skin.43 Such powers led respected thinkers to recommend medicines made from snakes, but sometimes such attempts at extending life went badly wrong. In 1633, the wife of a well-regarded Royal Society fellow died from drinking “viper wine,” and she was not the only one to have suffered in a life-extension experiment.44 Philosopher and author Francis Bacon (no relation to Roger) became deeply interested in life extension. Like Aristotle before him, Bacon thought that aging was due to a shifting in a spiritlike essence in the body, but he deviated from the Greek philosopher’s path by thinking that the human body could be repaired.45 Bacon theorized that to extend life, the human spirit or flame could not escape the body but had to be kept cool enough so that the heat from this flame didn’t damage the person from inside.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

The more I learned about transhumanism, the more I came to see that, for all its apparent extremity and strangeness, it was nonetheless exerting certain formative pressures on the culture of Silicon Valley, and thereby the broader cultural imagination of technology. Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering.

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(You would not by any means be the first person to think here of Pascal’s Wager.) “Personally,” said Max as we made our way through the patient care bay toward the exit, “I’m hoping to avoid having to be preserved. My ideal scenario is I stay healthy and take care of myself, and more funding goes into life extension research, and we actually achieve longevity escape velocity.” He was referring here to the scenario, projected by the life extension impresario Aubrey de Grey, a scientific advisor at Alcor, whereby for every year that passes, the progress of longevity research is such that average human life expectancy increases by more than a year—a situation that would, in theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death.

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Among the ideas he had popularized (through, among other channels, a widely consumed 2005 TED talk) was something referred to as “longevity escape velocity.” This was the notion that the pace of technological advancement in the area of life extension would eventually increase to the point that, for every year that passes, average human life expectancy increases by more than a year—at which point, the theory goes, we put a comfortable distance between ourselves and our own mortality. Over the past century or so, life expectancy had been increasing at the rate of about two years per decade, but the optimistic expectation within the life extension movement was that we would soon reach a point where the ratio flipped—thereby, as de Grey put it, “effectively eliminating the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year.”

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

But for the most part, The Science and Technology of Growing Young is told through the stories of the amazing people and ideas I have discovered in my quest to help one billion people live to see one hundred. I am convinced that the future will hold some form of extreme longevity. That may come in the form of radical life extension to 150 or 200 years. That may come in the form of “technical immortality,” where a new definition of life is preserved infinitely. It may even be genuine biological immortality, where human beings will have the choice to continually extend their lives or not. But I believe that radical life extension will happen, and relatively soon. But before we jump into that exciting future, let’s take a closer look at what we really mean by longevity. CHAPTER 2 DEFINING LONGEVITY The Three Dimensions of Longevity Impact and the Two Horizons of the Longevity Revolution “Aging may not have to proceed in one single direction.”

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t=2257. 5Rodale Books, “New book released—Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever,” Kurzweil Web Page, last modified November 17, 2004, https://www.kurzweilai.net/fantastic-voyagebook-announcement. Chapter 3 1Joseph Liu, “Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension,” Pew Research Center Web Page, August 6, 2013, https://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/. 2Gallagher, James. “Fertility Rate: ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Global Crash in Children Being Born.” BBC News, BBC, 14 July 2020, www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521. Chapter 4 1Rayner, Claire. “Alex Comfort.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Mar. 2000, www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/28/guardianobituaries. 2Aubrey de Grey, Meeting with author in San Francisco in November 26, 2019. 3Sinclair, David A., and Matthew D.

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First—Do Not Die Breaking the “Sound Barrier” of Lifespan Turning Back Time, and Growing Young The Near Horizon of Longevity: Living to Be 150 Years Old The Far Horizon of Longevity: Living to Be 200 Years Old—or More The Current Day: How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever CHAPTER 3: The Longevity Revolution—The Three Most Popular Myths About Longevity, and the Four Technological Shifts Blowing Them Apart Myth 1: “Living More Means Living Less” Myth 2: “Longevity Is Dangerous and Selfish” Myth 3: “Life Extension Is Not Really Possible” The Genetic Engineering Breakthrough The Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough The Health-Care Hardware Breakthrough The Health Data Intelligence Breakthrough CHAPTER 4: What Is Aging, Anyway?—The Colorful Theories of What Causes Aging, and Why They May Not Even Matter Theories of Aging Entering a New Era of Aging The Hallmarks of Aging Age Is in the Eye of the Epigenome Technology as Timekeeper Age Is Just a Number THE NEAR HORIZON OF LONGEVITY CHAPTER 5: DIY Diagnostics—How Wearable, Portable, Embeddable, and Ingestible New Technologies Will Deliver Early Diagnosis and Radically Reduce Disease and Death Diagnosis Is in a Deep Crisis Diagnostics Become Noninvasive and Highly Affordable Diagnostics Go DIY A Look into the (Near) Future of DIY Diagnostics Data Are at the Center of Diagnostics CHAPTER 6: Precision Medicine—How Health Data and Artificial Intelligence Are Turning the Practice of Sick Care into the Science of Health Care Getting Personalome AI to the Rescue The Promise of Precision The Doctor Won’t See You Now The Power of Virtual Connection Your Data or Your Life The Health-Care Landscape It Is A-Changin’ CHAPTER 7: Engineering Our Genetic Code—How Human Genome Sequencing Is Paving the Way for Radical New Technological Advances in Health Care and Longevity Sequencing the Human Genome Making CRISPR Work of Gene Editing Altering the Genes Inside Your Body’s Cells Could This Be the End of Cancer?

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

William Briggs, Human Longevity, Inc. Amalio Telenti, Human Longevity, Inc. Riccardo Sabatini, Human Longevity, Inc. David Karow, Human Longevity, Inc. Heather Kowalski, Human Longevity, Inc./The J. Craig Venter Institute Max More, Alcor Life Extension Foundation Hugh Hixon, Alcor Life Extension Foundation Aaron Drake, Alcor Life Extension Foundation Diane Cremeens, Alcor Life Extension Foundation J. Craig George, North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management Joon Yun, Palo Alto Investors, LLC Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review Herbert Boyer, Genentech, Inc. David Masci, Pew Research Center Carolyn Funk, Pew Research Center BOOKS Botstein, David.

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Masci, David, and Funk, Carolyn. “Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension.” Pew Research Center, August 6, 2013. pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension. ———. “To Count Our Days: The Scientific and Ethical Dimensions of Radical Life Extension.” Pew Research Center, August 6, 2013. pewforum.org/2013/08/06/to-count-our-days-the-scientific-and-ethical-dimensions-of-radical-life-extension. McCracken, Harry, and Lev Grossman. “Google vs. Death: How CEO Larry Page Has Transformed the Search Giant Into a Factory for Moonshots.”

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Graham, Megan Smith, and Rochelle Buffenstein. “Naked Mole-Rat Mortality Rates Defy Gompertzian Laws by Not Increasing With Age.” eLife 7 (2018): e31157. elifesciences.org/articles/31157. Shermer, Michael. “Radical Life-Extension Is Not Around the Corner-Can Science and Silicon Valley Defeat Death?” Scientific American, October 1, 2016. scientificamerican.com/article/radical-life-extension-is-not-around-the-corner. Sifferlin, Alexandra. “How Silicon Valley Is Trying to Hack Its Way Into a Longer Life.” Time, February 16, 2017. Simon, Stacy. “Cancer Statistics Report: Death Rate Down 23% in 21 Years.”

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Even in the tragic case of Terry Schiavo a commentator not generally noted for his progressive views – President Bush – stated that it is best to “err on the side of life.” Yet those who doubt the benefits of life extension argue that condemning 100,000 people every day to an unnecessarily (as it will eventually be) early death on the basis of their age is a policy that needs no more justification than an uncertainty regarding whether life extension will be good for us. In responding to the suggestion that Kass’s “wisdom of repugnance” actually constitutes a strong argument for life extension, Hurlbut has noted that “Young children love their grandparents. They don’t find them repulsive. They see in them the beauty of the generative spirit, of the nurturing mind.”

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Concluding Thoughts We could start off asking the question: What might be concerns of artistic works and design-based practices that approach human enhancement and life extension? Addressing this question would imply that possible questions from artistic practices are different than the questions tackled by science. It also implies that there are borders/boundaries that need to be mediated. Another question might be: If human–computer interaction is now a developed field of study, and bioart has become a promising field within the arts curriculum, is there potential that human enhancement and life extension might follow suit? Possibly. Relatedly, one might ask: Is there a rapport between aesthetics and enhancement which makes enhancement superficial and artificial, rather than being aligned with the notion of the beauty of nature and natural?

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In fact, the areas on which I think he is right are so key to the arguments involved that I feel he is genuinely susceptible to persuasion of the merits of extreme life extension, albeit not of many other aspects of modern or anticipated biomedical modifications of our natural lives. It is seldom effective to overstate one’s disagreements, nor to overlook one’s areas of agreement, with someone whose views one would like to alter – and Kass’s influence has been so great that even a softening of his opposition to such work would have considerable policy consequences. The most straightforward way to explain what I like about Kass’s views on life extension is to refer not to their most high-profile exposition, the chapter “Ageless Bodies” from the President’s Council report (2003), but rather to two of Kass’s earlier publications.

Fix Your Gut: The Definitive Guide to Digestive Disorders by John Brisson

23andMe, big-box store, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, meta-analysis, microbiome, pattern recognition, publication bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Zimmermann PGP

NOW has a free online university through their website that helps consumers learn more about the supplements they are taking. Number 4 Company: Life Extension Life Extension is one of the oldest US-based supplement companies and manufactures their products in Florida. They are a great supplement company offering a lot of niche supplements, as well as great proprietary supplements. Life Extension does a lot of research when it comes to their supplements more than any other supplement company in the United States does! They occasionally put fillers in their products, but they maintain a high standard of excellence. I recommend that everyone sign up for the Life Extension free magazine. It is full of great information and studies.

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Enzymedica Digestive Enzyme Gold – take one capsule with every meal daily. Thorne Research B complex– take one capsule daily, do not use if you are an overmethylator. Pure Encapsulations zinc carnosine – take one capsule with a meal, twice daily. Do not wear tight clothing or tight belts. Melatonin Life Extension extended release – take 3-10 mg before bed daily. If all else fails to relieve LES issues: Jarrow 5-HTP – follow supplement bottle recommendations, and supplement no longer than two weeks. Calcium citrate, in theory, should strengthen the LES when it encounters it if you drink it in powder form mixed with water.

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Jarrow R-lipoic acid - one capsule, twice a daily with meals. Magnesium malate - 600 mg total daily. Enzymedica Digestive Enzyme Gold - take one capsule with every meal. Thorne Research B complex - one capsule daily, do not use if you are an overmethylator. Pure Encapsulations zinc carnosine - one capsule with meals, twice daily. Melatonin Life Extension extended release - take three mg at night daily. If all else fails to provide relief: Jarrow 5-HTP - follow supplement recommendations on the bottle. Only take for two weeks at most. Follow SIBO protocol (Ch. 9) if bacteria are present. Consider a low residue diet. Consider using spicy food or ginger to increase gastric emptying.

Just Keep Calm & Take Some Magnesium - Why a "Boring" Mineral Is Suddenly Hot Property for Soothing Bodies and Calming Minds by James Lee

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, epigenetics, life extension, planned obsolescence, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

When people think of anti-aging, they think of oxidative stress, antioxidants, expensive face creams and the like. However this is far too narrow a definition for anti-aging as I see it. I prefer to use the term life-extension, which is more descriptive of what it is I am looking to achieve with this book. Oh, and in the interests of disclosure, this book contains no secret tips on how to keep your skin looking its best – there are more than enough books on that already. Life extension is not just about eating broccoli and lathering Crème de la Mer on your face each night. It’s also about playing the odds. Each poor decision you make regarding your health accumulates.

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Who is actually older – the 80 year old who can run a marathon and write a novel or a 30 year old with type-2 diabetes that sits on the couch all day because of a bad back and muscle soreness? As part of this thinking we need to broaden our definition of anti-aging far beyond the concept of life-extension. I think a better target would be “life-extension + life-optimization”. Despite this, some researchers believe that by targeting one, you naturally target the other. The latest issue of the Public Policy & Aging Report (PP&AR), titled The Longevity Dividend: Geroscience Meets Geropolitics, states that the best way to achieve improved longevity and quality of life is by targeting the slowing down of the process of biological aging rather than targeting the individual diseases separately.

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For example, imagine that you smoke a pack a day of cigarettes ever each, drink a six pack of beer each night, drink a liter of Coca Cola each day while you work, take cocaine on weekends with your buddies, ride a high-powered motorbike everywhere (sometimes without a helmet), go skydiving each weekend, surf in an area notorious for great white sharks, have a high-stress job, rarely eat fruit or vegetables and eat a diet based primarily around junk food. How long do you think you will live? Each of your poor diet and lifestyle choices is like playing a game of Russian roulette. One day there will be a bullet in the chamber. So life extension is about a holistic plan that incrementally decreases your odds of dying by misadventure or developing a preventable disease. This is all about reducing risk, not about guaranteeing anything. Sometimes people can become fatalistic when they hear of the health fanatic that dropped dead at 40 with a heart attack.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Like every techno-utopian, Zoltan appears to flit with misleading ease between science and fiction, taking any promising piece of research as proof of victory. The three main transhumanist technologies that excite transhumanists like Zoltan are life extension, cryonic freezing and mind uploading. Each of them is advancing quickly. But they are also highly speculative. Radical life extension seeks to use a variety of medical advances—tissue rejuvenation, regenerative medicine, gene therapy, molecular repair—to slow and eventually stop the process of ageing. Ageing, after all, is simply an accumulation of damage to cells, tissues and molecules, and so it stands to reason there are molecular and cellular solutions.

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Transhumanism is a growing community of thousands of people who believe that technology can make us physically, intellectually, even morally better; that we can and should use technology to overcome the limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage—especially mortality—and thereby exceed the constraints of the human condition. Like most transhumanists, Zoltan believes that death is a biological quirk of nature, something we should not accept as inevitable. Transhumanists work on a dazzling array of cutting-edge technologies to that end, everything from life extension, anti-ageing genetic research, robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, space colonisation, virtual reality and cryonics. For the transhumanists, there is no ‘natural’ state of man. We’re always changing and adapting, and embracing technology is simply the next step along the evolutionary cycle.

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Although the quest for immortality arguably starts with the very first recorded piece of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old poem about Gilgamesh’s quest for the secret of eternal life, transhumanism’s modern roots are found in the ideas of early twentieth-century science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and the biologist Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous), who coined the term ‘transhuman’ to mean ‘beyond human’ in his 1951 book Knowledge, Morality and Destiny.2 Huxley, an agnostic on religious matters, thought that man’s natural evolution was of ever higher degrees of complexity, towards the ‘fullest realisation of his own inherent possibilities’, even if that meant transcending humanity. As science and technology started to have a profound effect on society in the 1960s and 1970s, those ‘inherent possibilities’ started to stretch. Organisations—often inspired by Huxley’s or Asimov’s writing—were founded to promote life extension and various types of radical futurist thinking. By the mid-1980s small groups of self-described transhumanists started meeting formally in California to discuss if and how technology might change human existence. In 1990—the year of the first gene-therapy trials, the first designer babies, and the World Wide Web—Max More set out a coherent philosophy of the movement in an influential paper called ‘Transhumanism: towards a futurist philosophy’.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Another enthusiastic and readable immortalist is Ray Kurzweil, as reflected in his many books and articles on the subject, most notably Fantastic Voyage: Living Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, 2004), Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (also with Terry Grossman, Rodale, 2009) and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005). The Immortality Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting radical life extension, has also published a collection of articles on the science and philosophy of the immortalists (including by Kurzweil and de Grey) called The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans (Libros en Red, 2004). At the time this book went to print, this collection was also available to download for free from imminst.org/book. A philosophical defense of radical life extension is offered by the work of John Harris, for example in Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making People Better (Princeton University Press, 2007), whereas those altogether opposed to such attempts are well represented by Francis Fukuyama in his book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Profile Books, 2002).

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Bryan Appleyard’s aforementioned How to Live Forever or Die Trying and Jonathan Weiner’s Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality (HarperCollins, 2010) both give good (somewhat skeptical) layman’s accounts of the modern life-extension movement’s aims and leading personalities. The demographer who calculated that curing cancer would add only three years to our lives was S. Jay Olshansky, and the pessimistic view of the possibility of radical life extension can be found in his book (with Bruce A. Carnes) The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging (W. W. Norton, 2001). An excellent overview of the science of life, death, aging and immortality can be found in The Living End by the gerontologist Guy Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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It therefore begins with the basics, the things that all humans need to keep going: food and drink, shelter and defenses. As societies develop, they refine the provision of these essentials, through collaborative efforts, specialization of labor and passing on of skills. At its core, a civilization is a collection of life-extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, medicine to combat injury and disease. But whereas most people are satisfied with applying these technologies to themselves, their families or their villages, the First Emperor had a much grander vision.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Piece by piece, or maybe all at once, we become what transhumanists argue is the next stage of evolution: some hybrid of person and machine, or maybe an entirely digital species. Along the way, though, we take on an increasingly mechanistic understanding of our personhood. Ironically, transhumanism is less about embracing the future than fixing the human experience as it is today. Medical and life extension interventions seek only to preserve the person who is alive right now. Cryonics seeks to freeze the human form in its current state in order to be reanimated in the future. Uploading one’s mind simply transfers the human brain, or a perfect clone of it, as is, into a more durable substrate. In some ways, transhumanism is a reactionary response to the sorts of changes inherent in nature, a defiant assertion of the individual against its own impermanence.

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The screen is encroaching on the eye, from TVs to computer monitors to phone screens to smart watches to VR goggles to tiny LEDs that project images onto the retina to neural implants that communicate directly with the optic nerve. With each leap in human–machine intimacy, resolution increases, and our utility value is improved along some measurable metric. This is the mindset encouraged by wristbands that count our heartbeats and footsteps under the pretense of improved health or life extension. Health, happiness, and humanity itself are all reducible to data points and subject to optimization. We are all just numbers: the quantified self. Like a music recording that can be reduced to code and stored in a file, the quantified human can also be reduced to bits, replicated infinitely, uploaded to the cloud, or installed in a robot.

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The internet’s tremendous social and intellectual potential was surrendered to short-term market priorities, turning a human-centered medium into a platform for manipulation, surveillance, and extraction. The more we see the human being as a technology to be enhanced, the greater the danger of applying this same market ethos to people, and extending our utility value at the expense of others. Life extension becomes the last-ditch attempt of the market to increase our available timeline as consumers—and consumers willing to spend anything for that extra few years of longevity. Sure, many of us would accept a digital implant if it really worked as advertised. Who wouldn’t want some painless enhancements, free of side effects?

Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

The extended life span is due to a three-fold slowing in the exponential rate of mortality increase (Johnson 1990). Four other mutations lead to significant extension of adult life span in C. elegans. spe-26 mutants result in life extensions of about 65 % for the hermaphrodite and the mated male (Van Voorhies 1992; Murakami and Johnson 1996), although recent observations (Gems and Riddle 1996) suggest that the life extension may be artifactual and result from inappropriate comparisons with wild type. daf-2 mutants result in a more than Identifying and Cloning Longevity-Determining Genes in the Nematode 159 two-fold extension of mean life span (Kenyon et al. 1993), and this extension is blocked by the action of daf-16.

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Several hundred laboratories across the world use C. elegans to study development, behavior, and physiology. C. elegans reproduces by self-fertilization, yet has a facultative male, which makes it extremely easy to identify mutations, even those that affect life span (Klass 1983; Duhon et al. 1996). For analysis of life extension and other life history traits, the lack of inbreeding depression is extremely important (Johnson and Wood 1982; Johnson and Hutchinson 1993). Moreover, because of its small genome size (10 8 base pairs) and genetic sophistication, C. elegans has been chosen as a model organism for the Human Genome Project.

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Larsen et al. (1995) showed that daf-23 doubles the life expectancy, and also showed that daf-2 interacts with daf-12 to cause an almost four-fold enhancement of life prolongation. Wong et al. (1995) reported that several alleles of a new gene, elk-I, which have altered the normal course of the cell cycle and of development, also have a increased life span. The several unpublished cases of additional life-extension loci suggest that the total number of gerontogenes in C. elegans may be near 10. Physiological Role of These Gerontogenes All of the mutations mentioned above, with the exception of age-I, also alter some other aspect of the normal development or physiology of the nematode (Table 1). spe-26 mutants are male sterile, indicating a defective step in fertilization that turns out to be at the point of spermatid formation (Varkey et al. 1995).

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

If you believed that the decline of organized labor was bad for America, and Thiel somehow maneuvered the conversation in that direction, you knew enough to change the subject to an area of potential common ground—life extension, for instance. Thiel had begun donating to the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the idea of curing aging, which it claimed mainstream science was ignoring; some Clarium staffers, including Thiel, were customers of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the cryonics center. In terms of work that would be recognizable as such, well, there wasn’t much. Most days they would clear out a little around 3 p.m.

…

Abraham, Jack, 169 Abramowitz, Marc, 221 Abrams, Dan, 229 Accenture, 312 Access Hollywood, xi, 242, 244 Accidental Billionaires, The (Mezrich), 159 Adamson, Chris, 16 Advocate, 243, 244 Affirm, 151, 331 Afghanistan, 146, 148–49 African Americans, 176–78, 186 see also racism aging and death, see life extension AIDS, 32, 34 Airbnb, xiii, 189, 190, 309 Air Force, U.S., 235 Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 101 Alford, Peggy, 298 Alibaba, 262 Al Qaeda, 113, 146 bin Laden’s killing, 151–55, 215 Altman, Sam, 269–70, 331 alt-right, 197, 202–4, 229, 231, 233, 242, 255, 270–72, 278, 282, 304, 333 see also white supremacists, white nationalists Amazon, 55, 56, 259, 261–62, 286–87 COVID pandemic and, 309 America-Lite (Gelernter), 252 American Civil Liberties Union, 111, 154 American Enterprise Institute, viii American Express, 221, 298 American Spectator, 42 American Thunder, 98–99 Anderson, Martin, 15 Andreessen, Marc, 46–48, 171, 298, 308 Andregg, William, 138, 167–68, 191 Anduril, 151, 285, 286, 290, 309, 333 Angelou, Maya, 265 Anonymous, 150 Anslow, Louis, 172, 270 antitrust law, 83, 85, 212, 261, 274, 281, 300 Anton, Michael, 283, 288 apartheid, 5–6, 18–19, 24, 176, 178 Apollo program, 143, 145 Apple, 8, 75–76, 124–25, 145, 163, 259, 260, 263, 309, 334 Arab Spring, 275 Ardern, Jacinda, 306 Army, U.S., 146–49, 216–17, 234–35, 258–59, 284 Army Times, 216 Arpaio, Joe, 236 Asimov, Isaac, 8 Asparouhov, Delian, 331 AT&T, 223 Atlantic, 135, 191, 212, 244 Atlas, Scott, 316 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 53 Axios, 323 Ayyadurai, Shiva, 229, 233 Baffler, 176, 192 Baio, Scott, 237 Baked Alaska, 255 Banister, Cyan, 297 Banister, Scott, 49 Bank of America, 150 Bannon, Steve, xi–xii, 219, 223, 236, 237, 241, 242, 246, 249, 250, 251, 254–56, 257, 260, 262, 265, 269, 271, 272, 300, 304, 314, 328 Barrack, Thomas, 237 Barron’s, 102, 129 Bartiromo, Maria, 283 Bass, Jules, 10 Beck, Glenn, viii, x, 217 Beenz, 56, 68, 72 Behnken, Bob, 310 Bennett, Bill, 26, 198, 261 Benton, Jesse, 181, 354n Berico, 150 Bezos, Jeff, vii, xii, 231, 257, 259–62 Biddle, Sam, 229 Biden, Hunter, 303, 316 Biden, Joe, 303, 304, 319, 320, 328, 332, 333 Big Short, The (Lewis), 132 Billpoint, 56, 65, 76, 79, 90 Bingham, Eli, 151 bin Laden, Osama, 146 killing of, 151–55, 215 Black Lives Matter, 197, 199, 202, 304, 316 Blacks, 176–78, 186 see also racism Bliss, Nishanga, 7, 10–11 blitzscaling, 76–77, 81 Bloom, Allan, 30 Bloomberg, 104, 233, 304 Bloomberg Businessweek, 119 Bollea, Terry (Hulk Hogan), xv, 182, 195–97, 201, 227–34 Bolton, John, 247–48, 288 Bono, 76 Book, Norman, 24, 53 Boomer, Ross, 199 Bosworth, Andrew, 246 Botha, Roelof, 69–72, 87–88, 108 Bounds, Ryan, 37 Bowden, Mark, 152–53 Bowles, Erskine, 298 Bozell, David, 245 Brand, Stewart, 144 Brant, Peter, 228 Brant, Peter, II, 228 Breitbart, 203, 219, 231, 242, 282, 304, 332 Breivik, Anders, 176 Brin, Sergey, xii, 259, 263 Brinkley, Alan, 45 Broaddrick, Juanita, 243 Brooks, David, 170 Brooks, Michael, 287 Brown, Michael, 187, 199–200 Buckley, Christopher, xvi Buckley, William F., xvi, 17, 33 Burke, Edmund, 25 Burnham, John, 204–5 Bush, Billy, 242 Bush, George H.

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Though Gawker was still as critical as ever—“Thiel is spinning so much bullshit,” Valleywag complained in late 2014, referring to Thiel’s argument about a slowdown in innovation—the rest of the press had mostly acceded to the Hollywood view of the man. The Washington Post featured him in a series of Q&As with people who were “shaking up philanthropy,” focusing on his support of research into life extension. “I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he said. “I think that’s somewhat unusual.” He added that he hoped his work to extend the human lifespan would be his legacy. At the moment, Thiel’s investment firm, Founders Fund, was throwing money behind the hottest Silicon Valley trend: the “sharing economy.”

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

., ‘Recombinant manganese peroxidase reduces A2E burden in age-related and Stargardt’s macular degeneration models’, Rejuvenation Res. 21, 560–71 (2018). DOI: 10.1089/rej.2018.2146 ageless.link/z7dgq9 This work is described quite accessibly in a video from the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation conference 2019: Kelsey Moody, ‘Macular degeneration talk at Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019’ (Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, YouTube, 2019) ageless.link/fjekaq There’s already a drug called Remofuscin … F. Yuan et al., ‘Preclinical results of a new pharmacological therapy approach for Stargardt disease and dry age-related macular degeneration’, ARVO 2017 E-Abstract (2017) ageless.link/ojsizw … get rid of their toxic stockpiles Another example is under development by a company called Underdog Pharmaceuticals, who hope to use sugars called cyclodextrins to remove oxidised cholesterol from atherosclerotic plaques.

…

Klass’s results seemed to confirm this thinking: mutating a few genes in a worm couldn’t extend its life, other than by the back-door route of depriving it of food. He ended up quitting academic science in frustration, but his colleague Tom Johnson took up the quest with remarkable tenacity. Johnson was hoping that the worms’ life extension was real, and that he could use it to double down on the existing dogma and prove that ageing was controlled by many different genes. He knew that these mutation-inducing chemicals typically introduced about twenty errors in each worm’s DNA, so it was quite possible that the long-lived worms possessed a string of genetic alterations, some positive, some negative, and all ripe for investigation.

…

He managed to produce some worms which ate as much as normal, but still had long lifespans. DR ruled out, he bred some of these long-lived and well-fed worms with N2s. To his astonishment, the worm-children produced by this union had normal lifespans. The simplest explanation for this observation was that a single gene was responsible for the life-extension observed.* If there were many genes involved, it was highly unlikely that the entire effect would vanish in the first generation – you’d expect the lifespan of the cross-bred worms to be somewhere in between N2 and the long-lived mutants. Then, breeding the long-lived mutants with each other didn’t enhance lifespan further – suggesting that they all shared either the same or a very similar genetic mutation.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Living long enough to know your great-grandchildren has become the norm, even with delayed childbearing. Among the things that the new elders are doing with their power—and their accumulated wealth—is directing ever more sophisticated research toward life extension. I have heard biotech scientists seriously ask one another, off the record, “What if we cure death?” Whether or not effective immortality actually comes, its prospect is now in sight, and that itself begins to change things. The best science fiction on life extension is Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire (01996). In its deliberately stable world dominated by the “medical-industrial complex,” one character explains, “When you live a really long time, it changes everything.

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People complain about overwhelming masses of information on the Web, but one of its inventors, Tim Berners-Lee, comments, “To be overloaded by the existence of so much on the Web is like being overloaded by the mass of a beautiful countryside. You don’t have to visit it, but it’s nice to know it’s there. Especially the variety and freedom.” The Internet may be showing the way to live with an infinite amount of past in infinite detail, and still encourage freedom to innovate without the need of violent revolution. Add in drastic life extension, due soon, and you get quite a different world, one that might say about our world: “Can you imagine what it was like when people and programs had to die, whether they wanted to or not? No wonder it took so long for culture to get anywhere. Everything and everyone was starting over all the time—the same dumb mistakes over and over again.

…

The toughest problem will be building software that will forgive us our trespasses and trespass not against us. There is no real glimmer yet how to approach the question but also no reason to give up on it. As for computer professionals routinely thinking and acting with long-term responsibility, that may come gradually as a by-product of the Year 2000 comeuppance, of life extension, of environmental lessons, and of globalization (island Earth). At issue here is how to address the management of digital continuity over time, how to shorten the digital dark age. Pure information can have astonishing longevity. In 1090 C.E. the Chinese genius Su Sung built a monumental water-driven mechanical clock for his emperor.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

You'll have even more incentive because you will benefit from the positive long-term effects. The reverse holds true as well. People will be less apt to maintain an I-got-mine mentality and rape the planet of natural resources or leave a mess of pollution for the people coming later. Life extension is a development that will reinforce the more environmentally friendly mentality that the world needs. Life extension is completely in sync with the Long Boom. 203 TecNrMolocjy EMIRATES NATURE NANOTEch's ENckjAME All stories need to start somewhere, and the nanotechnology story starts with Richard Feynmaa, the world-famous physicist, giving an after-dinner talk at his hometown campus, the California Institute of Technology, on December 29, 1959, There, he addressed a national society of experimental physicists in a speech called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

…

The Human Genome Project—the cracking of the human genetic code—was completed a full five years ahead of its original schedule. The first practical genetic therapy was successfully completed on several hemophilia patients and appears to have effected a cure. This development could pave the way for many other genetic therapies. Advanced Cell Technology made a possible breakthrough in life extension by creating clones from the cells of an adult cow. These cows have cells that do not seem to deteriorate, and so they have a high likelihood of living much longer than normal. Meanwhile, more than 500 new biotech therapies have moved into the late stages of testing and are poised to enter the market in the next five years.

…

In many ways networked computers are the great enablers of the other technologies that are to come. But developments in biotechnology—that is, manipulation at the genetic and molecular level—are going to create a revolution similar to the digital revolution we're in now. Biotechnology will transform medicine and health care, leading to many wonders, including life extension to more than 120 years. The fuel cell and other new energy technologies are already proving that the world can lessen its dependence on oil as the primary energy source and can rely instead on the much more environmentally benign hydrogen. The fuel cell will soon replace the internal combustion engine— transforming the global auto and oil industries, which are already starting to prepare for the transition.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

The SIR2 gene represses genes that generate ribosomal wastes that build up in yeast cells and lead to their eventual death; low-calorie diets restrict reproduction but are helpful to the functioning of the SIR2 gene. This may provide a molecular explanation for why laboratory rats fed a low-calorie diet live up to 40 percent longer than other rats.7 Biologists such as Guarente have suggested that there might someday be a relatively simple genetic route to life extension in humans: while it is not practical to feed people such restricted diets, there may be other ways of enhancing the functioning of the SIR genes. Other gerontologists, such as Tom Kirkwood, assert flatly that aging is the result of a complex series of processes at the level of cells, organs, and the body as a whole, and that there is therefore no single, simple mechanism that controls aging and death.8 If a genetic shortcut to immortality exists, the race is already on within the biotech industry to find it.

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With life expectancies only in the 40s or 50s for most of human history, societies could rely on normal generational succession to take care of this problem. Mandatory retirement ages came into vogue only in the late nineteenth century, when increasing numbers of people began to survive into old age.d Life extension will wreak havoc with most existing age-graded hierarchies. Such hierarchies traditionally assume a pyramidal structure because death winnows the pool of competitors for the top ranks, abetted by artificial constraints such as the widely held belief that everyone has the “right” to retire at age 65.

…

If they don’t, generational warfare will join class and ethnic conflict as a major dividing line in society. Getting older people out of the way of younger ones will become a significant struggle, and societies may have to resort to impersonal, institutionalized forms of ageism in a future world of expanded life expectancies. Other social effects of life extension will depend heavily on the exact way that the geriatric revolution plays itself out—that is, whether people will remain physically and mentally vigorous throughout these lengthening life spans, or whether society will increasingly come to resemble a giant nursing home. The medical profession is dedicated to the proposition that anything that can defeat disease and prolong life is unequivocally a good thing.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Thiel’s support for technophilic extremists did not stop with Anissimov. The billionaire was, for example, among the most important clients of an outfit called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which promised to freeze the dead for later resuscitation. Max More, an Alcor employee and self-proclaimed guru of “extropian” futurism, had given a presentation on “cryonics as a bridge to an indefinitely extended life” at the same BIL conference where Thiel donee Curtis Yarvin appeared. The bearded British life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey spoke at BIL that year about his work in “anti-aging bioscience.” De Grey whiled away most of his days at the Thiel-funded, Mountain View–based SENS Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization also dedicated to the quixotic cause of achieving human immortality.

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BIL’s programs were characteristically packed with California oddities, and in 2012 there were so many “sex positive” talks—covering everything from “orgasmic meditation” to polyamory and sex tips for “geeks, introverts and self-identified Aspies”—that a dedicated “boiler room” was set aside for them. BIL’s bread and butter, however, was the typical stuff of Silicon Valley pipe dreams: indefinite life extension, the Singularity, genetic engineering, and space travel. Amid some evident kooks lurked a sizable contingent of aerospace engineers and executives, including Virgin Galactic CEO and former NASA chief of staff George T. Whitesides. BIL was, in short, a who’s who of free-market techie futurism.

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The trick will be to survive a few more decades, until the inventions of atom-scaled medical nanobots and digital backups of human consciousness. “We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever,” Kurzweil writes. “But most baby boomers won’t make it.” This led to his other scammy obsession—life extension. To help his own rapidly aging generation survive until the arrival of the technological tipping point when they might upload their memories and personalities to a Google cloud server—around 2045, he figures—he promotes a program of diet, exercise, and unproven life-extending supplements. If all else fails to ward off the Reaper, one can always have one’s body or brain frozen for later resuscitation, a process known as cryonics, which Kurzweil endorses as a last resort.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

TAKE A COLD BATH ONE HOUR PRIOR TO BED. The Japanese have longer average lifespans than most other nationalities, including Americans, whom they beat by more than four years. One explanation researchers have proposed is that the regular ofuro, or hot bath at bedtime, increases melatonin release and is related to mechanisms for life extension. Paradoxically, according to one of the Stanford professors who taught the sleep biology class I took circa 2002, cold is a more effective signaler (aka zeitgeber, or “time giver”) for sleep onset. Perhaps the ofuro effect was related to the subsequent rapid cooling? Not eager to kill my swimmies with hot baths, I opted for direct cold.

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ON LONGER AND BETTER LIFE LIVING FOREVER Vaccines, Bleeding, and Other Fun There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. —Richard Feynman, co-recipient of 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. —Socrates This will be the shortest chapter on life-extension ever written. Let it begin, as all good short chapters do, with a story of two monkeys: Canto and Owen. Housed at the University of Wisconsin, these two rhesus monkeys are as close to identical as possible, with one exception. Canto is on a diet. Specifically, his calories are restricted to 30% less than normal.

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It’s the difference between the guy who got the marbleized rib-eye and the guy who got the oh-so-lean filet. Or between the guy who got a Château Grand Pontet St. Emilion with his brie and the guy who got water. As Edgar notes in King Lear, “Ripeness is all.” You don’t get to ripeness by eating apple peel for breakfast.… When life extension supplants life quality as a goal, you get the desolation of Canto the monkey. Living to 120 holds zero appeal for me. Canto looks like he’s itching to be put out of his misery.… We don’t understand what the mind secretes. The process of aging remains full of enigma. But I’d bet on jovial Owen outliving wretched Canto.… Laughter extends life.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Having done that, we have the ability to find the ideas to confront and resolve each such problem . ·We can apply the enormous leverage provided by the acceleration of technology. A notable example is achieving radical life extension through "a bridge to a bridge to a bridge" (applying today's knowledge as a bridge to biotechnology, which in turn will bridge us to the era of nanotechnology).4 This offers a way to live indefinitely now, even though we don't yet have all the knowledge necessary for radical life extension. In other words we don't have to solve every problem today. We can anticipate the capability of technologies that are coming—in five years or ten years or twenty—and work these into our plans.

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We have seen comparable mistakes during earlier paradigm shifts—for example, during the early railroad era (1830s), when the equivalent of the Internet boom and bust led to a frenzy of railroad expansion. Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in to day's world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.

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These will usher in what I referred to earlier as Epoch Five, the beginning of the Singularity. We are in the early stages of the "G" revolution today. By understanding the information processes underlying life, we are starting to learn to reprogram our biology to achieve the virtual elimination of disease, dramatic expansion of human potential, and radical life extension. Hans Moravec points out, however, that no matter how successfully we fine-tune our DNA-based biology, humans will remain "second-class robots," meaning that biology will never be able to match what we will be able to engineer once we fully understand biology's principles of operation.2 The "N" revolution will enable us to redesign and rebuild—molecule by molecule—our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact, going far beyond the limitations of biology.

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

I first learned of transhumanism while an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, when I joined the Extropians, an early transhumanist group. After poring through my boyfriend’s science fiction collection and reading the Extopian listserv, I was enthralled by the transhumanist vision of a technotopia on Earth. It is still my hope that emerging technologies will provide us with radical life extension, help end resource scarcity and disease, and even enhance our mental lives, should we wish to enhance. A FEW WORDS OF WARNING The challenge is how to get there from here in the face of radical uncertainty. No book written today could accurately predict the contours of mind-design space, and the underlying philosophical mysteries may not diminish as our scientific knowledge and technological prowess increase.

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Philosophers call the characteristics that a thing must have as long as it exists “essential properties.” Now let’s reconsider the transhumanist’s trajectory for enhancement. It is portrayed as a form of personal development. However, even if it brings such goodies as superhuman intelligence and radical life extension, it must not involve the elimination of any of your essential properties. What might your essential properties be? Think of yourself in first grade. What properties have persisted that seem somehow important to your still being one and the same person? Notice that the cells in your body have now changed, and your brain structure and function have altered dramatically.

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Bostrom (2014, p. 109). 16. Seung (2012). 17. Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004). 18. Schneider (2011). 19. Baars (2008). 20. Clarke (1962). CHAPTER EIGHT: IS YOUR MIND A SOFTWARE PROGRAM? 1. This quote is from The Guardian (2013). 2. Harmon (2015a, p. 1). 3. See Harmon (2015a); Alcor Life Extension Foundation (n.d.). 4. Crippen (2015). 5. I’m grateful to Kim Suozzi’s boyfriend, Josh Schisler, for a helpful email and telephone conversations about this (August 26, 2018). 6. Harmon (2015a). 7. Harmon (2015a). 8. Harmon (2015a). 9. Schneider (2014); Schneider and Corabi (2014). For an overview of different steps of uploading, see Harmon (2015b). 10.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Another variant of the singularity takes current efforts to fight disease and projects them into radical life extension, where technology helps us overcome all our mental and physical limitations. Ray Kurzweil has been the most eloquent proponent of this future. He’s a founder of the Singularity University, where the tech world’s movers and shakers pay tens of thousands of dollars for short courses on the cutting edge in AI and nanotechnology. Critics have mocked the idea of the singularity as the “rapture of the nerds,” and they’ve noted that only the wealthy will benefit from radical-life-extension technology. The goal of researchers like Kurzweil is simple: immortality.

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By the age of fourteen, his mother had died and he had given up formal schooling. A reclusive teenager, he moved to Moscow so he could spend long hours at a local library, where he studied physics and astronomy. At the library he was influenced by Nikolai Fyodorov, a futurist who advocated radical life extension and immortality and who thought that the future of humanity lay in space. He also stumbled on the works of Jules Verne and became inspired by Verne’s tales of space travel. Tsiolkovsky’s family recognized his talent but worried that he was studying obsessively and forgetting to eat. When he was nineteen, his father brought him back home and helped him get a teaching credential so he could earn a living.

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Once they learn how to miniaturize them, biohackers will implant themselves with medical sensors that can talk to a smartphone and a device that will let fingers “see” by echolocation.31 This goes beyond sensory extension to the creation of entirely new senses. The philosophical movement that forms an umbrella for cybernetics and cyborgs is called transhumanism. Transhumanism is a worldwide cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to use technology to improve the human condition. Radical life extension is one aspect, as is the enhancement of physical and mental capabilities. Two prominent transhumanists are Nick Bostrom, a University of Oxford philosopher who has assessed various risks to the long-term survival of humanity, and Ray Kurzweil, the engineer and inventor who popularized the idea of the singularity, a time in the not-too-distant future when technology will enable us to transcend our physical limitations.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Meanwhile, we also hype the changes that are supposedly just around the corner: the alternative energy revolution that’s always poised for takeoff; the genetic engineering breakthrough that will deliver designer babies any day now; the dramatic artificial intelligence leap forward that will either usher in utopia or end with our extermination at the hands of some misanthropic Skynet; the radical life-extension hack that will either add fifty years to our lifespans or enable us to upload ourselves into virtual immortality; the “new study” that offers hope for curing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or cancer; the robots that are supposedly about to take over all our jobs. Even the stars are making a comeback: I’m writing this paragraph with a copy of Bloomberg BusinessWeek beside me that hypes the new Silicon Valley–funded space race.

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But a society being fundamentally transformed by automation would have sharp productivity growth, of the kind we used to have and briefly enjoyed in the Internet’s first flower, rather than the productivity stagnation afflicting both the United States and Europe. For all the bright talk about radical life extension, too, recent medical progress has come primarily in the fight against rare conditions that affect small populations, rather than big killers such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Obviously, if you’re a parent of a child with cystic fibrosis, for which a long-awaited treatment just arrived, or a mother whose baby was just saved from a congenital defect by surgery in the womb, or an Iraq War veteran with a miraculous-seeming prosthetic, the progress that we have experienced is amazing, and the fields that generate them are obviously not decadent.

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Maybe we have simply been in a kind of bottleneck for the last few generations, achieving important scientific breakthroughs that don’t (yet) translate into society-altering changes. At a certain point, we’ll clear the bottleneck, and it will become clear that our era was a necessary prelude to renewed acceleration—eventually giving us self-driving cars courtesy of a finally profitable Uber, a Mars colony courtesy of the Elon Musk–Jeff Bezos space race, and radical life extension courtesy of Google’s longevity lab or some other zillionaire who can’t imagine shuffling off this mortal coil. All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong.

Between the Strokes of Night by Charles Sheffield

life extension, nuclear winter, time dilation

The pattern in every one is the same: discovery of S-space; exploitation of S-space, as a means of subjective life extension and interstellar space travel; and then, after a shorter or longer period, the realization that S-space existence, sufficiently continued, brings with it physical decline and finally death. As a means of seeking immortality, S-space is a blind alley.” “Immortality!” It was not clear how many people said the word, but it lingered as a murmur around the chamber. “Let us say, potential immortality. No one knows the maximum attainable life-span of an intelligence, but this we do know: maximal life extension is impossible for an embodied form that uses S-space, T-state, or any of their variations.

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He seemed uneasy, and lacking in confidence. “I read it wrong. I thought the reason for being here in Gulf City was safety from outside interference, and control of S-space. The whole advantage of being an ‘Immortal’ was presented to us as increased subjective life span — but now I wonder about that.” “You are right to do so. We have life-extension methods available, ones that came out of S-space research and allow increased life span in normal space. And probably they will let the subject enjoy life more keenly, too. But you can’t solve the problem thrown at us by the Kermel Objects unless you can work on it for a long time. That means Gulf City, and it means S-space.”

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No one knows the maximum attainable life-span of an intelligence, but this we do know: maximal life extension is impossible for an embodied form that uses S-space, T-state, or any of their variations. Ultimately, time consumes flesh. Maximal life extension requires conversion to immaterial form.” “Pure spirit,” Emil Garville said softly. “Use that word if you wish. Stabilized fields is a name we would prefer. In any case, your own species faces a choice: material existence, which offers immortality only in the form of offspring; or a move to immaterial form, where we believe that the duration of existence of individual consciousness may be unlimited. “Now.” The body of Judith Niles sat up straighter in its chair. “We have given you as much information as we think it wise for you to have.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

There’s a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It’s AI. * * * Our new AI religion has what all religions have. Believers: the Singularity disciples, the Transhuman evangelists (there’s even a Mormon group), the Biohax converts, the life-extension enthusiasts, the start-up brain-uploaders, the science labs printing 3D body parts, the stem-cell researchers who will ‘match’ your perfect body ideal – so many, so different, yet all of these sharing a Gnostic unorthodoxy of loosely overlapping ideas anchored to the central, but updating text of accelerating change, inside and outside the human body.

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Ray Kurzweil, ‘Breakfast with the FT’, April 2015 Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, Futurist and AI guru, hopes to be alive for long enough to see lifespan, including his own lifespan, dramatically increase. He takes around 100 supplements a day, to maintain his health, and to slow the ageing process – these supplements are not a smash-and-grab from the pharmacy; they are tailored for his body by a physician. In case he does run out of time, Kurzweil has signed up to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor is a cryopreservation institute. If you are interested in the details, their website is excellent: www.alcor.org. Cryonics aims to pause death by vitrification. Once a person is pronounced legally dead, there is enough time, says Alcor, providing their team is ready and waiting, to empty your body of fluids, then vitrify it.

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They were sci-fi, not science. Cryopreservation is still regarded with scepticism by most medical establishments – even though cryonics is used to freeze embryos. Alcor moves the preservation principle to the end of life, not its beginning. An embryo, though, is not a whole body, or a brain. Life-extension theory is moving towards brain-only preservation, because if technology really does succeed in preserving and returning a brain kept in cold storage, or in scanning the contents of a brain before biological death, then by that time the merger of science and tech will be so advanced that building a new body, with or without biological components, will be no more of a challenge than organ transplant is today.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

But there’s one unprepossessing creature, the naked mole rat, which may have some special biological lessons for us; some live for more than thirty years—several times longer than the lifespan of other small mammals. Any major breakthrough in life extension for humans would alter population projections in a drastic way; the social effects, obviously huge, would depend on whether the years of senility were prolonged too, and on whether the age of women at menopause would increase with total lifespan. But various types of human enhancement via hormonal treatment may become possible as the human endocrine system is better understood—and some degree of life extension is likely to be among these enhancements. As with so much technology, priorities are unduly slanted towards the wealthy.

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See also robots air traffic control, 108 Alcor, 81–82 Aldrin, Buzz, 138 aliens, intelligent: communicating through shared mathematical culture, 160, 168; with different perception of reality, 160, 190; early history of speculation on, 126–27; Earth’s history seen by, 1–2; likelihood of, 154–56, 162; possibly pervading the cosmos, 8, 156; search for, 156–64. See also planets; SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Allen, Woody, 178 ALMA radio telescope in Chile, 207 AlphaGo, 86–87, 88, 106, 191 AlphaGo Zero, 87 Alzheimer’s disease, failure of drugs for, 212 Ambrosia, life-extension start-up, 80 Anders, Bill, 120 Anderson, Philip, 176 Andromeda galaxy, 178 animal research, ethics of, 221 Anthropocene, 3, 31 antibiotic resistance, 72 antimatter, 169 Apollo programme, 120, 137, 139, 144, 145 Archimedes, 165 Arkhipov, Vasili, 18 Armstrong, Neil, 120, 138 arts and crafts, resurgence of, 98 Asilomar Conference, 74–75 assisted dying, 70–71 asteroid impact: collapse in global food supplies and, 216; existential disaster compared to, 114; on Mars, sending rock to Earth, 129; nuclear destruction compared to, 15, 18; planning for, 15–16, 43; as rare but extreme event, 15, 76 asteroids: establishing bases on, 149; travel to, 148 astrology, 11 atoms: aliens composed of, 160; complexity and, 172–74; as constituents of all materials, 165–66, 168; hard to understand, 195; number in visible universe, 182; quantum theory of, 166, 205 Bacon, Francis, 61 battery technology, 49–50, 51 Baumgartner, Felix, 149 Baxter robot, 106 Before the Beginning (Rees), 186 The Beginning of Infinity (Deutsch), 192 Bethe, Hans, 222 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 76 Bezos, Jeff, 146 big bang: birth of universe in, 124; chain of complexity leading from, 164, 214; conditions in particle accelerator and, 111; intelligent aliens’ understanding of, 160; physical laws as a given in, 197–98; possibly not the only one, 181, 183, 184–85 (see also multiverse) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 224 biodiversity: loss of, 32–33, 66; our stewardship of, 35 bio error, 73, 75, 77–78 biofuels, 32, 52 biohacking, 75, 78, 106 biotech: benefits and vulnerabilities of, 5, 6; concerns about ethics of, 73–75; concerns about safety of, 73, 74, 75, 76, 116, 218; responsible innovation in, 218, 225; threat of catastrophe due to, 76, 109–10; unpredictable consequences of, 63.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

ISBN-13: 9781477827949 ISBN-10: 1477827943 Cover design by Dave Stanton / Faceout Studio Author photograph by Ryan Heffernan For my mother and father Contents Start Reading The Future Is Here: AN INTRODUCTION PART ONE: THE FUTURE IN HERE Bionic Man: THE WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC MAN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The Genius Who Sticks Around Forever: THE SCIENCE OF MIND UPLOADING 1 2 3 4 Extreme States: THE BIOLOGY OF SPIRITUALITY 1 2 3 4 5 Evolution’s Next Stage: THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION 1 2 3 4 5 Vision Quest: THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL VISION IMPLANT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 PART TWO: THE FUTURE OUT THERE Reengineering the Everglades: THE WORLD’S FIRST TERRAFORMING PROJECT 1 2 3 4 5 6 Buckaroo Banzai: THE ARRIVAL OF FLYING CARS 1 2 3 4 Meltdown or Mother Lode: THE POSSIBILITIES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY 1 2 3 4 5 6 Space Diving: THE FUTURE OF SPORT 1 Building a Better Mosquito: THE WORLD’S FIRST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CREATURE 1 2 3 4 The Great Galactic Gold Rush: THE BIRTH OF THE ASTEROID MINING INDUSTRY 1 2 3 PART THREE: THE FUTURE UNCERTAIN The Psychedelic Renaissance: THE RADICAL WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Sympathy for the Devil: THE TROUBLED SCIENCE OF LIFE EXTENSION 1 2 3 4 5 6 The Final Frontier: THE POLITICS OF STEM CELLS 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hacking the President’s DNA: THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLAYING GOD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The God of Sperm: THE CONTROVERSIAL FUTURE OF BIRTH 1 2 3 4 5 6 Acknowledgments About the Author Index Sure this is magic, but not necessarily fantasy.

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In less time than it took to drink a cup of coffee, a paradigm had shattered — science fiction had become science fact. On the way home, I started to wonder about other paradigms. After all, if private spaceships were possible, what about all the other sci-fi mainstays? What about bionics? Robotics? Flying cars? Artificial life? Life extension? Asteroid mining? What about those more ephemeral topics: the future of human evolution, the possibilities of downloadable consciousness? I made a long list — and that list defined large parts of the next two decades of my career. Tomorrowland is the result of that journey. The pieces in this book come from an assortment of major publications — the New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, to name a few — and all were penned between 2000 and 2014.

…

Here we’ll cover everything from on-world paradigm shifts, like the birth of the world’s first genetically engineered insect, to off-world paradigm shifts, like the birth of the asteroid mining industry. Finally, in The Future Uncertain, we’ll examine the gray areas, those explosive collisions between science and culture — for example, the use of steroids for life extension or the use of synthetic biology for the creation of bioweapons — where lines are being crossed and controversy reigns, and no one is certain what tomorrow brings. This last bit is no small thing. All of the technologies described in this book are disruptive technologies, though not as we traditionally define the word.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Today there are around 6,000 members from more than 100 countries – an eclectic mix of self-confessed technology geeks, scientists, libertarians, academics and activists like Zoltan (who describes himself as a writer, activist and campaigner all-in-one). Together they work on a dazzling array of cutting-edge technology. Everything from life extension, anti-ageing, robotics, artificial intelligence (Marvin Minsky, considered one of the inventors of artificial intelligence, is a prominent transhumanist), cybernetics, space colonisation, virtual reality and cryonics. But most transhumanist technology focuses on life extension, and technological upgrades to the brain and body. It’s the possibility of a tech-powered ‘great leap forward’ that excites transhumanists like Zoltan, who believes the possible benefits of near- and medium-term technology are too important to ignore.

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Zoltan tells me he is planning a number of publicity stunts in the next couple of years to bring the movement to a wider audience. This includes marching with a group of robots and a large coffin to Union Square in San Francisco to protest against what he sees as a lack of government investment in life-extension science. Many transhumanists are ‘biohackers’ – who, like Anders, experiment with introducing new technology into their own body directly. In 2013, transhumanist Richard Lee became the first person to have implanted a headphone in his ear. In 2012, in Essen, Germany, Tim Cannon, a tranhumanist biohacker, implanted a small computer and wireless battery inside his arm.

…

Whether it was anarchist Bitcoin programmers, trolls, extremists, pornographers or enthusiastic self-harmers, all were more welcoming and pleasant, more interesting and multifaceted, than I’d imagined. Ultimately, the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online – but still recognisably us. * * * fn1 Anders will be frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, which charges a total of $200,000 ($215,000 for UK residents) for Whole Body Cryopreservation. fn2 I cannot say that Zerzan was unwilling to engage with the transhumanists. When he learned that I’d been communicating with Zoltan, he sent him the following, unsolicited message: I understand that you are in contact with Jamie Bartlett regarding his book project, dealing with the internet and technology more generally.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

"Engineering and aging," IEEE Spectrum 41 (2004), no. 9: 10, 31-35. For much more on this controversial possibility, see de Grey 204 Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 2004. Aubrey D. N. J. de Grey is a well-known and controversial advocate of what might be called the "radical human life extension" school. Whether life extension is possible, and if so when it will be available, and how long lives will eventually be, remain highly contentious within the relevant research communities. Interestingly, other science and policy communities, such as those associated with sustainability, are generally not attending to these possibilities, despite their obviously challenging implications.

…

The net result is that it becomes necessary to design toward better military productivity, with productivity measured as mission accomplishment per soldier lost. This is one reason why the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a major funder of research on how to keep soldiers in peak physical condition longer (which is dual-use research insofar as it also provides the scientific and technical basis for radical life-extension technologies). The substitution of military robots for people is an exact parallel to the substitution of capital for labor early in the Industrial Revolution. Robots, in other words, are another expression of the search for efficiency. So yes, LARs will accomplish the Level I function of saving soldiers' lives.

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

She believed he must be very old, from one of the first generations of Shapers. Their genetic engineering had been limited and they could scarcely be told from original human stock. He must be almost a hundred years old. To be so old, yet look so young, meant that he had chosen sound techniques of life extension. He dated back to an era before Shaperism had reached its full expression. Bacteria still swarmed through his body. Kitsune never told him about the antibiotic pills and suppositories she took, or the painful antiseptic showers. She didn’t want him to know he was contaminating her. She wanted everything between them to be clean.

…

The history of the Fortuna Miners’ Democracy was a simple one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had declared their independence. As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-extension treatments from other more advanced worlds. But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy.

…

He was sixty-eight. The demortalization clinic was in the outskirts of Goldreich-Tremaine, part of the growing cluster of inflatable subbles. The tube-linked bubbles could mushroom or vanish overnight, a perfect habitat for Black Medicals and other dubious enclaves. Mechanists lurked here, hunting Shaper life-extension while evading Shaper law. Supply and demand had conjured up corruption, while Goldreich-Tremaine grew lax with success. The capital had overreached itself, and cracks in the economy were papered over with black money. Fear had driven Lindsay to this point: fear that things might fall apart and find him weak.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Fedorov imagined evolution as a process centred around intelligence and our quest to achieve it. Man, he argued, was the culmination of natural history, and should use whatever reason and morality it has available to guide the hand of natural selection. This led to an interest in the use of scientific methods to bring about not just radical life extension and physical immortality, but also the idea that we might eventually restore to life everyone who has ever died. Where would all of these newly immortal beings live? In space and under the sea, of course, which Fedorov envisioned being colonised by the human race. Like Google’s democratised, data-driven approach to life as we know it, Fedorov stated: ‘Everyone must be learning and everything be the subject of knowledge and action.’

…

However, if scientists remove the optic glands of females brooding their eggs, they discovered that the octopus abandons its eggs, resumes feeding and growing, and survives for roughly twice the length of an unmodified octopus. Already we carry out not dissimilar operations on humans for the purposes of life extension, whether it be removing dangerous tumours or giving people potentially life-saving transplants of vital organs. As one might expect from a person who had spent their career investigating intelligence, Minsky was of the opinion that minds were more complicated. He wrote: As a species we seem to have reached a plateau in our intellectual development.

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Not all such projects are taking place in the public sector, however. One of the more unusual and ambitious brain-science projects of the past few decades was announced by Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov in 2011. Given the name the 2045 Initiative, Itskov’s project is a nonprofit dedicated to the goal of life extension. In its own words, the 2045 Initiative aims to ‘create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality’. Like the BRAIN initiative, Itskov’s project breaks down into multiple stages.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Much as we fear illness, healthy aging and chronic disease can and do coexist in a multitude of olders. There’s no clear divide between between mobility and immobility, or independence and helplessness. Binaries serve us badly. So, as ever, does age denial. A panacea that would somehow stop our biological clocks, the holy grail of life-extension science and “anti-aging” medicine, is even less likely than a cure for cancer. The goal is to stay healthy, not to “stay young.” Longevity is a bonus. One manifestation of age denial is that it keeps many people from making lifestyle choices that pay off in the long run. As composer and musician Eubie Blake famously put it, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

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Every week seems to herald an “anti-aging” breakthrough on the horizon: the possibility of using stem cells to rejuvenate tissue, or mobilizing nanobots to patrol the body and repair cell damage, or lengthening telomeres, to name a few. (Telomeres are stretches of DNA at the end of chromosomes that shorten naturally with age each time a cell divides.) Leading the pack are the proponents of radical life extension who think that advances in biotechnology will soon be able to slow down or turn back the biological clock, and that my generation can anticipate living far longer than our parents. Many proponents believe that what biomedical researcher Aubrey de Grey calls “longevity escape velocity” is within reach: the point at which, for every year that passes, life expectancy will increase by one year, making lifespans infinite.

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New York Times, July 8, 2008. 34 Gretchen Reynolds, “Exercise to Age Well, Whatever Your Age,” New York Times, January 29, 2014. 35 “Dr. Mark Lachs—‘Treat Me Not My Age,’” Annuity News Now, uploaded to YouTube November 15, 2010. 36 “Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension,” Pew Research Religion & Public Life Project, August 6, 2013. 37 “Aging Through The Eyes of A Doctor,” The Today Show, Feb 17, 2011. 38 Cruikshank, Learning to Be Old, 37. 39 Ibid, p. 42. 40 Paula Span, “A Workout for the Mind,” New York Times, October 20, 2014. 41 Karin A. Ouchida and Mark S.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Here he was not unique; for thousands of years in China, immortality on earth was a popular aim.67 One history of Chinese chemistry describes dozens of substances and potions for eternal life tested by emperors and their alchemists throughout much of this period.68 In the last century, many authoritarian or totalitarian rulers were interested in or actively pursued life extension.69 Stalin expressed an interest in the topic, and according to one Soviet defector, this prompted scientists to make life extension “a central subject of Soviet medical research.”70 North Korea’s Kim Il-sung set up a longevity centre devoted to keeping him alive and received blood transfusions from citizens in their twenties in an attempt to live longer.71 Nursultan Nazarbayev, the authoritarian ruler of Kazakhstan between 1990 and 2019, tasked Kazakh scientists with “the prolongation of life.”

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel have both invested in San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology, a company whose mission is to prevent aging.73 In 2013, Google launched the company Calico, which also aims to combat aging, with more than a billion dollars in funding.74 Ambrosia, a California start-up, charges its elderly customers $8,000 for injections of two and a half litres of blood plasma harvested from teenagers.75 Even if aging cannot be cured in our lifetime, some people plan to punt the problem to the future by paying for cryonics: having their body or severed head frozen in the hope that resurrection will be possible with future technology. Whole-body cryopreservation with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation costs $220,000; it costs less than half that if one merely preserves one’s head.76 Some entrepreneurs hope to abandon meat-based bodies altogether and live on in digital form through computer emulation of their brains. Nectome, a Y Combinator–funded start-up that preserves brains with the hope that future generations will scan and upload them, counts Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman as a customer.

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See also GDP income inequality, happiness inequality and, 204–205 inconsistencies in moral worldviews, 67–68 India fertility rate and economic growth, 94 quality of life survey, 199–201 the risks of global conflict, 115 individual actions, the power of, 245–246 industrial development aftermath of Roman decline, 124 carbon concentrations, 24 economic growth rates, 82 effect on wellbeing, 206–207 as efflorescence, 144 fossil fuel consumption and depletion, 138–141 history of humanity, 12–13 postcatastrophe reliance on preindustrial technology, 131–134 sugar and cotton cultivation, 64 upward trend in wellbeing, 207–208 Industrial Revolution economic doubling, 82 fossil fuel depletion, 138–139 global economic growth, 26, 144 impact of the contingency of moral norms, 70 population-technology feedback loop, 153 postcatastrophe recovery, 133 technological development in Europe, 124, 126 upward trend in wellbeing following, 207–208 inequality Easterlin paradox, 201–202 global inequalities, 215 happiness and income inequalities, 204–205 in the total view of wellbeing, 183 inequality, happiness, 204–205 infrastructure, postcatastrophe state of, 130–131, 134 inheritance: cultural evolution, 58–59 innovation automating with AGI, 81, 144 in clean energy, 25 declining rate of, 150–151, 153, 155 Islamic Golden Age, 143 stagnation, 158, 161–162 taking action for the future, 227–228 intelligence, human-level, 57–58 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 24, 39–40, 42 International Energy Agency, 134–135 intuition of neutrality, 171–173, 176–177 invertebrates, 191, 213 investing in the future, 24 Iroquois Confederacy, 11 Ishii, Shiro, 112 Islamic Golden Age, 143, 158 ITN (importance, tractability, neglectedness) framework, 256–257 Jamaican Christmas Rebellion (1831–1832), 69 Japan bioweapons programme, 111–112 the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 126–128 Jerome (saint), 123 Jews and Judaism: the persistence of values, 78 Jones, Chad, 150 Kaufman, Chaim, 64 Kennedy, John F., 37, 128 Khmer Rouge, 60 Kim Il-sung: life extension efforts, 84–85 Korea, division of, 40–41 Kremer, Michael, 152 labour force countering the slowing rate of technological progress, 155–156 economic stagnation, 150 increasing scientific research efforts, 152 women’s participation, 53, 61–62 See also slavery Large Hadron Collider, 151 Lay, Benjamin, 49–51, 72 Learn How to Increase Your Chances of Winning the Lottery (Lustig), 203 learning more, to positively influence the future, 226–227, 235–237 Legalism (China), 76–78 Levy, David, 106 Lewis, Joshua, 199 LGBTQ+ individuals moral views on the status of, 53 transmission of cultural traits, 95 life, evolution of, 117–119 life expectancy among hunter-gatherer societies, 207 changes over time, 205(fig.)

The Radium Girls by Moore, Kate

Charles Lindbergh, information security, life extension, Skype, women in the workforce

Though Viedt had managed to hire an extra six girls, it wasn’t enough; the executives still had to address the “psychological and hysterical situation”9 that was now unfolding in the studio. So, while it waited for Drinker to begin his study, the firm organized its own examinations of the current team of dial-painters, conducted by the Life Extension Institute. The girls were tested confidentially—but the reports were shared with the firm. “The individuals concerned,” Viedt wrote Roeder, “do not know that we have these copies…information given in them is very confidential and they might object to our having them.”10 Though the institute found some girls had infected teeth, it concluded that their ailments “did not reflect any specific occupational influence.”11 Roeder wrote contentedly to Viedt that the results were “just as I anticipated.”12 Viedt, however, who was more involved in operations at the studio, was not so reassured.

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“The individuals concerned,” Viedt wrote Roeder, “do not know that we have these copies…information given in them is very confidential and they might object to our having them.”10 Though the institute found some girls had infected teeth, it concluded that their ailments “did not reflect any specific occupational influence.”11 Roeder wrote contentedly to Viedt that the results were “just as I anticipated.”12 Viedt, however, who was more involved in operations at the studio, was not so reassured. “I do not feel quite as optimistic about this matter as you do,” he wrote to his boss. “While the Life Extension Institute have made a report, I do not believe that this will satisfy our various operators and that we must wait for Dr. Drinker’s final report in order to really convince them that there is no injurious element.”13 Roeder then added his own two cents. “We should create an atmosphere in the plant of competence,” he wrote decidedly to Viedt.

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It was radium that had killed Irene, and Helen, and so many more… It was radium, the Drinkers said, that was the problem. The doctors enclosed a table of their test results of the workers and, crucially, analyzed them. “No blood [from the USRC employees],” they wrote, “was entirely normal. These same findings were noted in previous reports by the Life Extension Institute, but the Institute did not appear to have been aware of their meaning.” While some employees registered marked changes in their blood, other results were noted to be “practically normal.”21 But not one worker had wholly normal blood; not even a woman who had been with the firm for only two weeks.

The Fast Diet Revised and Updated by Michael Mosley, Mimi Spencer

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Easter island, life extension, meta-analysis, mouse model, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

He lost weight on each one of them, and then within a few months put it all back on, and more. Then, at the beginning of 2012, I was approached by Aidan Laverty, editor of the BBC science series Horizon, who asked if I would like to put myself forward as a guinea pig to explore the science behind life extension. I wasn’t sure what we would find, but, along with producer Kate Dart and researcher Roshan Samarasinghe, we quickly focused on calorie restriction and fasting as a fruitful area to explore. Calorie restriction is pretty brutal; it involves eating an awful lot less than a normal person would expect to eat, and doing so every day of your – hopefully – long life.

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Index 4:3 pattern 1, 2 6:1 maintenance 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 adaptation 1 adherence 1, 2 agave 1 age to start fasting 1, 2 ageing Byetta 1 cognitive ability 1, 2, 3 research 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 alcohol 1, 2 allergies 1 almonds 1, 2 alternate day fasting (ADF) as booster method 1 problems 1, 2 research 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Alzheimer’s disease 1, 2 see also carbo hydrates; dementia amputation 1 amyloid 1 anabolic response 1 animal research Alzheimer’s disease 1 brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 cancer 1 eating patterns 1 fasting 1, 2, 3 fertility 1 longevity 1 animals, wild 1 antidepressants, natural 1 antioxidants 1, 2, 3, 4 appetite excess 1, 2 regulation 1, 2, 3, 4 apples 1, 2, 3, 4 apps 1 aromas 1 arthritis 1 Asian coleslaw 1 asparagus, stir fry with prawns 1 asthma 1, 2, 3, 4 athletes 1, 2 Atkins diet 1, 2 attention see mindfulness attitude changes 1, 2, 3 aubergines calorie content 1 Goan curry 1 warm salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 autoimmune diseases 1 autophagy 1, 2 awareness 1, 2, 3 Babraj, Dr John 1 bacon and butterbean soup 1 bananas 1, 2 BBC 1 BDNF see brain derived neurotrophic factor beauty industry 1 bedtime 1 beef calorie content 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 skinny spag bol 1 steak and Asian coleslaw 1 Thai steak salad 1 beer 1 benefits, generally 1, 2 see also health improvements berries 1, 2 betacarotene 1 bingeing 1, 2, 3 bitterness 1 blindness 1 blood pressure see also hypertension alternate day fasting 1 four day fast 1 monitoring 1 personal experiences 1 blood sugar 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 see also insulin blood tests 1, 2 blueberries 1 BMI see body mass index body-consciousness 1 body fat percentage 1, 2 body image 1 body mass index (BMI) calculation 1, 2 initial level 1 Mosley, Dr Michael 1 reduction 1 boiling vegetables 1 bolognese, skinny 1 boredom 1 bouillon 1 brain ageing 1, 2, 3 energy sources 1 research 1, 2, 3, 4 brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1, 2, 3, 4 brassicas 1 bread 1, 2 breakfast cereals 1, 2, 3 eggs 1 Fast Days 1, 2 glycaemic index (GI) 1 importance 1 low GI 1 protein-rich 1 breaking the fast 1 breast cancer 1, 2, 3 breast feeding 1 broccoli 1, 2, 3 bulgar 1, 2 busyness 1, 2, 3 butter 1, 2, 3 butterbean and chorizo hotpot 1 butternut squash, baked with courgette and tomato 1 Byetta 1 cabbage 1 Caesar salad 1 caffeine 1, 2 Calabrese, Edward 1 calcium 1 calorie content chart 1 drinks 1 labels 1, 2 portion sizes 1, 2, 3 calorie intake Fast Days 1, 2, 3 worldwide trend 1 calorie restriction (CR) 1, 2 Cambridge Diet 1 cancer development 1 fasting 1, 2, 3, 4 growth factors 1 human research 1 insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) 1, 2, 3, 4 insulin resistance 1 Laron syndrome 1 risk reduction 1, 2 stem cells 1 tumours 1 vitamin supplements 1 car analogy 1, 2 carbohydrates blood sugar 1, 2, 3 Fast Days 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 reduction 1 cardiovascular disease see heart disease carotenoids 1 carrots 1, 2, 3, 4 cashews 1 catecholamines 1 cell mutation 1 cellular repair 1, 2 cereals 1, 2, 3 cerebrospinal fluid 1 challenges 1, 2 chat rooms 1, 2 cheating 1 cheese 1, 2, 3 mushrooms with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 warm aubergine salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 chemotherapy 1, 2, 3, 4 chicken 1, 2 Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 spiced chicken with warm lentils and roasted garlic 1 stir fry 1 super-fast Thai green curry 1 chickpeas calorie content 1 curry 1 warm aubergine salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 children 1, 2, 3 chilli flakes 1 chilli, vegetarian 1 chocolate 1 cholesterol alternate day fasting 1, 2 blood levels 1, 2, 3 eggs 1 grazing 1 personal experiences 1 reduction 1 tests 1 chorizo, hotpot with butterbeans 1 CHRONies (Calorie Restrictors on Optimal Nutrition) 1 citrus fruit 1, 2, 3 coconut 1 coffee 1, 2 cognitive ability 1, 2, 3, 4 Cohen, Leonard 1 coldness 1 coleslaw, Asian 1 comfort foods 1, 2, 3 compliance alternate day fasting 1 conventional diets 1 first weeks 1 practicality 1 snacks 1 compulsive eating 1 concentration 1, 2 confectionary 1, 2 consecutive day fasting 1 see also four day fast constipation 1 consumption levels, non-Fast Days 1 cooking tips 1 cordials 1 courgettes, baked butternut with courgette and tomato 1 couscous 1, 2, 3 curry chickpea 1 Goan aubergine 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 red lentil tikka masala 1 super-fast Thai green chicken 1 dairy products 1, 2, 3, 4 Dart, Kate 1 dates 1, 2 dehydration 1, 2, 3 delayed gratification 1 dementia see also Alzheimer’s disease brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 diabetes 1 drug therapies 1 fasting 1, 2, 3 risk factors 1 walking 1, 2 denial 1 see also willpower dermatitis 1 dhal 1 diabetes Byetta 1 complications 1 doctor consultation 1 family history 1 Laron syndrome 1 meal pattern research 1 risk factors 1, 2, 3 risk reduction 1, 2 Type 1 1 worldwide trend 1 diaries 1, 2 diet drinks 1 diets current standard advice 1 fads 1, 2 failure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 high-fat 1, 2, 3 high-fructose 1 high-protein 1 low-carbohydrate 1 low-fat 1 Mediterranean 1 digestion 1, 2, 3 Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 diseases, risk reduction 1, 2 disinhibition effect 1 dissatisfaction 1 distraction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 doctor consultation diabetes 1 obesity 1 statins 1 warfarin 1 doctors’ viewpoints 1 dressings 1 The Drinking Man’s Diet 1 drinks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 drug therapies 1 Dublin study, fast diet 1 DXA scan (dual energy X-ray absorptiometry) 1, 2 Eat Fast, Live Longer 1, 2 eating disorders 1 eating patterns 4:3 1, 2 breakfast 1 evolutionary 1, 2, 3 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 habit 1, 2, 3 non-Fast Days 1 normal expectation 1 personal experiences 1, 2, 3 recent changes 1 research evidence 1, 2 Ecuador 1 eczema 1, 2 edamame 1 eggs 1, 2, 3 huevos rancheros 1 mushroom and spinach frittata 1 scrambled 1, 2 electric shock therapy 1 emotion confusion 1 endurance training 1 energy levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 English breakfast, Fast Day 1 evolution fasting 1, 2, 3 hippocampus 1 memory 1 natural eating pattern 1, 2 repair genes 1 excess appetite 1, 2 exercise see also high intensity training benefits 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 pedometer 1 personal experiences 1 physical response 1 with prolonged fasting 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 strength training 1 time required 1 external cues 1 Facebook 1 faintness 1, 2 faith 1 family support 1, 2 famine 1 fashion industry 1 Fast Days busyness 1, 2, 3 calorie level 1, 2, 3 hours 1 meal pattern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 weekly patterns 1, 2 Fast Diet potential 1 Fast Exercise 1 see also high intensity training fasting alternate day 1, 2, 3 animal research 1, 2, 3 definition 1 evolution 1, 2 four-day 1, 2 health benefits 1 hippocampus 1 IGF-1 1 prolonged 1, 2 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 two-day 1, 2 fasting glucose levels 1, 2, 3 fasting window 1, 2 fat burning exercise 1 fasting 1, 2 gender differences 1 iFast 1 meal pattern 1 naringenin 1 noradrenaline 1 process 1, 2 fat intake 1 fat levels on Fast Days 1 fat-soluble vitamins 1 fat storing gender differences 1 insulin 1, 2 triglycerides 1 fat, visceral 1, 2 fatigue 1 fats, calorie content 1 fatty acids 1 fear 1 fennel 1 fertility 1 ferulic acid 1 fibre 1, 2, 3, 4 first day 1, 2, 3 fish 1 calorie content 1 mackerel 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 pesto salmon 1 smoked haddock 1 tuna 1, 2 flavour boosts 1, 2 flavour improvement 1 flexibility 1, 2, 3, 4 focus 1, 2 food fixation 1 food industry marketing 1, 2 food preference changes 1, 2, 3, 4 food preparation 1 food weighing 1 four day fast 1, 2 free radicals 1 friend not foe 1 friends 1, 2, 3 frittata, mushroom and spinach 1 fruit antioxidants 1 benefits 1 calorie content 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 research evidence 1, 2 skins 1 fruit bars 1 fruit juice 1 fullness 1, 2 game meat 1 garlic 1, 2 gastric reflux 1 gender differences 1 genes 1, 2, 3 Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre, Wythenshawe 1, 2 Germans 1 glucose levels carbohydrates 1, 2 fasting test 1, 2, 3 four day fast 1, 2 grazing 1 intermittent fasting (IF) 1 monitoring 1 normal levels 1 glucose metabolism 1 gluttony 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1, 2 glycaemic load (GL) 1 glycogen 1, 2 goals 1, 2 Goan aubergine curry 1 gout 1 grains 1 grapefruit 1, 2 grapes 1, 2 grazing 1, 2, 3, 4 see also snacks green beans 1 green tea 1 green vegetables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 growth factors 1 see also insulin-like growth factor 1 growth hormone receptor 1 guilt 1, 2 habit 1, 2, 3, 4 habituation 1 haddock, smoked 1 hair 1 Harvie, Dr Michelle 1, 2, 3, 4 HDL (high density lipoprotein) 1, 2 headaches 1, 2 health improvements fasting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 maintenance model 1 Mosley, Dr Michael 1 motivation 1 personal experiences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 heart disease risk factors 1, 2, 3, 4 risk reduction 1, 2, 3 hedonic eating 1 herbal teas 1 herbs 1, 2, 3 high-fat diet 1, 2, 3 high-fructose diet 1 high intensity training (HIT) 1, 2, 3 hippocampus 1, 2 history 1 HIT see high intensity training Horizon, BBC 1, 2, 3 hormesis 1, 2 hormones 1, 2, 3 Horne, Dr Benjamin 1 hot chocolate 1 hotpot, butterbean and chorizo 1 Howell, Prof Tony 1 huevos rancheros 1 human research alternate day fasting 1, 2 cancer 1 intermittent fasting (IF) 1 Laron syndrome 1 two day fast 1 hummus 1, 2 hunger pangs adaptation 1, 2 decreasing levels 1 distraction 1, 2, 3, 4 emotion confusion 1 fear 1 learned reactions 1 mood 1 passing 1, 2 personal experiences 1, 2 waiting 1 hydration 1, 2, 3 hyperphagia 1 hypertension 1 see also blood pressure iFast 1, 2 IGF-1 see insulin-like growth factor 1 immune system 1 impotence 1 impulsive snacking 1 inflammation gout 1 high protein diets 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3 skin conditions 1, 2 visceral fat 1 initial health measuring 1, 2 Mosley, Dr Michael 1, 2, 3, 4 Spencer, Mimi 1 insalata caprese 1 instinct 1, 2, 3 insulin 1, 2, 3 see also blood sugar insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) four day fast 1, 2 function in the body 1 healthy range 1 high-protein diet 1 protein 1 reduction 1, 2 tests 1 insulin resistance 1, 2, 3, 4 insulin sensitivity 1, 2, 3, 4 Intermountain Heart Institute, Utah 1 iron 1, 2 Italian diet 1 juice 1 junk food 1, 2 Kahleova, Dr. 1 kale 1 ketchup 1 ketone bodies 1 Laron mice 1 Laron syndrome 1 lattes 1, 2, 3, 4 Laverty, Aidan 1 LDL (low density lipoprotein) 1, 2, 3, 4 learned reactions 1 legumes 1, 2, 3 lemons 1 lentils 1 red lentil tikka masala 1 spiced chicken with warm lentils and roasted garlic 1 spiced dhal 1 life extension see longevity lifestyle choices 1 liminoids 1 lipolysis 1, 2 liver 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 long term plan 1 longevity animal models 1 benefits 1 diabetes effect 1 research evidence 1, 2 start of fasting 1 Longevity Institute, University of Southern California 1 Longo, Professor Valter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 low-fat diet 1 low-fat foods 1 lunar fasting 1 lung function 1 lycopene 1, 2, 3 mackerel 1, 2 maintenance model 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mandolin 1 marketing pressure 1, 2 Mars bars 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 Mattson, Professor Mark 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 meal patterns see eating patterns meal-replacement shakes 1 meals daily number 1 focus 1, 2 frequency 1, 2 intermittent fasting 1 size 1 meat 1, 2, 3 media interest 1 medical conditions 1, 2, 3 medication interference 1 Mediterranean diet 1 memory hippocampus 1, 2 junk food 1 online tests 1 men body fat percentage 1 exercise 1 fasting 1 fasting day calories 1 menstrual cycle 1 mental attitude see mood metabolic changes food choices 1 HIT exercise 1 mood 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4 metabolic syndrome 1 mice 1, 2 milk calorie content 1, 2 Fast Days 1 fat content 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 protein levels 1 mindfulness 1, 2 miso soup 1, 2 mitochondria 1 Mohammed 1 mood brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 difficulties 1, 2 HIT exercise 1 hunger pangs 1 improvement 1, 2, 3 Mosley, Dr Michael background 1, 2 Fast Days 1, 2 father 1, 2 health improvements 1, 2, 3 HIT exercise 1 initial health 1, 2, 3, 4 motivation 1, 2, 3, 4 MRI scans 1, 2, 3 multivitamins 1, 2 muscles exercise 1, 2 fasting 1, 2 fat burning 1 glycogen storage 1 HIT exercise 1 protein synthesis 1 strength training 1 mushrooms 1, 2 frittata with spinach 1 with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 mussels, Thai mussels 1 naringenin 1 National Institute on Aging, USA 1, 2, 3, 4 neck size 1 nerve cells 1, 2 New Scientist 1 newspapers 1 NHS website 1 Nikolai of Zicha, Saint 1 no-carb Caesar salad 1 nobiletin 1 non-Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 non-stick pans 1 noodles 1 noradrenaline 1 nutritional requirements 1 nuts benefits 1 calorie content 1 Fast Days 1, 2 glycaemic index (GI) 1, 2 oats 1, 2, 3, 4 obesity breast cancer 1 fast diet benefits 1 grazing 1 worldwide trend 1 oils 1, 2 omega 3 fatty acids 1, 2 oranges 1, 2, 3 overeating 1, 2, 3 pancreas 1, 2 parental advice 1 pasta 1, 2 patience 1, 2 pears, spiced porridge 1 peas, Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 pectin 1 pedometer 1 pesticides, natural 1 pho, Vietnamese prawn 1 phytochemicals 1, 2, 3, 4 pickles 1 Pilon, Brad 1 pineapple 1 pistachios 1 pizza, tortilla 1 PKA gene 1 planning 1, 2 poisons 1 polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) 1 polyphenols 1 popcorn 1 pork, Fast Day roast 1 porridge 1, 2 spiced pear 1 portion sizes 1, 2, 3, 4 positivity 1 potatoes 1, 2, 3 potential benefits 1, 2 see also health improvements Power, Dr Ray 1 praise 1, 2 prawns calorie content 1 stir-fry with asparagus 1 Vietnamese pho 1 pregnancy 1, 2, 3 preparation 1, 2 probiotics 1 processed foods 1 prostate cancer 1, 2 protective genes 1 protein calorie content 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 function in the body 1, 2 ‘good’ 1 high-protein diets 1 insulin-like growth factor 1 1 recommended quantity 1, 2 ‘proximity principle’ 1 psoriasis 1, 2 psychology 1, 2 pulses 1, 2 quick no-cook meals 1 Quinn, Nora 1 quinoa 1, 2, 3 radiotherapy 1, 2 raisins 1, 2 Ramadan 1 rapamycin 1 raw food 1, 2 ready meals 1 realism 1 refined sugars 1, 2 religion 1, 2 repair genes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research evidence alternate day fasting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Alzheimer’s disease 1 asthma 1 brain effects 1, 2, 3, 4 breakfast 1 calorie restriction (CR) 1 cancer 1, 2, 3 conventional diets 1, 2 diaries 1 diet drinks 1 Dublin study 1 exercise 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 fruit 1, 2 HIT exercise 1 immune system 1 inflammation 1, 2, 3 Laron syndrome 1 longevity 1, 2 meal patterns 1 metabolic changes 1, 2, 3, 4 mood 1 ‘proximity principle’ 1 soups 1 ‘starvation mode’ 1 two day fast 1 weight loss 1, 2 resentment 1 restrained eating 1, 2 reward 1 rheumatoid arthritis 1 rice 1, 2, 3 rice cakes 1 Russians 1 salad dressing 1 salads Fast Days 1, 2, 3 flavour boosts 1 insalata caprese 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 no-carb Caesar 1 steak and Asian coleslaw 1 Thai 1 Thai steak 1 tuna, bean and garlic 1 warm aubergine with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 warm vegetable 1 Salk Institute for Biological Studies 1 salmon calorie content 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 with pesto 1 Samarasinghe, Roshan 1 sandwiches 1 sashimi 1 satisfaction 1, 2, 3, 4 saucepans 1 scales 1 Scarsdale diet 1 scientific research see research evidence seafood prawn and asparagus stir fry 1 Thai mussels 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 seeds 1 self-awareness 1 ‘self eat’ 1 self praise 1, 2 shock 1 shopping list 1 Sikhism 1 single meal 1, 2 skin 1, 2, 3 skinny spag bol 1 sleep caffeine 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3 four-day fast 1 personal experiences 1, 2 slim individuals 1 smells 1 smoothies 1, 2, 3 snacks see also grazing as eating pattern 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 glycaemic index (GI) 1 habit 1, 2, 3 habitual 1 manufacturers 1 typical pattern 1 women 1 snoring 1, 2 social demands 1, 2, 3, 4 Somatomedin-C see insulin-like growth factor 1 soups appetite suppressant 1 bacon and butterbean 1 Fast Days 1, 2 miso 1 ready meals 1 research evidence 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 soy milk 1 Spencer, Mimi Fast Days 1 father 1 health improvements 1 initial BMI 1 previous diets 1 spiced dhal 1 spices 1, 2 spinach 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 mushrooms with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 spiritual benefits 1 staples 1 start day 1, 2, 3 ‘starvation mode’ 1 statins 1 steak with Asian coleslaw 1 Thai salad 1 steaming 1, 2 stem cells 1, 2, 3 Stevia 1 stir-fry 1 stomach size 1 straight-to-the-plate ideas 1 strawberries 1, 2, 3, 4 strawberry smoothie 1 strength training 1 stress responses 1, 2 stroke 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sugar 1, 2, 3, 4 super-foods 1 supplements 1, 2 support network 1, 2, 3 sustainability 1, 2 sweeteners 1 sweets 1, 2 tangerines 1, 2 targets 1, 2 teas 1 teeth 1 temptation 1, 2, 3, 4 Thai green chicken curry 1 Thai mussels 1 Thai salad 1 Thai steak salad 1 thirst 1, 2 thrifty hypothesis 1 time of fasts 1, 2 The Times 1 timetables 1 Timmons, Professor Jamie 1, 2 tiredness 1 TOFI (Thin on the Outside and Fat Inside) 1 tomatoes 1, 2, 3 baked butternut with courgette and tomato 1 butterbean and chorizo hotpot 1 huevos rancheros 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 tortilla pizza 1 training research 1, 2 transit time, digestion 1 treats 1, 2 triggers, personal 1 triglycerides 1, 2, 3 tumour necrosis factor 1 tumours 1 tuna bean and garlic salad 1 seared 1 turkey 1 cumin-turkey burgers with corn on the cob 1 Twitter 1, 2 two day fast 1, 2 underweight individuals 1 urine 1 Varady, Dr Krista 1, 2, 3, 4 variety 1, 2, 3 vegetable bouillon 1 vegetables antioxidants 1 bitterness 1 calorie content 1 consumption levels 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 leafy greens 1, 2, 3 ‘noodles’ 1 quantities 1 raw 1, 2 skins 1 starchy 1 steaming 1, 2 variety 1 warm salad 1 vegetarian chilli 1 venison 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 vinegar 1, 2 visceral fat 1, 2 vitamins 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 waist measurement alternate day fasting 1 Fast Diet plus HIT 1, 2 healthy range 1 initial level 1, 2 method 1 personal experiences 1 reduction 1 research evidence 1 two-day fast 1 waist to height ratio 1 walking 1, 2, 3 warfarin 1 water 1, 2, 3 watercress 1 watermelon 1, 2 websites Fast Diet 1, 2, 3, 4 glycaemic index (GI) 1 NHS 1 weekends 1 weekly patterns 1, 2 weight loss eating patterns research 1 fast diet 1, 2, 3 fixation 1 personal experiences 1, 2 prolonged fasting 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3 stalling 1 targets 1 two-day fast 1 weekly variation 1 weight measurements 1, 2, 3, 4 weight training 1 wild animals 1 willpower 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 wine 1 withdrawal symptoms 1 women body fat percentage 1, 2 exercise 1 fasting 1 fasting day calories 1 yoghurt 1, 2, 3 YouTube 1 To find out more, and for the latest science updates and tools to help you through your Fast Days, go to fastdiet.co.uk.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Late in 2013, the company announced that it was creating a new venture, Calico, “a new biotechnology company to fight the aging process and the diseases that accompany it.”30 This is part of the Kurzweil ideology too. Kurzweil takes around one hundred vitamins and supplements a day as he seeks to forestall death long enough to get to the singularity. Other technologists and Silicon Valley entities are also betting on life extension to get us there. Peter Thiel invested in and sat on the board of Halcyon Molecular, a company with the goal of eventually curing, or at least forestalling, aging. It closed down in 2012 after receiving roughly $20 million in investment funding. Thiel also gave $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, an organization aiming to “reverse human aging” and he has supported a nonprofit called Humanity Plus, “dedicated to transhumanism—the transformation of the human condition through technology.”31 Like Kurzweil and so many others, he is spreading his ample supply of chips on both odd and even, black and red, figuring that at least one of those bets will pay off eventually.

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“Bina and I were inspired to find a way for people to believe in God consistent with science and technology so people would have faith in the future.”35 The Time report, along with all the rest of the coverage, is respectfully incredulous: these people are nice, but nuts. But, in fact, Terasem is only seen as being on the lunatic fringe because they are putting a spiritual spin on what is an otherwise increasingly mainstream technological goal—virtual life extension via mind-machine meld. In 2013, Martine Rothblatt, who is also the founder of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics, was one of the speakers at Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Global Future Congress in New York City. Clearly, her spiritual beliefs fit right into the tenor of the times. In fact, they neatly dovetail with the overall techno-utopian belief system revolving around “faith in the (technological) future.”

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At the further fringes of prepperdom, there are militias that want to actively bring about the end-time, overthrow the government, end the corruption and forced enfeeblement of the citizenry. Again, I’m reminded of the Silicon Valley leaders, walling themselves off from the rest of society to focus on solving the problem of online media revenue management and mobile phone drink orders while pouring billions into dubious life extension schemes and envisioning the Bay Area seceding from California and the USA to become its own zone governed by the logic-infused fiat of data-empowered CEOs. At their core, both the technologists and the preppers have secular belief systems rooted in a sense of superiority over others. Both have a lifestyle of products and gatherings revolving around the endlessly arriving future.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Sparrow cites the ‘gap’ some men feel by not being able to bear children (I’m not one of them) and wonders, if there is a demand for male pregnancy, should it be an option freely available if the technology can be made safe? I suddenly realise that for these assembled academics, the prospect of fundamental alterations of our biology (including radical life extension and human enhancement) is a given. They’re not talking about what happens if it becomes possible, they’re discussing what we might do when it’s an option. And this worries many transhumanist critics. Sparrow later tells me, ‘The implications of taking transhumanism seriously are so radical and implausible that I think we should be much less inclined to do so.’

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I’m keen to understand where his optimism about transhumanist outcomes comes from, when so many people I mention the idea to visibly recoil. What drives him to bang the transhumanist drum in a world generally hostile to the idea? Throughout our talk, I pose this question in various guises, and Bostrom always answers in the same spirit – that, in his view, human life extension and enhancement will allow us not simply to live longer, but to enjoy living much more. When I ask, ‘What inspires and motivates you?’ he cites his reading, his colleagues, but also states ‘I guess through feeling and experiencing something in this life and thinking “why can’t it always be as good as that?”’

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To overcome this, the transhumanist project is developing technologies that can enable us to become all that we are in potential, by changing not just the world around us but human biology as well.’ Well, it’s certainly more ambitious than getting a new kitchen. For him and many other transhumanists it’s not just ‘better than human,’ it’s also ‘have a better time than humans.’ And if you’re going to have a better time, why stop at seventy or eighty years? ‘Life extension is very central to me,’ he states. ‘First because for all the ordinary reasons we prefer to be alive rather than dead and, second, because if you think that the future might hold additional possibilities of radical enhancements of human capacity, the only way to get to experience that is to remain alive long enough, until those technologies have been developed.’

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Others see it instead as increasingly inevitable. Physician, heal thyself. What if you are an aging surgeon and parts of your body are worn out? Options may include stem-cell therapy, the transplant of an artificial organ (a kidney grown in vitro), the printing of replacement teeth or bones using a fabricator, general life extension, some more hair, or perhaps some new fingers? This last idea may seem a little far-fetched, but if newts can repair themselves why not human beings? One way to do so might be to persuade cells to return to a younger state—in other words, trick the body into believing that it’s a young child once again.

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the condensed idea We prefer our robots cuddly timeline 1950 I, Robot short stories by Isaac Asimov 1999 Sony’s Aibo dog 2000 Hasbro’s FurReal robotic pets 2004 WowWee’s Robosapien 2005 Cornell’s first self-replicating robot 2006 Amazing Allysen interactive doll 2016 Widespread use of agricultural robots 2030 98 percent of Korean homes contain a robot 35 Transhumanism Could emerging technologies enable individuals to radically extend life spans or even transcend the very idea of aging itself? As you might expect, transhumanism has annexed various philosophical ideas, especially in California, to become a kind of quasi religion or a quest for immortality. At one level transhumanism intersects with some fairly practical theories regarding life extension. For example, the adoption of a very low-calorie diet has been shown in some studies to significantly extend the life of mice and some say that the idea can be applied to people too. Developments in regenerative medicine (see Chapter 22) tap into some of these urges and impulses too, although beyond this, things can get a little weird.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

He wasn’t looking for industry experience but for people he knew, people who were incredibly smart, people who were like him, Stanford friends like Reid Hoffman, Stanford Review alums like David Sacks and Keith Rabois, and Confinity’s cramped, spartan offices above a bike shop soon filled with carelessly dressed, badly groomed men in their twenties (Thiel was one of the oldest at thirty-two), chess players, math whizzes, libertarians, without distracting obligations like wives and children or time-wasting hobbies like sports and TV (one applicant was turned down because he admitted to enjoying shooting hoops). Some employees lived on junk food at their desks, others were on life-extension calorie-restricted diets. The company took out an ad in The Stanford Daily: “Think kick-ass stock options in a cool start-up are worth dropping out of college? We are hiring right now!” It became the first company in the history of the world to offer cryogenics as part of its employee benefits package.

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He refused to submit to what he called “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” He saw it as a problem to be solved, and the sooner the better. With the current state of medical research, he expected to live to be 120—a sorry compromise, given the grand possibilities of life extension. But 150 was becoming thinkable, and immortality wasn’t out of the question. In his last years, Steve Jobs had given speeches about how motivated he was by the prospect of death, but Thiel didn’t agree. Death was very demotivating. It ended up having a depressing effect, it gave a desperate tone to things and imposed constraints on what people tried to achieve.

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On the other hand, he shied away from investing in the area that would provide the most immediate help to struggling Americans—food and energy. Those were too regulated, too political. If there was something inegalitarian about his investments, every technological advance had an unequal component—you were doing the new thing, and the new thing could seldom be instantaneously transmitted to everybody. The starkest example was life extension: the most extreme form of inequality was between people who were alive and people who were dead. It was hard to get more unequal than that. The first people to live to be 150 would probably be rich—but Thiel believed that every technological breakthrough eventually improved the lives of most people, and anyway, none of it would happen if it were left to a popular vote

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Among the more prominent ones are Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, whose foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on aging research; Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, who has invested millions in biotech companies oriented toward solving the problem of aging; and Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, who started Calico (the California Life Company), whose focus is on aging research and life extension. And then there’s the health care mogul Joon Yun, who, though he didn’t make his fortune in classic high-tech, is based in Silicon Valley and is the sponsor of the $1 million Longevity Prize “dedicated to ending aging” through his foundation, the Palo Alto Institute. Although I remain quite skeptical that any of these will achieve any significant success, they are worthy efforts and a great example of American philanthropy at work, regardless of the motivation.

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Just to get a sense of how exceptional this is, the next oldest verified person was the American Sarah Knauss, who lived more than three years fewer than Jeanne, dying at the age of 119 years and 97 days. The next super-champs of long life lived almost two years fewer than Sarah, while the oldest person still alive today is the Italian Emma Murano, who is “only” in her 118th year. The search for life extension can therefore be boiled down to two major categories: (1) The conservative challenge: how can the rest of us continue the upward march toward a longer life and approach the extraordinary achievements of Jeanne Calment and Sarah Knauss? (2) The radical challenge: is it possible to extend life span beyond the apparent maximum limit of approximately 125 years and live, for instance, to 225 years?

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See aging and death Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 253–54 de Beauvoir, Simone, 257–58 decay rate, 190–91 Deng Xiaoping, 389 determinate growth, 165–66 Detroit, 359 “developing” countries, 9, 185, 280 Dickens, Charles, 186, 223, 225, 226 diet caloric restriction, 205–7, 206 life extension and, 189 2,000 food calories a day, 13, 90, 234, 373 dimensionality of cities, 409 of companies, 409–10 dimensionless quantity, 76–77, 167 dinosaurs, 158–59 direct current (DC), 123–24 Dirksen, Everett, 233–34 discontinuities, 130, 139, 141 Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Galileo), 38–42 dissipation, 14, 41–42, 124–25, 199 DLD Conference, 340–41 DNA, 84, 99, 200, 309, 437 DNA damage theory of aging.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

On occasion he would even enter hotel kitchens to give specific instructions to the chefs.9 He was to become well known throughout America as a health guru. In 1915 he c0-authored a book, How to Live, setting out basic rules of public hygiene. In total 400,000 copies were sold in the US and it was translated into ten languages. None of his economics writing was as successful. Fisher gave his royalties of $75,000 to the Life Extension Institute, an organization he co-founded two years earlier to promote healthy living and encourage frequent medical check-ups. Some of his associations were controversial. He was president of the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association. His belief in eugenics was based on the maintenance and improvement of the human race.

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emerging economies BRICs convergence hypothesis financial/currency crises and globalization and world GDP see also economic development challenges employment and automation China’s post-1949 system exploitation of workers and government spending and imperfect competition losses with imports and Robinson and skill-biased technical change temporary workers wages and levels of work incentive endogenous growth theories Engels, Friedrich The Condition of the Working Class in England and Marx see also Marx, Karl: Communist Manifesto (with Engels) Enlightenment European Scottish entrepreneurs/entrepreneurship in China and Schumpeter Equation of Exchange Equatorial Guinea Ermen & Engels eugenics euro area euro crisis European Central Bank (ECB) European Commission European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) European Investment Bank (EIB) European Union austerity Capital Markets Union growth through investment Juncker Plan services sector single market Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership UK membership referendum exchange rates exchange rate mechanism (ERM) fixed see also gold: standard exploitation of workers ‘economic rents’ exports China duties UK US externalities factor-price equalization theorem factor reallocation Fairfax Financial Fannie Mae Fear the Boom and Bust Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Federal Reserve and the 2008 financial crisis and Friedman and the Great Depression Fermi, Enrico financial accelerators financial crises 1857 crisis 1929 Great Crash 1990s real estate crash in Japan 2008 crisis banking panics currency crises see currency crises and development in emerging economies euro crisis and financial stability leading to low investment and Marx see also recession/depression financial services see also banks/banking financial stability Minsky’s hypothesis see also central banks; macroprudential policy Financial Times fiscal policy austerity see austerity government spending see government spending Keynes’ fiscal activism and public debt redistribution see redistribution Fisher, Antony Fisher, Ella Fisher, George Whitefield Fisher, Herbert Fisher, Irving and the backlash against globalization Booms and Depressions business cycle theory and central banks on combating deflation debt-deflation theory of depression distributive lag model doctoral thesis and the dollar and the Econometric Society and eugenics Fisher equation and gold How to Live imprint on economics and the Index Number Institute and the Index Visible Company life and times of and the Life Extension Institute The Making of Index Numbers mathematical economics and Minsky and the ‘money illusion’ The Nature of Capital and Income as presidential adviser and Prohibition The Purchasing Power of Money Quantity Theory of Money The Rate of Interest and Remington Rand The Stock Market Crash – and After and stocks The Theory of Interest wealth Why is the Dollar Shrinking?

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joint-stock companies Jones, Homer Journal of Economic Perspectives Journal of Political Economy JPMorgan Juncker Plan Kahn, Richard Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard and the backlash against globalization and the Bloomsbury Group and Bretton Woods System and budget deficits counter-cyclical policies and crowding out on depression/recession The Economic Consequences of the Peace fiscal activism and Friedman The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and government spending on government’s role in economy and Hayek and investors Keynesian revolution legacy life and times of and Marshall and Niemeyer and paradox of thrift at Paris Peace Conference Prices and Production and public investment and Robbins Robinson and Keynes/Keynesian economics and Schumpeter and ‘socializing investment’ A Tract on Monetary Reform and the Treasury A Treatise on Money wealth Keynes, John Neville Khrushchev, Nikita Knight, Frank Kodak Korea North South Krugman, Paul Krupp Kuznets, Simon labour force growth labour productivity and work incentive laissez-faire landowners Lassalle, Ferdinand Latin America currency crisis (1981–82) see also specific countries League of Nations Lehman Brothers Lenin, Vladimir Leontief, Wassily Lewis, Arthur Lewis, Barbara (‘Bobby’) Life Extension Institute Linda for Congress BBC documentary London London School of Economics and Political Science London Stock Exchange Long Depression (1880s) Lopokova, Lydia Louis XIV LSE see London School of Economics and Political Science Lucas, Jr, Robert Ma, Jack (Ma Yun) Maastricht Treaty macroprudential policy see also central banks; financial stability Malaysia Malthus, Thomas Manchester Mandela, Nelson manufacturing additive (3D printing) automation in China and deindustrialization GDP contribution in UK German high-tech and industrialization see also industrialization Japan ‘manu-services’ ‘March of the Makers’ mass-manufactured goods and national statistics reshoring rolling back deindustrialization process and Smith trade patterns changed by advanced manufacturing US Mao Zedong Maoism ‘March of the Makers’ marginal utility analysis marginalism market forces/economy ‘Big Bang’ (1986) competition see competition and economic equilibrium see economic equilibrium emerging economies see emerging economies Hayek and the supremacy of market forces ‘invisible hand’ and laissez-faire and Marx 4 self-righting markets supply and demand see supply and demand Marshall, Alfred on approach to economics and the backlash against globalization and the Cambridge School and decentralization Economics of Industry and education’s role in reducing inequality and inequality and Keynes and laissez-faire legacy life and times of marginal utility analysis and Marx and poverty Principles of Economics and utility theory Marshall, Mary, née Paley Marx, Heinrich Marx, Henriette, née Pressburg Marx, Jenny, née von Westphalen Marx, Karl and agriculture and the backlash against globalization Capital and capitalism and China and class Communist Manifesto (with Engels) communist theories A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy doctoral thesis The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Engels journalism life and times of and Marshall and rate of profit and Ricardo and Russia on service sector workers surplus value theory and the Young Hegelians Marx, Laura Marx, Louise Marxism and the Austrian School and unemployment see also Marx, Karl Mason, Edward mathematical economics Mauritius May, Theresa Meade, James median income Menger, Carl mercantilist policies see also Corn Laws Merkel, Angela Mexico middle class China and economic growth and economic inequality and European revolutionaries income and industrialization and Keynes and Heinrich Marx as proportion of world population and Schumpeter social resentment US Mill, James Mill, John Stuart On Liberty Principles of Political Economy Minsky, Hyman Mises, Ludwig von Mitchell, Wesley mobile phones/smartphones monetarism see also Friedman, Milton monetary policy and Friedman tools see also quantitative easing (QE) see also central banks monopolies and Marx natural and Robinson and Schumpeter and Smith and Sraffa monopsony Mont Pelerin Society Morgenthau, Henry mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mortgage lending and the 2008 financial crisis sub-prime Myanmar Myrdal, Gunnar Napoleon I Napoleon III Napoleonic Wars national/official statistics China UK US national debt Austria and central banks China and creditors and debt forgiveness and deficits euro area and foreign exchange reserves and investment Japan major economies owed to foreigners and quantitative easing and Ricardian equivalent UK US Vietnam National Health Service (UK) National Infrastructure Commission (UK) Navigation Acts neoclassical economics convergence hypothesis ‘neoclassical synthesis’ New Neoclassical Synthesis see also Fisher, Irving; Marshall, Alfred; Solow, Robert Neoclassical Synthesis see also Samuelson, Paul New Classicists see also Lucas, Jr, Robert New Deal New Institutional Economics see also North, Douglass New Keynesians see also Stiglitz, Joseph New Neoclassical Synthesis New Rhineland News (Cologne) New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy (London) new trade theory New York Herald New York Times New York Tribune Newcomb, Simon Newsweek Niemeyer, Sir Otto Nissan Nixon, Richard Nokia non-tariff barriers (NTBs) Nordhaus, William North, Douglass and the backlash against globalization and development challenges doctoral thesis The Economic Growth of the United States from 1790 to 1860 and institutions Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance life and times of Nobel Prize path dependence theory and Smith North, Elizabeth, née Case North Korea Northern Rock Oak Ridge National Laboratory Obama, Barack Occupy movement oil industry Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Osborne, George Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Oxford University Balliol College Paine, Thomas Paley, Mary Paris Peace Conference path dependence theory see also North, Douglass Peel Banking Act Philips, Lion Philips (electronics company) physical capital Physiocrats Pigou, Arthur Cecil Piketty, Thomas pin-making Pinochet, Augusto Ponzi finance populism Portugal poverty aid and development see economic development challenges eradication/reduction frictional and Marshall and Marx and median income people lifted from in South Africa productivity and agriculture ‘benign neglect’ of Britain’s productivity puzzle and computers and economic growth and education and factor reallocation and Germany and Hayek incentives and industry/industrial revolution and innovation and investment Japan and jobs labour see labour productivity and land low and Marshall moving into higher sectors of and pricing raising and Schumpeter and secular stagnation slow economic and productivity growth and the future and specialization and technology total factor productivity and trade and wages Prohibition protectionism agricultural see also Corn Laws Navigation Acts public-private partnerships public investment and Keynes public spending general government spending see government spending public investment see public investment squeeze see also austerity Puerto Rico quantitative easing (QE) Quantity Theory of Money see also Friedman, Milton; monetarism; Equation of Exchange Rand, Ayn RAND Corporation rate of profit rational expectations theory Reagan, Ronald recession/depression debt-deflation theory of depression Great Depression see Great Depression (1930s) Great Recession (2009) Greece ‘hangover theory’ of Hayek on and Keynes Long Depression (1880s) second recession (1937–38: recession within the Depression) in UK 1970s redistribution Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Reich, Robert reindustrialization Reisinger, Anna Josefina Remington Rand rent-seeking research and development (R&D) investment China Research in Motion (RIM) retail trade Rhineland News Ricardian equivalence Ricardo, David and the backlash against globalization and class comparative advantage theory and the Corn Laws Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock The High Price of Bullion international trade theory as a landlord life and times of as a loan contractor and Marx On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and Schumpeter and Smith wealth Ricardo, Priscilla Robbins, Lionel Robinson, Austin Robinson, James Robinson, Joan The Accumulation of Capital and the AEA and the backlash against globalization and communism Economic Philosophy The Economics of Imperfect Competition Essays in the Theory of Employment and imperfect competition Introduction to the Theory of Employment and Keynes and Keynesian economics life and times of and monopolies monopsony theory and Schumpeter and unemployment wage determination theory robotics Rodrik, Dani Rolls-Royce Roosevelt, Franklin D New Deal Russia 1905 Revolution and Lenin and Marx Samsung Samuelson, Paul and the backlash against globalization Economics factor-price equalization theorem Nobel Prize savings for capital investment and inflation and Keynes and the ‘paradox of thrift’ Say, Jean-Baptiste Schmoller, Gustav von Schumpeter, Anna, née Reisinger Schumpeter, Gladys, née Seaver Schumpeter, Joseph and the backlash against globalization as banker/investor Business Cycles and capitalism Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ‘creative destruction’, innovation and ‘The Crisis of the Tax State’ and the Econometric Society economics and entrepreneurs on Fisher and Hayek History of Economic Analysis and Keynes legacy life and times of The Nature and Content of Theoretical Economics and perfect competition and Ricardo and Robinson Theory of Economic Development wealth Schumpeter, Romaine Elizabeth, née Boody Schumpeter Group of Seven Wise Men Schwartz, Anna Jacobson Schwarzenegger, Arnold Scottish Enlightenment Seaver, Gladys Ricarde see Schumpeter, Gladys secular stagnation self-interest services sector China and deindustrialization financial services see financial services global trade in services human capital investment invisibility of liberalization ‘manu-services’ and Marx move away from and national statistics output measurement productivity and innovation and Smith Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) UK US shadow banking Shiller, Robert silver Singapore Skidelsky, Robert skill-biased technical change skills shortage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) smartphones/mobile phones Smith, Adam and the backlash against globalization as Commissioner of Customs for Scotland economic freedom on ‘invisible hand’ of market forces and laissez-faire economics legacy life and times of and manufacturing and Marx and North and Physiocracy on rate of profit and rebalancing the economy and Ricardo and the services sector and state intervention The Theory of Moral Sentiments The Wealth of Nations social capital social networks social services socialism communist see communism vs welfare state capitalism Solow, Barbara (‘Bobby’), née Lewis Solow, Robert and the backlash against globalization with Council of Economic Advisers doctoral thesis economic growth model ‘How Economic Ideas Turn to Mush’ John Bates Clark Medal and Keynesian economics life and times of Nobel Prize Presidential Medal of Freedom and technological progress Sony Sorrell, Sir Martin South Africa South Korea Soviet Union and China Cold War collapse of see also Russia Spain specialization spontaneous order Sraffa, Piero stagflation Stanley Black & Decker state government regulation intervention in the economy laissez-faire STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers sterling Stigler, George Stiglitz, Joseph stocks and Fisher and interest rates US railroad Strachey, Lytton Strahan, William Strong, Benjamin Sturzenegger, Federico Summers, Lawrence supply and demand see also market forces/economy: ‘invisible hand’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Taiwan Tanzania tariffs taxation and austerity devolved powers of flat for government deficit spending before Great Depression and inequality and investment Japan and Marshall negative income tax to pay off national debt Pigouvian tax progressive and Reagan redistribution through Schumpeter on Smith on Taylor, John Taylor, Overton H.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

23andMe, Adam Curtis, air freight, company town, desegregation, index card, indoor plumbing, life extension, medical malpractice, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, white picket fence

… SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART … DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE Scientists said Carrel’s chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the secrets behind everything from eating and sex to “the music of Bach, the poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.” Carrel was a scientific messiah. Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever. But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else.

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“Scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you disassociate your materials from the people they come from. But if you could get a sample from Henrietta’s body today and do DNA fingerprinting on it, her DNA would match the DNA in HeLa cells.” Around the time Van Valen suggested HeLa was no longer human, researchers began exploring whether Henrietta’s cells might hold the key to human life extension—perhaps even immortality—and headlines once again claimed that scientists had found the fountain of youth. In the early 1900s, Carrel’s chicken-heart cells supposedly proved that all cells had the potential for immortality. But normal human cells—either in culture or in the human body—can’t grow indefinitely like cancer cells.

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W Greider, “Telomeres Shorten During Ageing of Human Fibroblasts,” Nature 345 (May 31, 1990); C. W Greider and E. H. Blackburn, “Identification of Specific Telomere Terminal Transferase Activity in Tetrahymena Extracts,” Cell 43 (December 1985). For further reading on research into aging and human life extension, see Stephen S. Hall’s Merchants of Immortality. For a selection of HPV research involving HeLa cells, see Michael Boshart et al., “A New Type of Papillomavirus DNA, Its Presence in Genital Cancer Biopsies and in Cell Lines Derived from Cervical Cancer,” EMBO Journal 3, no. 5 (1984); R. A. Jesudasan et al., “Rearrangement of Chromosome Band nqi3 in HeLa Cells,” Anticancer Research 14 (1994); N.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

He’d put money into politics and social projects—funding sometimes controversial efforts, political candidates, and movements that aligned with his conservative libertarian views. He’d put up a scholarship that encouraged brilliant entrepreneurs under twenty to drop out of school and pursue their dreams, believing that school wasn’t the answer for everyone. But perhaps his most pressing passion, and the one that had put him into Luhan’s sphere of expertise, was life extension. Reverse aging, immortality, whatever label the science came under, Thiel was interested, and willing to put some of his billions behind it. Luhan had never met a billionaire before, and from what she had read about Thiel, she had expected him to be arrogant and intimidating. But she quickly found him quite humble, even charming, and well versed in genetics and the health sciences.

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As Thiel pressed her for more information about the project that had led her to her knowledge of elephants, she realized that she was on the verge of something. An answer to their stem cell problem was sorting itself out in her thoughts. What she had told Thiel didn’t just apply to his own passions, his goal of infinite life extension. It applied to the Revivalists as well. The answer they were looking for was already there, in nature, in the elephant cells themselves. After she had filled in Thiel on more of the science of the Woolly Mammoth project, he congratulated her and turned his attention to another guest. In May 2015, he had already given one hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Mammoth Revival project.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The social outcome we seem to be approaching later in the century would grant simulated immortality for ordinary people, which could only be enjoyed by observers, not the actual dead, while the very rich might enjoy actual methusalization. One of the keenest reasons to want a middle-class distribution of wealth is to avoid a situation in which a small number of wealthy individuals live very long lives while no one else can afford the same life extensions. In my breakfast conversations about artificial hearts with Marvin Minsky, so long ago, he proposed that life extension could become so cheap that it would be universal. What we’ve seen, though, is that when some things become very cheap, other things become very expensive. Printers are incredibly cheap, and yet ink for them is incredibly expensive. Phones are cheap and yet connectivity for them is insanely expensive.

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Printers are incredibly cheap, and yet ink for them is incredibly expensive. Phones are cheap and yet connectivity for them is insanely expensive. Wal-Mart is cheap, and yet jobs go away. Software is “free” and yet the Internet is not creating as many jobs as it destroys. The talking seagull from the first chapter is probably more realistic than universal life extension for all in a world where clout and wealth flow to Siren Servers. A great showdown will occur when lives are extended significantly for the first time. My guess is that this won’t happen in the United States first. Russian oligarchs6 or Gulf sheiks might step up initially. If there’s a clock ticking to get a monetized information economy started, this is it.

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

bioinformatics, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, theory of mind, We are as Gods

Even if you get a life extension treatment later, it can’t be done at the same time.” Linda shrugs and looks down. Her shoulders are tense; her hands are fisted in her lap. I think she will not take the treatment without the promise of longer life. If I do it and she does not, we may not see each other again. I feel strange about that; she was in this unit before I was. I have seen her every working day for years. “I will talk to the board about this,” Mr. Arakeen says, more calmly. “We’ll have to get more legal and medical advice. But if I understand you, some of you are demanding life extension treatment as part of Page 196 the package, at some time in the future, as a condition of participation, is that right?”

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Light should go on top of dark. That balances. I can just see over them to walk down the hall. I fix the Chopin prelude in my mind and head for the laundry room. As usual on Friday nights, only Miss Kimberly is there. She is old, with fuzzy gray hair, but not as old as Miss Watson. I wonder if she thinks about the life extension treatments or if she is too old. Miss Kimberly is wearing light-green knit slacks and a flowered top. She usually wears this on Fridays when it is warm. I think about what she wears instead of the smell in the laundry room. It is a harsh, sharp smell that I do not like. “Good evening, Lou,” she says now.

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

They’ll bring big gains but without putting too many people back to work, IT specialists of the right kind excluded. The internet is wonderful, but it’s not saving the revenue-generating sector of the economy. The forward march of technology has indeed continued, but it’s giving us Twitter and better painkillers and some life extension when we are old and sick. And I love Twitter and I’ll probably value those painkillers, too, once I need them. We’re living the age-old wish of getting away from money, money, money and finding some of our biggest innovative successes in sectors that are good for us but not revenue intensive.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Alba, “Chicago Uber Driver Charged with Sexual Abuse of Passenger”; Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber”; Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 11. Copeland, “Summing Up Alan Turing.” 12. “The Leibniz Step Reckoner and Curta Calculators—CHM Revolution.” 13. Kroeger, The Suffragents; Shetterly, Hidden Figures; Grier, When Computers Were Human. 14. Wolfram, “Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016).” 15. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, “Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky.” 16. Brand, “We Are As Gods.” 17. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 18. Brand, “We Are As Gods.” 19. Hafner, The Well. 20. Borsook, Cyberselfish, 15. 21. Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 22. 

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New York: ACM Press, 2013. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2534860. Alba, Alejandro. “Chicago Uber Driver Charged with Sexual Abuse of Passenger.” New York Daily News, December 30, 2014. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/chicago-uber-driver-charged-alleged-rape-passenger-article-1.2060817. Alcor Life Extension Foundation. “Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky.” Alcor News, January 27, 2016. Alexander, Michelle, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised ed. New York: New Press, 2012. Ames, Morgan G. “Translating Magic: The Charisma of One Laptop per Child’s XO Laptop in Paraguay.”

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Unable to die, he became more and more decrepit and decayed, living an eternity with pain and suffering. So that is the challenge facing the science of the twenty-first century. Scientists are now reading the book of life, which includes the complete human genome, and which promises us miraculous advances in understanding aging. But life extension without health and vigor can be an eternal punishment, as Tithonus tragically found out. By the end of this century, we too shall have much of this mythical power over life and death. And this power won’t be limited to healing the sick but will be used to enhance the human body and even create new life-forms.

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More likely, it will be a combination of several methods: 1. growing new organs as they wear out or become diseased, via tissue engineering and stem cells 2. ingesting a cocktail of proteins and enzymes that are designed to increase cell repair mechanisms, regulate metabolism, reset the biological clock, and reduce oxidation 3. using gene therapy to alter genes that may slow down the aging process 4. maintaining a healthy lifestyle (exercise and a good diet) 5. using nanosensors to detect diseases like cancer years before they become a problem POPULATION, FOOD, AND POLLUTION But one nagging question is: If life expectancy can be increased, then will we suffer from overpopulation? No one knows. Delaying the aging process brings up a host of social implications. If we live longer, won’t we overpopulate the earth? But some point out that the bulk of life extension has already happened, with life expectancy exploding from forty-five to seventy to eighty in just one century. Instead of creating a population explosion, it has arguably done the reverse. As people are living longer, they are pursuing careers and delaying childbearing. In fact, the native European population is actually decreasing dramatically.

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See Longevity Life-­forms, artificial creation of Life in space, search for, 6.­1, 8.­1 Life in 2100 dating, 9.­1, 9.­2, 9.­3, 9.­4 global warming and godlike power for humans, itr.­1, itr.­2 home life longevity questions, 9.­1, 9.­2 marriage and family life medical care, 9.­1, 9.­2 remodeling shopping, 9.­1, 9.­2 sports and games vacations work life Life on Mars, artificial establishment of Life’­s origins Lilienthal, David LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) Lloyd, Seth Locomotive technology Longevity aging process caloric restriction and entropy and evolutionary perspective on genetics of, 3.­1, 3.­2 metabolism and methods for life extension popular interest in population expansion and resveratrol and telomeres of a cell and in 2100, 9.­1, 9.­2 youth preservation and Luria, A.­ R.­ Luttwak, Edward Lutz, Robert Maes, Pattie Maglev trains and cars, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic energy, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic field to create nuclear fusion Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as mind-reading technology, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3 replicators and reverse engineering the brain and Mallouk, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Mammoth resurrection Markram, Henry Marquess, Ron Marriage and family life in 2100 Mars landing/­colonization Martel, Sylvain Martian moon landing Matrix movies, 2.­1, 7.­1 Maxwell, James Clerk McGinnis, Dave McRae, Hamish, 7.­1, 7.­2, 7.­3 Medicine/­biotechnology augmented reality and brain injury treatments cancer screening cancer therapies, 1.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2, 4.­1, 9.­1 Cave Man Principle and cloning, 3.­1, 3.­2 computers and creating new life-­forms curing all diseases, 3.­1, 8.­1 depression treatments designer children, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 far future (2070), 3.­1, 9.­1, 9.­2 gene therapy, 3.­1, 3.­2 genetic enhancements genomic medicine germ warfare memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 midcentury (2030) Moore’­s law and muscle disorder treatments nanotechnology and near future (present to 2030) nightmare scenarios quantum theory and resurrecting extinct life-­forms robotics and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 side effects of biotech revolution spinal cord injury treatments stem cell technology surgery three stages of tissue engineering (organ replacement), 3.­1, 3.­2 virtual reality and See also Longevity Memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 Men in Black (movie) “­Merger of Flesh and Machine, The”­ (Brooks) Merrill Lynch company Methane gas, 5.­1, 6.­1 Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), 4.­1, 4.­2 Middle class, planetary Miesenbö­ck, Gero Miller, Webb Mind-­body problem Mind reading EEG and MRI technology for ethics of Kaku’­s brain scan mini-­MRI machines photographing of dreams Mining operations on other worlds Minsky, Marvin, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 Mischel, Walter Modha, Dharmendra Modular robots, 2.­1, 4.­1 Mohamad, Mahathir Moon landing/colonization, 6.­1, 6.­2 Moore, Gordon, 1.­1, 4.­1 Moore’s law computers and, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 4.­1 medicine and nanotechnology and, 4.­1, 4.­2 Moravec, Hans, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 More, Sir Thomas Morfoot, Linda Morphing Moses, Edward MRI-­MOUSE Muscle disorder treatments Musical robots Music industry Myrabo, Leik Najmabadi, Farrokh, 5.­1, 5.­2 Nanobots, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 Nanocars Nanoparticles, 4.­1, 4.­2 Nanorods Nanostarships Nanotechnology carbon nanotubes, 4.­1, 6.­1 commercial applications today computers and DNA chips energy for molecular machines far future (2070) manipulation of individual atoms medicine and midcentury (2030) Moore’s law and, 4.­1, 4.­2 nanomachines in our bodies near future (present to 2030) potential of quantum theory and shape-­shifting technology space travel and, 6.­1, 6.­2 See also Replicators National Ignition Facility (NIF) Neanderthal resurrection Neecke, Nikolas Neumann, John von, 2.­1, 2.­2 Neural networks News broadcasting Newspaper industry Newton, Isaac, itr.­1, 6.­1, 7.­1 New York Times Nicolelis, Miguel A.­

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

In 1973, the DOD sought to defer drug replacement costs for date sensitive stockpiles of prescription and OTC drugs by extending their useful life beyond the manufacturer’s original expiration date. Subsequently, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office completed studies to determine the feasibility of a “shelf life extension program.” These agencies found that the shelf life of OTC drugs, generally two to three years, could safely be extended to five years under properly controlled storage conditions. On July 1, 1975, the FDA and the Veterans Administration (VA) entered into a “Memo of Understanding” implementing a program to extend the expiration dates of the prescription and non-prescription drugs that the VA purchased.

…

Throughout the 1980s, the DOD contracted with the McNeil Consumer Products Company to buy Tylenol from all three of the Johnson & Johnson facilities that distributed Tylenol. The DOD purchased Tylenol in bulk containers for use in Military treatment facilities and VA hospitals and clinics. The DOD also purchased Tylenol for sale in the retail class of trade through its military commissaries. Because of the shelf-life extension program, all of the Tylenol sold to the DOD was given a shelf life of five years. This required separate bottling production runs so that the labels on the Tylenol bottles being sold to the DOD reflected the 5-year shelf life rather than the typical 3-year shelf life of the Tylenol bottled at the McNeil manufacturing plants.

…

Inquirer, February 11, 1986. In October of 1982, Dean Mickelson, a pharmacist at the Revco drugstore: “Pharmacies pull drug,” The Taos News: Oct 7, 1982. An FOIA request was filed with the FDA: Konigstein, David. Response to FOIA Request, File 2011-4678, July 26, 2011. In 1973, the DOD: “SLEP - The DoD/FDA Shelf Life Extension Program.” Accessed July 10, 2011. https://slep.dmsbfda.army.mil/portal/page/portal/SLEP_PAGE_GRP/SLEP_HOME_NEW On July 1, 1975, the FDA: “MOU 224-76-8049: Memorandum of Understanding Between The Veterans Administration and The Food and Drug Administration.” June 12, 1975. Throughout the 1980s, the DOD: DOD Contract with McNeil Consumer Products Company, Round Rock, Texas, Contract number LA12082 C0776, May 1982. – DOD (Air force) Contract with McNeil Consumer Products Co., Glendale, California, Contract number SA13H 77 50158, Fiscal year 1980.

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

Vaccination against serious diseases such as polio, for example, has hugely improved both childhood mortality figures (fewer children dying) and morbidity in terms of quality of life for survivors (fewer children permanently disabled as a result of polio). There is a growing debate around the issue sometimes known as human life extension, which deals with extending the far end of life, old age. Human life extension refers to the concept that we can use interventions so that individuals will live to a greater age. But this takes us into difficult territory, both socially and scientifically. To understand why, it’s important to establish what ageing really is, and why it is so much more than just being alive for a long time.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

So Teller thought for a while and finally asked, “So, are we taking moonshots?” “That’s it,” answered Page, “that’s exactly what we’re doing.” And that is exactly what they’re doing. Over the past few years, Google has repeatedly made headlines with the audacity of their moonshots, dedicating their skunk works to everything from space exploration and life extension to AI and robotics. In other words, as of right now, there is perhaps no other company in the world playing the skunk game at such an elevated level. Over the next few pages, we’re going to examine exactly how Google takes moonshots, giving you an inside look at their skunk methodology and paying attention to which of Kelly Johnson’s initial ideas they’ve kept, which they’ve changed, and—from a psychological perspective—why.

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(HLI), 65–66 Hyatt Hotels Corporation, 20 IBM, 56, 57, 59, 76 ImageNet Competition (2012), 55 image recognition, 55, 58 Immelt, Jeff, 225 incentive competitions, xiii, 22, 139, 148, 152–54, 159, 160, 237, 240, 242, 243–73 addressing market failures with, 264–65, 269, 272 back-end business models in, 249, 265, 268 benefits of, 258–61 case studies of, 250–58 collaborative spirit in, 255, 260–61 crowdsourcing in designing of, 257–58 factors influencing success of, 245–47 false wins in, 268, 269, 271 “flash prizes” in, 250 global participation in, 267 innovation driven by, 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, 258–59, 260, 261 intellectual property (IP) in, 262, 267–68, 271 intrinsic rewards in, 254, 255 judging in, 273 key parameters for designing of, 263–68 launching of new industries with, 260, 268, 272 Master Team Agreements in, 273 media exposure in, 265, 266, 272, 273 MTP and passion as important in, 248, 249, 255, 263, 265, 270 operating costs of, 271, 272–73 principal motivators in, 254, 262–63 purses in, 265, 266, 270, 273 reasons for effectiveness of, 247–49 risk taking in, 247, 248–49, 261, 270 setting rules in, 263, 268, 269, 271, 273 small teams as ideal in, 262 step-by-step guide to, 269–73 telegenic finishes in, 266, 272, 273 time limits in, 249, 267, 271–72 XPRIZE, see XPRIZE competitions Indian Motorcycle company, 222 Indian Space Research Organization, 102 Indiegogo, 145, 173, 175, 178, 179, 184, 185–86, 187, 190, 199, 205, 206, 257 infinite computing, 21, 24, 41, 48–52, 61, 66 entrepreneurial opportunities and, 50–52 information: crowdsourcing platforms in gathering of, 145–46, 154–56, 157, 159–60, 220–21, 228 in data-driven crowdfunding campaigns, 207–10, 213 networks and sensors in garnering of, 42–43, 44, 47, 48, 256 science, 64 see also data mining Inman, Matthew, 178, 192, 193, 200 innovation, 8, 30, 56, 137, 256 companies resistant to, xi, 9–10, 12, 15, 23, 76 crowdsourcing and, see crowdsourcing as disruptive technology, 9–10 feedback loops in fostering of, 28, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90–91, 92, 120, 176 Google’s eight principles of, 84–85 incentive competitions in driving of, 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, 258–59, 260, 261 infinite computing as new approach to, 51 power of constraints and, 248–49, 259 rate of, in online communities, 216, 219, 224, 225, 228, 233, 237 setting big goals for, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 103 skunk methodology in fostering of, 71–87, 88; see also skunk methodology inPulse, 176, 200 Instagram, 15–16, 16 insurance companies, 47 Intel, 7 intellectual property (IP), 262, 267–68, 271 INTELSAT, 102 Intel Science and Engineering Fair, 65 International Manufacturing Technology Show, 33 International Space Station (ISS), 35–36, 37, 97, 119 International Space University (ISU), 96, 100–104, 107–8 Founding Conference of, 102, 103 Internet, 8, 14, 39, 41, 45, 49, 50, 117, 118, 119, 132, 136, 143, 144, 153, 154, 163, 177, 207, 208, 209, 212, 216, 217, 228 building communities on, see communities, online crowd tools on, see crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns; crowdsourcing development of, 27 explosion of connectivity to, 42, 46, 46, 146, 147, 245 mainstreaming of, 27, 32, 33 reputation economics and, 217–19, 230, 232, 236–37 Internet-of-Things (IoT), 46, 47, 53 intrinsic rewards, 79, 254, 255 Invisalign, 34–35 iPads, 42, 57, 167 iPhones, 12, 42, 62, 176 iPod, 17, 18, 178 iRobot, 60 Iron Man, 52–53, 117 Ismail, Salim, xiv, 15, 77, 92 isolation, innovation and, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81–82, 257 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 97 JARVIS (fictional AI system), 52–53, 58, 59, 146 Jeopardy, 56, 57 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 99 Jobs, Steve, xiv, 23, 66–67, 72, 89, 111, 123 Johnson, Carolyn, 227 Johnson, Clarence “Kelly,” 71, 74, 75 skunk work rules of, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 84, 247 Joy, Bill, 216, 256 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act (2012), 171, 173 Kaggle, 160, 161 Kahneman, Daniel, 78, 121 Kaku, Michio, 49 Kauffman, Stuart, 276 Kaufman, Ben, 17–20 Kay, Alan, 114n Kemmer, Aaron, 35, 36, 37 Kickstarter, 145, 171, 173, 175, 176, 179–80, 182, 184, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197, 200, 205, 206 Kindle, 132 Kiva.org, 144–45, 172 Klein, Candace, 19–20, 171 Klein, Joshua, 217–18, 221 Klout, 218 Kodak Corporation, 4–8, 9–10, 11, 12, 20 Apparatus Division of, 4 bankruptcy of, 10, 16 digital camera developed by, 4–5, 5, 9 as innovation resistant, 9–10, 12, 15, 76 market dominance of, 5–6, 13–14 Kotler, Steven, xi, xiii, xv, 87, 279 Krieger, Mike, 15 Kubrick, Stanley, 52 Kurzweil, Ray, 53, 54, 58, 59 language translators, 137–38 crowdsourcing projects of, 145, 155–56 Latham, Gary, 74–75, 103 Law of Niches, 221, 223, 228, 231 leadership: importance of vision in, 23–24 moral, 274–76 Lean In (Sandberg), 217 Lean In circles, 217, 237 LEAP airplane, 34 LendingClub, 172 LeNet 5, 54, 55 Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, see Tesla Museum campaign Levy, Steven, 138 Lewicki, Chris, 99, 179, 202, 203–4 Lichtenberg, Byron K., 102, 114n Licklider, J. C. R., 27 LIDAR, 43–44, 44 life-extension projects, 66, 81 Li’l Abner (comic strip), 71 Lincoln, Abraham, 109, 194 Lindbergh, Charles, 112, 244, 245, 259–60 linear growth, 7, 9 linear industries, 38, 116 exponential technologies in disrupting of, 17, 18–22 linear organizations, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 76, 85, 116 LinkedIn, 77, 213, 231 Lintott, Chris, 220 Linux, 11, 163 Littler Workplace Policy Institute, 60 live-streaming, in crowdsourcing campaigns, 207 Lloyd, Gareth, 4 Local Motors, 33, 217, 223–25, 231, 238, 240, 241 Locke, Edwin, 23, 74, 75, 103 Lockheed, 71–72, 75 Lockheed Martin, 249 Longitude Prize, 245, 247, 267 long-term thinking, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Los Angeles, Calif., 258 loss aversion, 121 Louis Pasteur Université, 104 Lovins, Amory, 222 MacCready, Paul, 263 McDowell, Mike, 291n machine learning, 54–55, 58, 66, 85, 137, 167, 216 see also artificial intelligence (AI) Macintosh computer, 72 McKinsey & Company, 245 McLucas, John, 102 Macondo Prospect, 250 macrotasks, crowdsourcing of, 156, 157–58 Made in Space, 36–37 Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Heath and Heath), 248 MakerBot printers, 39 Makers (Doctorow), 38 MakieLabs, 39 manufacturing, 33, 41 biological, 63–64 digital, 33 in DIY communities, 223–25 robotics in, 62 subtractive vs. additive, 29–30, 31 3–D printing’s impact on, 30, 31, 34–35 Marines, US, 222 Markoff, John, 56 Mars missions, 99, 118–19, 128 Mars Oasis project, 118 Maryland, University of, 74 Maryniak, Gregg, 244 Mashable, 238 massively transformative purpose (MTP), 215, 221, 230, 231, 233, 240, 242, 274 in incentive competitions, 249, 255, 263, 265, 270 mastery, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92 materials, in crowdfunding campaigns, 195 Maven Research, 145 Maxwell, John, 114n Mead, Margaret, 247 Mechanical Turk, 157 meet-ups, 237 Menlo Ventures, 174 message boards, 164 Mexican entrepreneurs, 257–58 Michigan, University of, 135, 136 microfactories, 224, 225 microlending, 172 microprocessors, 49, 49 Microsoft, 47, 50, 99 Microsoft Windows, 27 Microsoft Word, 11 microtasks, crowdsourcing of, 156–57, 166 Mightybell, 217, 233 Migicovsky, Eric, 175–78, 186, 191, 193, 198, 199, 200, 206, 209 Millington, Richard, 233 Mims, Christopher, 290n MIT, 27, 60, 100, 101, 103, 291n mobile devices, 14, 42, 42, 46, 46, 47, 49, 124, 125, 135, 146, 163, 176 see also smartphones Modernizing Medicine, 57 monetization: in incentive competitions, 263 of online communities, 241–42 Montessori education, 89 moonshot goals, 81–83, 93, 98, 103, 104, 110, 245, 248 Moore, Gordon, 7 Moore’s Law, 6–7, 9, 12, 31, 64 Mophie, 18 moral leadership, 274–76 Morgan Stanley, 122, 132 Mosaic, 27, 32, 33, 57 motivation, science of, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Murphy’s Law, 107–8 Museum of Flight (Seattle), 205 music industry, 11, 20, 124, 125, 127, 161 Musk, Elon, xiii, 73, 97, 111, 115, 117–23, 128, 134, 138, 139, 167, 223 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 119–23, 127 Mycoskie, Blake, 80 Mycroft, Frank, 180 MySQL, 163 Napoléon I, Emperor of France, 245 Napster, 11 Narrative Science, 56 narrow framing, 121 NASA, 96, 97, 100, 102, 110, 123, 221, 228, 244 Ames Research Center of, 58 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of, 99 Mars missions of, 99, 118 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 226 National Institutes of Health, 64, 227 National Press Club, 251 navigation, in online communities, 232 Navteq, 47 Navy Department, US, 72 NEAR Shoemaker mission, 97 Netflix, 254, 255 Netflix Prize, 254–56 Netscape, 117, 143 networks and sensors, x, 14, 21, 24, 41–48, 42, 45, 46, 66, 275 information garnered by, 42–43, 44, 47, 256 in robotics, 60, 61 newcomer rituals, 234 Newman, Tom, 268 New York Times, xii, 56, 108, 133, 145, 150, 155, 220 Nickell, Jake, 143, 144 99designs, 145, 158, 166, 195 Nivi, Babak, 174 Nokia, 47 Nordstrom, 72 Nye, Bill, 180, 200, 207 “Oatmeal, the” (web comic), 178, 179, 193, 196, 200 Oculus Rift, 182 O’Dell, Jolie, 238–39 oil-cleanup projects, 247, 250–53, 262, 263, 264 Olguin, Carlos, 65 1Qbit, 59 operational assets, crowdsourcing of, 158–60 Orteig Prize, 244, 245, 259, 260, 263 Oxford Martin School, 62 Page, Carl, 135 Page, Gloria, 135 Page, Larry, xiii, 53, 74, 81, 84, 99, 100, 115, 126, 128, 134–39, 146 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 136–38 PageRank algorithm, 135 parabolic flights, 110–12, 123 Paramount Pictures, 151 Parliament, British, 245 passion, importance of, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 180, 183, 184, 248, 249 in online communities, 224, 225, 228, 231, 258 PayPal, 97, 117–18, 167, 201 PC Tools, 150 Pebble Watch campaign, 174, 175–78, 179, 182, 186, 187, 191, 200, 206, 208, 209, 210 pitch video in, 177, 198, 199 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 172 Pelton, Joseph, 102 personal computers (PCs), 26, 76 Peter’s Laws, 108–14 PHD Comics, 200 philanthropic prizes, 267 photography, 3–6, 10, 15 demonetization of, 12, 15 see also digital cameras; Kodak Corporation Pink, Daniel, 79 Pishevar, Shervin, 174 pitch videos, 177, 180, 192, 193, 195, 198–99, 203, 212 Pivot Power, 19 Pixar, 89, 111 Planetary Resources, Inc., 34, 95, 96, 99, 109, 172, 175, 179, 180, 186, 189–90, 193, 195, 201–3, 221, 228, 230 Planetary Society, 190, 200 Planetary Vanguards, 180, 201–3, 212, 230 PlanetLabs, 286n +Pool, 171 Polaroid, 5 Polymath Project, 145 Potter, Gavin, 255–56 premium memberships, 242 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 146 Prime Movers, The (Locke), 23 Princeton University, 128–29, 222 Prius, 221 probabilistic thinking, 116, 121–22, 129 process optimization, 48 Project Cyborg, 65 psychological tools, of entrepreneurs, 67, 115, 274 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 103–4, 112, 137, 185–87 importance of, 73 line of super-credibility and, 96, 98–99, 98, 100, 101–2, 107, 190, 203, 266, 272 passion as important in, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 249, 258 Peter’s Laws in, 108–14 and power of constraints, 248–49 rapid iteration and, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 120, 126, 133–34, 236 risk management and, see risk management science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103, 254, 255 in skunk methodology, 71–87, 88; see also skunk methodology staging of bold ideas and, 103–4, 107 for thinking at scale, see scale, thinking at triggering flow and, 85–94, 109 public relations managers, in crowdfunding campaigns, 193–94 purpose, 79, 85, 87, 116, 119–20 in DIY communities, see massively transformative purpose (MTP) Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, 253 Quirky, 18–20, 21, 66, 161 Rackspace, 50, 257 Rally Fighter, 224, 225 rapid iteration, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 236 feedback loops in, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90–91, 92, 120 in thinking at scale, 116, 126, 133–34 rating systems, 226, 232, 236–37, 240 rationally optimistic thinking, 116, 136–37 Ravikant, Naval, 174 Raytheon, 72 re:Invent 2012, 76–77 reCAPTCHA, 154–55, 156, 157 registration, in online communities, 232 Reichental, Avi, 30–32, 35 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 4 reputation economics, 217–19, 230, 232, 236–37 Ressi, Adeo, 118 ReverbNation, 161 reward-based crowdfunding, 173, 174–80, 183, 185, 186–87, 195, 205, 207 case studies in, 174–80 designing right incentives for affiliates in, 200 early donor engagement in, 203–5 fundraising targets in, 186–87, 191 setting of incentives in, 189–91, 189 telling meaningful story in, 196–98 trend surfing in, 208 upselling in, 207, 208–9 see also crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns rewards, extrinsic vs. intrinsic, 78–79 Rhodin, Michael, 56 Richards, Bob, 100, 101–2, 103, 104 Ridley, Matt, 137 risk management, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 103, 109, 116, 121 Branson’s strategies for, 126–27 flow and, 87, 88, 92, 93 incentive competitions and, 247, 248–49, 261, 270 in thinking at scale, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Robinson, Mark, 144 Robot Garden, 62 robotics, x, 22, 24, 35, 41, 59–62, 63, 66, 81, 135, 139 entrepreneurial opportunities in, 60, 61, 62 user interfaces in, 60–61 Robot Launchpad, 62 RocketHub, 173, 175, 184 Rogers, John “Jay,” 33, 38, 222–25, 231, 238, 240 Roomba, 60, 66 Rose, Geordie, 58 Rose, Kevin, 120 Rosedale, Philip, 144 Russian Federal Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 76, 96, 112, 127, 269 San Antonio Mix Challenge, 257–58 Sandberg, Sheryl, 217, 237 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 3 Sasson, Steven, 4–5, 5, 6, 9 satellite technology, 14, 36–37, 44, 100, 127, 275, 286n scale, thinking at, xiii, 20–21, 116, 119, 125–28, 148, 225, 228, 243, 257 Bezos’s strategies for, 128, 129, 130–33 Branson’s strategies for, 125–27 in building online communities, 232–33 customer-centric approach in, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131–32, 133 first principles in, 116, 120–21, 122, 126, 138 long-term thinking and, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Musk’s strategies for, 119–23, 127 Page’s strategies for, 136–38 passion and purpose in, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134 probabilistic thinking and, 116, 121–22, 129 rapid iteration in, 116, 126, 133–34 rationally optimistic thinking and, 116, 136–37 risk management in, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Scaled Composites, 262 Schawinski, Kevin, 219–21 Schmidt, Eric, 99, 128, 251 Schmidt, Wendy, 251, 253 Schmidt Family Foundation, 251 science of motivation, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Screw It, Let’s Do It (Branson), 125 Scriptlance, 149 Sealed Air Corporation, 30–31 Second Life, 144 SecondMarket, 174 “secrets of skunk,” see skunk methodology Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), US, 172 security-related sensors, 43 sensors, see networks and sensors Shapeways.com, 38 Shingles, Marcus, 159, 245, 274–75 Shirky, Clay, 215 ShotSpotter, 43 Simply Music, 258 Singh, Narinder, 228 Singularity University (SU), xi, xii, xiv, 15, 35, 37, 53, 61, 73, 81, 85, 136, 169, 278, 279 Six Ds of Exponentials, 7–15, 8, 17, 20, 25 deception phase in, 8, 9, 10, 24, 25–26, 29, 30, 31, 41, 59, 60 dematerialization in, 8, 10, 11–13, 14, 15, 20–21, 66 democratization in, 8, 10, 13–15, 21, 33, 51–52, 59, 64–65, 276 demonetization in, 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 52, 64–65, 138, 163, 167, 223 digitalization in, 8–9, 10 disruption phase in, 8, 9–10, 20, 24, 25, 29, 32, 33–35, 37, 38, 39, 256; see also disruption, exponential Skonk Works, 71, 72 skunk methodology, 71–87, 88 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 103 Google’s use of, 81–84 isolation in, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81–82, 257 “Kelly’s rules” in, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 84, 247 rapid iteration approach in, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86 risk management in, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88 science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92 triggering flow with, 86, 87 Skunk Works, 72, 75 Skybox, 286n Skype, 11, 13, 167 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 219–20 Small Business Association, US, 169 smartphones, x, 7, 12, 14, 15, 42, 135, 283n apps for, 13, 13, 15, 16, 28, 47, 176 information gathering with, 47 SmartThings, 48 smartwatches, 176–77, 178, 191, 208 software development, 77, 144, 158, 159, 161, 236 in exponential communities, 225–28 SolarCity, 111, 117, 119, 120, 122 Space Adventures Limited, 96, 291n space exploration, 81, 96, 97–100, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 139, 230, 244 asteroid mining in, 95–96, 97–99, 107, 109, 179, 221, 276 classifying of galaxies and, 219–21, 228 commercial tourism projects in, 96–97, 109, 115, 119, 125, 127, 244, 246, 261, 268 crowdfunding campaigns for, see ARKYD Space Telescope campaign incentive competitions in, 76, 96, 109, 112, 115, 127, 134, 139, 246, 248–49, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 International Space University and, 96, 100–104, 107–8 Mars missions in, 99, 118–19, 128 see also aerospace industry Space Fair, 291n “space selfie,” 180, 189–90, 196, 208 SpaceShipOne, 96, 97, 127, 269 SpaceShipTwo, 96–97 SpaceX, 34, 111, 117, 119, 122, 123 Speed Stick, 152, 154 Spiner, Brent, 180, 200, 207 Spirit of St.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

A few were used for more unconventional purposes–such as an open-air prison. The Universal Cause Collective was an independent Russian research organization originally dedicated to the improvement of amplified team technologies. Not long after its founding, however, it ventured into new fields including life extension, resurrection, and transhumanism under the direction of its charismatic lead scientist, Evgeny Pasternak. Its early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence attracted millions of customers eager to buy its services, fund its wildly ambitious goals, and pledge their allegiance to its cause. In order to transform the soul, Pasternak believed that he must also transform society.

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They don’t want to hear from yet another person complaining about how unfair the transition centers are. Why else do you think they employ humans to run the tests? Once they’ve climbed the ladder, they think that anyone else who can’t manage it doesn’t deserve to join them. Pretend that you couldn’t imagine anything better than being a normal human. Don’t beg for favors such as personal life extension. It looks desperate. PHs can be very touchy about intimate questions such as, “Who were you before you went up?” or “Where are you actually located?” But if they ask you personal questions, don’t be offended; try to answer them honestly. If they’re inclined to, they can easily find out if you’re lying.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Technological advances could help solve the problem of succession. Brain scans might one day be used to screen out closet sceptics within the party. Other forms of novel surveillance technologies could also make it easier to control population. New psychiatric drugs might be developed that could increase docility without noticeably reducing productivity. Life-extension medicine might prolong the lifespan of the leader so that the problem of succession comes up less frequently. As for the existence of non-totalitarian outsiders, Caplan worries about the possible emergence ofa world government. Such a government, even ifit started out democratic, might at some point degenerate into totalitarianism; and a worldwide totalitarian regime could then have great staying power given its lack of external competitors and alien exemplars of the benefits of political freedom.

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For instance, Kurzweil predicts that we will soon be able to distribute trillions of nanorobots in our brains, and thereby extend our minds, and eventually upload our minds into machines. Since lucky humans will at that point merge with superintelligence or become superintelligent, some refer to the Singularity as the 'Techno-rapture', pointing out the similarity ofthe narrative to the Christian Rapture; those foresighted enough to be early adopters of life extension and cybernetics will live long enough to be uploaded and 'vastened' (given vastly superior mental abilities) after the Singularity. The rest of humanity may however be 'left behind'. This secular 'left behind' narrative is very explicit in the Singularitarian writings of computer scientist Hans Moravec ( 1990, 2000) .

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Those who call for the countries of the world to unite against threats to humanity should consider the possibility that unification itself is the greater threat. 22.4 Totalitarian risk management 2 2 . 4 . 1 Tech n o logy Dwelling on technology-driven dystopias can make almost anyone feel like a Luddite. But in the decentralized modern world, it is extremely difficult to prevent the development of any new technology for which there is market demand. Research on the brain, genetics, and life extension all fit that The totalitarian threat 515 description. Furthermore, all of these new technologies have enormous direct benefits. If people lived forever, stable totalitarianism would be a little more likely to emerge, but it would be madness to force everyone to die of old age in order to avert a small risk of being murdered by the secret police in 1000 years.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

No wonder he adopted a fastidious health regime: he abstained from alcohol, tobacco, meat, tea, coffee, and chocolate. One dinner guest enjoyed his hospitality while noting his quirkiness: “While I ate right through my succession of delicious courses, he dined on a vegetable and a raw egg.”3 This wasn’t just a personal matter: he was an evangelist for health and nutrition. He founded the Life Extension Institute and persuaded William Howard Taft, who’d just finished his presidential term, to be its chairman. (It may seem an incongruous choice: Taft was obese, the heaviest man ever to be president. Taft’s weight problem did, however, prompt his interest in diet and exercise.) In 1915, when Fisher was nearly fifty years old, he published a book titled How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science.

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See also news media Kahan, Dan, 267–71, 275 Kahneman, Daniel, 41, 56, 61n, 96, 121–22, 130, 254 Keil, Frank, 272 Kestenbaum, David, 115 Keynes, John Maynard, 255–59, 260–61, 262 Kickended.com, 109–12, 122, 127 Kickstarter, 108–9, 110, 112, 122 King’s College, Cambridge, 255, 257–58, 259 Kirchner, Néstor, 194 Knowledge Illusion, The (Fernbach and Sloman), 272 Kosara, Robert, 227 Kunda, Ziva, 24 Kurov, Alexander, 209 Kvitkin, Olimpiy, 202 labor statistics, 11, 68–69, 141, 189n, 207, 218n laissez-faire economics, 200–201, 203 land ownership, 201 landmark numbers, 94–95 law and legal statistics, 66 Leave Means Leave, 71 LePan, Douglas, 255 Lepper, Mark, 35, 105, 107 leveraged investments, 243–44, 259–60 Lewin, Kurt, 260–61 Lewis, Martyn, 99, 99n Lewis, Michael, 13 libertarian ideology, 203 Lievesley, Denise, 195–96 life expectancy, 214, 236 Life Extension Institute, 241 lifespan data, 93 Limeburner, Shannon, 108 LinkedIn, 150 literacy rates, 203–4 Literary Digest, 143–44, 164 lobbyists, 13, 273 Lodge, Milton, 33, 38 Loewenstein, George, 27, 271 London, 87–88, 167–68 London Underground, 47, 50–51 Lord, Charles, 35 Lorusso, Silvio, 109, 111 Lovelace, Ada, 219 Lundberg, Shelly, 142 lung cancer, 3–6, 52, 248.

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

In a similar way, it feels quite futile for me to make a quantitative prediction about when these breakthroughs in AGI will arrive, but Rutherford’s story is a good one. MARTIN FORD: Do you expect AGI to happen in your lifetime? STUART J. RUSSELL: When pressed, I will sometimes say yes, I expect AGI to happen in my children’s lifetime. Of course, that’s me hedging a bit because we may have some life extension technologies in place by then, so that could stretch it out quite a bit. But given that we kind of understand enough about these breakthroughs to at least describe them, and that people certainly have inklings of what their solutions might be, suggests to me that we’re just waiting for a bit of inspiration.

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RAY KURZWEIL: One thesis of mine is that we’re going to merge with the intelligent technology that we are creating. The scenario that I have is that we will send medical nanorobots into our bloodstream. One application of these medical nanorobots will be to extend our immune systems. That’s what I call the third bridge to radical life extension. The first bridge is what we can do now, and bridge two is the perfecting of biotechnology and reprogramming the software of life. Bridge three constitutes these medical nanorobots to perfect the immune system. These robots will also go into the brain and provide virtual and augmented reality from within the nervous system rather than from devices attached to the outside of our bodies.

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Whenever I see Kurzweil I remind him that he is going to die. MARTIN FORD: That’s mean. RODNEY BROOKS: I’m going to die too. I have no doubt about it, but he doesn’t like to have it pointed out because he’s one of these techno-religion people. There are different versions of techno religion. There are the life extension companies being started by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, then there’s the upload yourself to a computer person like Ray Kurzweil. I think that probably for a few more centuries, we’re still mortal. MARTIN FORD: I tend to agree with that. You mentioned self-driving cars, let me just ask you specifically how fast you see that moving?

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

When he read the novels of Larry Niven, which discussed the possibility of cryogenically freezing humans and later bringing them back to life, Hal didn’t just ponder the potential in his dorm room. He located a foundation dedicated to making this process a reality and signed up to receive the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s magazine. Eventually he would pay to have his and his family’s bodies put into Alcor’s frozen vaults near Los Angeles. The advent of the Internet had been a boon for Hal, allowing him to connect with other people in far-flung places who were thinking about similarly obscure but radical ideas.

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For instance, his post on “Bit Gold Markets” says that it was written on December 27, 2008, but the URL is http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets .html#links. 339“repeated use of ‘of course’ without isolating commas”: Skye Grey, “Satoshi Nakamoto Is (Probably) Nick Szabo,” LikeinaMirror, December 1, 2013, https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/. 348a hacker demanding ransom was targeting Hal: Robert McMillan, “An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters,” Wired, December 29, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/. 353The United States Marshals Service had auctioned off the 29,655: Tim Draper’s announcement is available at https://medium.com/mirror-blog/tim-draper-wins-govt-auction-partners-with-vaurum-to-provide-bit coin-liquidity-in-emerging-markets-88f04a1d8598. 353Wences officially announced the $20 million: The Xapo announcement is available at https://blog.xapo.com/xapo-raises-20-million-investment-led-by-greylock-partne/. 354Gates had initially bet against the open Internet and built a closed network: Kathy Rebello, “Inside Microsoft: The Untold Story of How the Internet Forced Bill Gates to Reverse Course,” BusinessWeek, July 15, 1996. INDEX “The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.” Abedier, Osama, 101 Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 7 Alibaba (Chinese Internet company), 261 Alice (hypothetical user), 9, 11, 21–23, 358–359 Alipay (Chinese payment processor), 260–261 Allen & Co., 181, 292, 349, 353 altoid (screen name), 69, 248. See also Ulbricht, Ross Andreessen Horowitz, 186, 192, 329 Andreessen, Marc, 181, 186–187, 293–295, 303, 335 Andresen, Gavin beginnings with Bitcoin, 44–47, 49–50, 323 as Bitcoin central figure, 59–62 Bitcoin mining, 53, 192–197, 329 Bitcoin promotion, 75–76, 101–106 creation of Bitcoin Foundation, 138, 141–142 dealing with scandals, 99 relationship with Satoshi, 55–56, 80–86 responding to Mt.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

They are pushing the current thresholds of lifespan, health, cognition and capabilities in ways that were previously the preserve of science fiction. As knowledge and discoveries in these fields progress, our focus and commitment to having ongoing moral and ethical discussions is critical. As human beings and as social animals, we will have to think individually and collectively about how we respond to issues such as life extension, designer babies, memory extraction and many more. At the same time, we must also realize that these incredible discoveries could also be manipulated to serve special interests – and not necessarily those of the public at large. As theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking and fellow scientists Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek wrote in the newspaper The Independent when considering the implications of artificial intelligence: “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all…All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks”.60 One interesting development in this area is OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company announced in December 2015 with the goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.61 The initiative – chaired by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors - has secured $1 billion in committed funding.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

If you ask someone who has never taken the idea of immortality seriously whether they would like to live forever, they are very likely to produce three objections: life as a very old person would be uncomfortable, they would get bored, and the planet would become overcrowded. They might add the notion that death gives meaning to our lives by making them more poignant. It is extraordinary how few people immediately perceive extended life as a straightforward benefit. Aubrey de Grey, a well-known researcher of radical life extension technologies, thinks we employ a psychological strategy called a “pro-aging trance” to cope with the horror of age and death: we fool ourselves into thinking that death is inevitable and even beneficial. The first point to make is that we are not talking about extended lives in which we become increasingly decrepit.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is. Google famously funded a project to “solve death.”6 This is such a precisely religious pretension that I’m surprised the religions of the world didn’t serve Google with a copyright infringement take-down notice.7 Google could have framed its work as life extension, or as aging research, but instead it went right for the prize, which is being the master of that which is most sacred within you. BUMMER must own you in order to own anything at all. Facebook also plays the game. The Facebook page of a deceased person becomes a shrine that one can only visit as a member, and to be a member you must implicitly become an adherent.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Indefinite Life Our ancestors sought to understand and extend the human lifespan. In the 16th century, conquistadors searched the jungles of Florida for a Fountain of Youth. Francis Bacon wrote that “the prolongation of life” should be considered its own branch of medicine—and the noblest. In the 1660s, Robert Boyle placed life extension (along with “the Recovery of Youth”) atop his famous wish list for the future of science. Whether through geographic exploration or laboratory research, the best minds of the Renaissance thought of death as something to defeat. (Some resisters were killed in action: Bacon caught pneumonia and died in 1626 while experimenting to see if he could extend a chicken’s life by freezing it in the snow.)

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

She decides to leave Ted and move to a "two-generation" family where she joins a new husband and a fifty-two-year-old "child." Presented through a mockumentary and photographic vignettes the project does not offer a design solution or map but serves as a tool for thinking through our own beliefs, values, and priorities when it comes to the pros and cons of extreme life extension. Jaemin Paik, When We All Live to 750, 2012. By acting on peoples' imaginations rather than the material world, critical design aims to challenge how people think about everyday life. In doing this, it strives to keep alive other possibilities by providing a counterpoint to the world around us and encouraging us to see that everyday life could be different.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It blasted beyond pure Internet services and delved into fiber-optic telecommunication systems, tablets, laptops, home security cameras, self-driving cars, shopping delivery, robots, electric power plants, life extension technology, cyber security, and biotech. The company even launched a powerful in-house investment bank that now rivals Wall Street companies, investing money in everything from Uber to obscure agricultural crop monitoring start-ups, ambitious human DNA sequencing companies like 23andME, and a secretive life extension research center called Calico.88 No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business.

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

“Is there a panic button under the bar, or were you just masturbating furiously?” “Panic button, putz.” She paused. “Say, nobody told me about any ersatz juvies. How do I tell if they come in my bar?” “Go by the room tag manifest for their ages. Don’t assume kids are as young as they look. Or old folks, for that matter. You come from somewhere that restricts life extension rights, don’t you?” Svengali shrugged. “At least most of the Lolitas have a handle on how to behave in public, unlike dumb-as-a-plank there. Damn good thing, that, it can be really embarrassing when the eight-year-old you’re trying to distract with a string of brightly dyed handkerchiefs turns out to have designed the weaving machine that made them.

…

Slowing even more, Elspeth continued thoughtfully: “There was a whole gallery explaining the sequence of conquests that enabled the Eastern Empire to defeat their enemies in the south and get a stranglehold on the remaining independent cornucopia-owning fabwerks. Fascinating stuff.” “Nothing on the mass graves, I take it,” Rachel observed. “No.” Elspeth shook her head. “Nor the blank spots on the map of North Transylvania.” “Ah.” Rachel nodded. “They haven’t gotten around to talking about it yet?” “Life extension, amnesia extension. It takes longer to admit to the crimes when the criminals are still taking an active role in government.” Elspeth drained her glass, then looked away. “Why were you there?” she murmured. “War crimes commission. I’d rather not talk about it, thanks.” Rachel finished her drink.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Another futuristic possibility is cloning, the exact duplication of an organism from a body cell (which is diploid, or has a full set of genes, as opposed to a sex cell, which is haploid, or has only a half set of genes). Cloning lower organisms has been accomplished but the barriers to cloning humans are both scientific and ethical. If these barriers go down, cloning may play a significant role in life extension. One of the major problems with organ transplantation is the rejection of foreign tissue. This issue would not exist with duplicate organs from a clone—just raise your clone in a sterile environment to keep the organs healthy, and then replace your own aging parts with the clone's younger, healthier organs.

…

: Harvard University Press, 1964. ......... 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: J. Murray. ......... [1883]. In Box 106, Darwin archives, Cambridge University Library. Darwin, M., and B. Wowk. 1989. Cryonics: Beyond Tomorrow. Riverside, Calif.: Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Davies, P. 1991. The Mind of God. New York: Simon & Schuster. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ......... 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton. ......... 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview with Richard Dawkins. Skeptic 3, no. 4:80-85. ......... 1996.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. I said it was a good idea all along. Today we use the word “moonshot” to connote an ambitious, exploratory, and groundbreaking project. Google X’s “Moonshot Factory” has embraced the term for inventive initiatives like driverless cars, robots for manufacturing purposes, even life extension. They define “moonshot” as a task or idea that addresses a huge problem, proposes a radical solution, and makes use of breakthrough technology. The National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health is sponsoring the “Cancer Moonshot” to accelerate cancer study and make more therapies available to more patients, while also advancing the capacity to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

Cyberpunk’s protagonists were usually outlaw computer hackers, battling sinister multinational corporations for control of cyberspace (a term coined by another sci-fi novelist, William Gibson). But in his 1996 novel Holy Fire, Sterling imagines a rather different future: a world ruled by an all-powerful gerontocracy, which appropriates most of the world’s wealth to pay for ever more costly life-extension techniques. And his heroine is, believe it or not, a ninety-four-year-old medical economist. When the novel first came out, it seemed that Sterling was behind the curve. Public concern over medical costs peaked in 1993, then dropped off sharply. Not only did the Clinton health care plan crash and burn, the long-term upward trend in private medical costs also flattened, as corporations shifted many of their employees into cost-conscious HMOs.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

(It will be a long, long time before A.I. can eliminate these jobs.) The new era of precision medicine and granular understanding of the interplay of all genetic material and environmental stimuli has enlivened quests for extreme longevity. Google, for example, has launched Calico, a new company focusing on radical life extension; and Craig Venter is one of the cofounders of a company called Human Longevity, which is working on extending the healthy human lifespan through genomics-based stem-cell therapies that mitigate the diseases of aging. Venter’s company is sequencing hundreds of thousands of genomes and incorporating data from functional-MRI scans that capture views of and data from processes inside a living human body in order to match genetic processes with in vivo biological ones.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Some of these people actually believe they will live forever. Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and major early investor in Facebook (and another Rand disciple), has derided the inevitability of death as an “ideology” while plowing millions into companies that might, as he said, “cure aging.” Google’s own forays into life-extension research, through a biotech subsidiary called Calico, reflects its belief that it can solve death—at least for a paying few. So how does social media fit into these dreams of emancipatory digital technology? Social media is a means to the cyber-libertarian end. That it’s only the latest hyped product to come down the pipe—that the inventors of the telegraph and the telephone and the Internet itself shared similar naïve fantasies—doesn’t seem to matter.

…

, 149–50 Jezebel blog, 169 Jobs, Steve, 3 Johnson, Benny, 116 journalism and conflicting reports, 108–9 false stories leading to contact with targets, 107–8 feedback loop on social media, 97 immediacy of report vs. facts, 108–10, 113–14 outrage and grievance applied to, 120–21 and tenor of the viral Web, 102–3 See also news organizations journalists overview, ix, 102–3 climate change writer, 333–35, 336–37, 340–41, 343, 346, 347 information overwhelm, 334–36, 340 and social media, 108, 148 and social news, 127 and unconfirmed reports, 110 and virality, 102–3, 105 junk mail with “Daughter Killed in a Car Crash” in address, 279–80 Jurgenson, Nathan, 61 Just Mugshots, 208 Kalanick, Travis, 235 Kardashian, Kim, 67 Karim, Jawed, 15 Karp, David, 27, 29–30 Keller, Jared, 84, 144 Kelly, Kevin, 280–81, 282 Kelly, Ray, 287 Kickstarter Web site, 84 Kirn, Walter, 142–43 Klein, Ezra, 124 Klout, 194–96, 200 Know More Web site (Washington Post:Wonkblog), 123–24 Kunkel, Benjamin, 274 Kurzweil, Ray, 5 labor markets overview, 226, 234–35, 247 Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 90, 226, 228, 229–30 exploitative nature of, 228–30, 243–44 Gigwalk, 232 social media compared to, 227 TaskRabbit, 222–26, 236–37, 242, 245 workers trapped by, 231–33 See also employment; fractional work Landy, Andy, 187–88 Lanier, Jaron, 138–39, 328 Lasch, Christopher, 23, 45, 319, 342, 343, 345 Law, Rachel, 357–58 Lazewatsky, Miriam, 79–80 Leibovitz, Liel, 348–49 Lenddo, 309 Lenticular printing, 299–300 Leonard, Franklin, 182–83 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 167–68 libel lawsuit, 113 libertarianism, 1–3, 19. See also cyber-libertarianism life-extension beliefs and research, 5 lifelogging, 136–40 Like, +1, or heart buttons and BuzzFeed listicles, 118–19 as commercial endorsement, 31–33, 34–35 data from, 8, 10, 294, 300 as de facto legal agreement, 26–27 and human nature, 24–26 as limp pat on the back, 52 as people rating system, 190–92 scoreboard function, 48 See also retweets and reblogs like economy, 35 liking studies, 24 linkbait, 104, 125, 125n LinkedIn, 35, 165, 181, 199, 323 Lippmann, Walter, 249 listicles, 114–15, 116–17, 118–19, 123, 261 ListiClock, 118 Lithium Technologies, 196 log-ins, 160, 165–66, 182 London, England, 306 Losse, Katherine, 6, 8, 12, 48, 129, 323, 327 Luddism and Luddites, x, 48 lurkers, 49 Lyft, 235 Lyon, David, 129, 316 MAC (media access control) address, 99 MAC address identifications, 306 Madrigal, Alexis, 25 Maimonides, 179–80 manipulation to obtain free labor, 260–63, 264–65 pricing based on purchaser’s ability to pay, 318 Manjoo, Farhad, 65, 262 Marconi, Guglielmo, 2, 3 market inefficiencies, 234, 235, 240, 243, 245 marketing boosting likes with prizes, 32 celebrity-driven campaigns, 89, 93–94 consumers joining companies in marketing process, 32–33, 34–35, 58–60 Facebook slogan, 12 follower services, 85–87, 88–89 liking studies, 24 marketing as journalism, 27–28 telemarketing, 43 tradition of deception, 92–94 and viral media, 68–69 See also advertising market intelligence, 35–36, 216–17 MarketPsy Capital, 37 Mastering the Internet project, Britain, 314 Master Switch, The (Wu), 67 Matlin, Chadwick, 119 McCoy, Terrence, 68 McDonaldization of Society, The (Ritzer), 270 McGillvary, Caleb “Kai,” 70 Mechanical Turk, 90, 226, 228, 229–30 Medbase2000, 318–19 MediaBrix, 304 media recommendations, 202 Mediated (Zengotita), 120 memes advertisers appropriation of, 60 amplifiers for, 88–89 false stories, 107–8, 109, 111, 113 of Hilton and Kardashian, 67 inflationary rhetoric for, 102–3 and informational appetite, 322 from local newscasts, 69–72 Old Spice guy as, 93 as one greedy industry meeting another, 84–85 poverty and urban crime, 72–73 reworking and corrections, 105, 106–7 unemployed college graduate’s story, 220–26 Memoto Mini Camera, 137–38 messaging apps, 156, 259 Messenger smartphone app, 177 metadata, 131 Metal Rabbit Media, 213 metrics advertising, 97–99 audience, 95–96, 101–2, 103 biometric tools, 305–6 Facebook, 152, 358–59 followers, 53 hits at a Web site, 102 influence scores, 194, 197–98 page views, 98, 102 as reminder of how well others are doing, 152–53 Twitter, 87, 96–97, 348–49 unique visitors, 96, 102 for Upworthy, 102 See also page views micro-fame, 149–50, 152, 196–97, 206 Microsoft, 195, 296, 311–12 micro-targeting listicles, 118–19 micro-work.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

And if it does, there is already a perennial shortage of donated blood, and it is needed for surgery and medical emergencies more than for speculative anti-ageing therapies. The best-case scenario is that blood compounds will indeed turn out to be responsible for the salutary effects; that scientists will be able to identify them; and that biochemists will work out a way to mass-produce them as drugs. Even then, the result would not necessarily be a life-extension potion. The hope instead is to extend “healthspan”, keeping elderly people hale and hearty for longer. Not the immortality of vampires, then, but still an outcome worth pursuing. What people want at the end of life As death approaches, what do most people want, hope for and worry about?

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Michael Ian Black

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, life extension, placebo effect, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, upwardly mobile

I am not going down like that. In fact, I am not going down. The one advantage I have going for me in my mortal battle with Martha is that I plan on living forever. This is no idle statement. Sometimes when I am not looking at pictures of Fat Kevin Federline online, I read articles about advances in gerontology and life extension therapy. Although I comprehend almost none of what I am reading, I am convinced that the work being done in these fields will provide enough breakthroughs within my lifetime to allow me to remain alive for at least a couple of hundred years. At that point, computer technology will have advanced enough to allow us to upload our consciousnesses into a vast, interconnected neural network, which will allow us to “live,” essentially, indefinitely, or at least until somebody accidentally kicks the extension cord out of the wall.

Kiln People by David Brin

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Easter island, index card, jitney, life extension, machine readable, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, price anchoring, prisoner's dilemma, Schrödinger's Cat, telepresence, Vernor Vinge, your tax dollars at work

The beauty of it is that they'll never have a reason to ever link you to our lawsuit." It makes sense. That is, assuming I don't choose to tell Aeneas Kaolin all about this, just as soon as I pass inside Universal Kilns! Sure, I'd forfeit my bond and lose most of Albert's hard-won credibility points, but there'd be compensations. Maybe he would make me a subject of his ditto life-extension experiments. I could have more than another twelve hours, maybe lots more! Huh. Now where did that thought come from? It was almost ... well, frankie ... confusing the more important "I" with the trivial i that's thinking these thoughts. How bizarre! Anyway, why daydream about doing things that I'll never do.

…

Hyperconducting terahertz cables, thick as a tree trunk, linking a human original to the distant lump of clay she plans to animate? Or might UK executives already have perfected the technology? Could they be using it right now, in secret, to "beam" copies of themselves all over the planet? How about the other breakthroughs that Wammaker and Irene and Collins suspect? Ditto life extension? Ditto-to-ditto copying? Modern wish-fantasies, but what if they're about to come true? My employers want me to seek evidence, but the other half of my job is just as urgent ... do nothing illegal. Whatever I happen to glimpse by wandering around can be blamed on poor UK security. But I won't pick any locks for Gineen and her friends.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

The more companies automate, because of the need to increase their productivity, the more jobs will be lost, forever. The future of work and innovation is not in the past that we know, but in unfamiliar territory of the future that is yet to come. New and exciting fields are emerging every day. Synthetic biology, neurocomputation, 3D printing, contour crafting, molecular engineering, bioinformatics, life extension, robotics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, these new frontiers that are rapidly evolving and are just the beginning of a new, amazing era of our species that will bring about the greatest transformation of all time. A transformation that will make the industrial revolution look like an event of minor importance.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Bill Gates commented, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.” But this is not stopping Thiel and Page in their pursuit of everlasting life. As the journalist Charlotte Lytton noted in December of 2015, “The 2045 Initiative—Dmitry Itskov’s life-extension organization seeking to transfer personalities onto non-biological items and, ultimately, immortality—projected that this year could be the first in which such a system was created.” I can’t imagine that Thiel and Page have really thought this concept of immortality through to its logical conclusion.

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

Not only nuclear weapons but also chemical and biological weapons are steadily becoming cheaper and more easily usable, while genetic engineering is sure to be used to develop methods of genocide that destroy human life selectively on a large scale. In a time when the spread of knowledge makes these technologies ever more accessible death rates could be very high, even among those whose longevity has been artificially enhanced. Moreover, those who have benefited from life-extension techniques could find themselves in an environment that is increasingly inhospitable to human life. During the present century climate change may alter the conditions in which humans live radically and irreversibly. The survivors could find themselves in a world different from any in which humans have ever lived.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

His conception of freedom had less to do with existential liberty, with meaningful human lives within flourishing communities, than it had to do with not having to share resources—the freedom of wealthy people from taxation, from any obligation to materially contribute to society. And he was known, too, for his apparent determination to literally live forever, through investing in various life extension therapies and technologies. (As though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric, he had publicly expressed interest in a therapy involving regular transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the aging process.) He was in one sense a figure of almost cartoonishly outsized villainy.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

The Money Illusion Irving Fisher was a Yale economist, a health-food zealot, a prohibitionist, and a fitness guru who filled a floor of his New Haven mansion with exercise equipment. He coauthored a book called How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science, which sold half a million copies, the royalties of which Fisher gave to an organization he’d founded called the Life Extension Institute. He invented a card filing system to organize all his projects, then patented it, then created a company called Index Visible to sell the card system, then merged his company with a bigger company and made a fortune. Fisher was a proponent of eugenics, which was widely popular at the time but is today clearly repulsive and immoral.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

And part of that is defeating death.” “How’d that work out for them?” Zula asked, deadpan. “These guys were smart,” Corvallis said. “Not flakes. There was nothing they didn’t know, or couldn’t learn, about the science. They knew perfectly well that it was going to be a long time—decades at least—before practical life-extension technology became available. They knew that in the meantime they could die at any point in a car accident or whatever. So, they instituted a stopgap. Based on the best science at the time, they designed a protocol for preserving human remains and keeping them on ice indefinitely.” “So that, down the road—” Zula began.

…

“Hang on, I know who El Shepherd is. Hell, I’ve met him,” Stan said. “I think he’s one of our clients in the Silicon Valley office.” “He made some money on an IPO and became a venture capitalist,” Corvallis said. “Mostly conventional tech VC stuff, it looks like—but he has maintained a side interest in life extension.” “So, what happened when he ‘swooped in’?” Esme asked. “He formed a new company called Ephrata Life Sciences and Health,” Corvallis said. He had ceased to be an autonomous participant in the conversation and become a conduit for whatever was on the Miasma. “He funded it with his own money.

…

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere: a hollow shell of rock and metal that would capture all of the sun’s power, spend it in computation, and radiate the waste heat into the cosmos as dull infrared light. But it would take a long, long time to get to that point. Long enough for every human now living to die of natural causes, even if they all used as many life-extension technologies as Zula. Earth, or at least a patch of Earthlike ecosystem, would be preserved as a kind of park, and bio-humans could live on it, if that was what they were into. Nowadays the building looked as it had in the very beginning, when the steelworkers and the concrete pumpers had roughed in the structure but the framers had not yet shown up with studs and drywall.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012. 53 have added about 0.4 years: Wolfram|Alpha. “Life Expectancy, United States”; http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+United+States, 2011. 53 actuarial escape velocity: Grey, Aubrey D. N. J. de. “Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now.” PLoS Biol 2, no. 6 (June 15, 2004): e187. Further reading: Finch, Caleb E., and Eileen M. Crimmins. “Inflammatory Exposure and Historical Changes in Human Life-Spans.” Science 305, no. 5691 (September 17, 2004): 1736–39. 55 The physicist Tom Murphy has shown: Murphy, Tom. “Galactic-Scale Energy.”

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

., historical profitability of value as measure in world, growth of see also environmental economics ecovillages education efficiency Egypt Ehrlich, Paul electric industry electric vehicles electronics, consumer imports of material flow and multifunctionality and storage and disposal of see also specific products Elpel, Renee Elpel, Tom Empire of Fashion (Lipovetsky) employee-owned companies employment, see labor; unemployment end of life (EOL) energy: housing and price of rebound effect from efficient use of systems dynamics and taxes and use of see also specific energy sources energy economics environment ecological footprint in, see ecological footprint ecological optimism and economic activity and feedback loops and full-cost pricing and integrated assessment models and mainstream economics and planetary boundaries and restoration of UN assessment of (2005) water footprint and see also climate change environmental economics cost-benefit analysis and customization and household production and production possibilities curve and reciprocity and resale and reuse and sharing and trade-off view of -4n working less and see also economy Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) -3n Europe: cohousing in ecological footprint in health care in historical carbon emissions of materials consumption in passive solar building in population decline in product life extension policies in European Society for Ecological Economics EV1 electric car extensive growth extinctions extra-market diversification ExxonMobil fabrication laboratories (fab labs) cost of Factor e Farm Farm, The (Tenn.) farmers’ markets fashion fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) Fathy, Hassan Featherstone, Mike feedback loops financialization Finland, ecological footprint in Finlayson, Ian fish Fleisher, Eric flexible production flex time floods food price of self-provisioning and forests Forrester, Jay fossil fuels -93n unaccounted costs of see also specific fuels Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC) France: ecological footprint in hours worked in Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) Freecycle.org Friedman, Milton Friedman, Thomas L.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Here’s an additional piece of information that may bring the decision into sharp focus: The surgery extends one’s life, on average, by only six weeks. This number is derived from the average of the forty-seven people whose lives were not extended at all (some were even shortened by complications from the surgery) and the one person whose life was saved by the surgery and has gained five and a half years. The six-week life extension in this case exactly equals the six-week recovery period! The decision, then, can be framed in this way: Do you want to spend those six weeks now, while you’re younger and healthier, lying in bed recovering from a surgery you probably didn’t need? Or would you rather take the six weeks off the end of your life when you’re old and less active?

…

The first is that talking about averages in a life-or-death decision like this doesn’t make sense because no actual prostate surgery patient has their life extended by the average quoted above of six weeks. One person has his life extended by five and a half years, and forty-seven have their lives extended by nothing at all. This “average” life extension of six weeks is simply a statistical fiction, like the parking example. It is true, no one person gains by this amount; the average is often a number that doesn’t match a single person. But that doesn’t invalidate the reasoning behind it. Which leads to the second objection: “You can’t evaluate this decision the way you evaluate coin tosses and card games, based on probabilities.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

1960s counterculture, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan

Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Geison, Gerald. The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 240 Hall, Stephen. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Hayflick, Leonard. How and Why We Age. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Hilts, Philip. Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Hilts, Philip. Rx for Survival: Why We Must Rise to the Global Health Challenge.

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

behavioural economics, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, Fairphone, gamification, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, Internet of things, Kickstarter, life extension, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, meta-analysis, period drama, planned obsolescence, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, thinkpad

Botsman, Rachel, and Rogers, Roo, What’s Mine Is Yours: The rise of collaborative consumption (HarperCollins, 2010). Brotheridge, Chloë, The Anxiety Solution: A quieter mind, a calmer you (Michael Joseph, 2017). Brown, Derren, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine (Bantam Press, 2016). Butlin, John, Product Durability and Product Life Extension: Their contribution to solid waste management (OECD, 1982). Dittmar, Helga, Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-being: The search for the ‘good life’ and the ‘body perfect’ (Psychology Press, 2007). Duhigg, Charles, The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business (Random House, 2012).

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We now know what he meant. In launching the Google[X] lab, Google has taken the classic skunkworks approach to new product development further than anyone ever imagined. Google[X] offers two fascinating new extensions to the traditional approach. First, it aims for moonshot-quality ideas (e.g., life extension, autonomous vehicles, Google Glass, smart contact lenses, Project Loon, etc.). Second, unlike traditional corporate labs that focus on existing markets, Google[X] combines breakthrough technologies with Google’s core information competencies to create entirely new markets. We strongly recommend that every big company attempt something similar by creating a lab that is a playground for breakthrough technologies.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

In one of my car’s dozen or so computer chips, the algorithm that translates my foot pressure into an effective braking cadence (antilock braking system, or ABS) is far better at avoiding skidding than I am. Google Search has become my virtual assistant, and probably yours too. Life seems better where AI assists. And it could soon be much more. Imagine teams of a hundred Ph.D.-equivalent computers working 24/7 on important issues like cancer, pharmaceutical research and development, life extension, synthetic fuels, and climate change. Imagine the revolution in robotics, as intelligent, adaptive machines take on dangerous jobs like mining, firefighting, soldiering, and exploring sea and space. For the moment, forget the perils of self-improving superintelligence. AGI would be mankind’s most important and beneficial invention.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If you mix it with the Amino Matrix, which is very tart, it buffers the alkalinity of the KetoForce and it ends up tasting quite good.” TF: A tablespoon of lemon juice (in the water you use to dilute KetoForce) will also work for buffering. If KetoForce is too odd for your stomach, try the powdered KetoCaNa, also developed by Patrick, which I often use before aerobic exercise. Metformin for Life Extension Both Patrick Arnold and his frequent collaborator, Dominic D’Agostino, PhD (page 21), are interested in metformin, which is not their creation. Dom considers it the most promising of the anti-aging drugs from a scientific standpoint, and I would estimate that a dozen of the people in this book use it.

…

Bryan launched OS Fund in 2014 with $100 million of his personal capital to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. In other words: He fuels real-world mad scientists tackling things like asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, life extension, and more. He is currently the founder and CEO of Kernel, which is developing the world’s first neuroprosthesis [brain-implantable computer] to mimic, repair, and improve cognition. Behind the Scenes To inspire his kids, Bryan commissioned a graffiti artist to paint Gandalf the Grey and Harry Potter on one of his walls at home.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

Objective decisions come to rest on normative ones. Cairns or Bailar could tell us how many absolute lives were being saved or lost by cancer therapeutics. But to decide whether the investment in cancer research was “worth it,” one needed to start by questioning the notion of “worth” itself: was the life extension of a five-year-old “worth” more than the life extension of a sixty-year-old? Even Bailar and Smith’s “most fundamental measure of clinical outcome”—death—was far from fundamental. Death (or at least the social meaning of death) could be counted and recounted with other gauges, often resulting in vastly different conclusions.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

See also Red Bull sports (traditional) action and adventure sports versus, xiv, 99, 103 flow experiences in, 68, 99 Squaw Valley Palisades, 75–76 Primal Crew, 140–43 Sacrifice, 87–89 Stikine, 94–97, 103–4, 106–8 Stratos Project, 187–91 strength, in flow, 50–51 stress response, 70–72, 120 Strug, Kerri, 3–4 struggle stage, in flow cycle, 120 stunts, movie, 60–62, 65, 69–73 success, ix Super Terminal, 60 surfing Bonzai Pipeline, 25 death by, xx–xxi evolution of, 24–25, 38–39 by Hamilton, Laird, 23–27, 29–30 Jaws, 37–39, 123–26 Maverick’s, xviii–xxi Millennium Wave, 26–27, 29–30 Teahupoo, 23–27, 29–30 tow-in, 24 Waimea Bay, 24 by Walsh, Ian, 123–26 survival instinct, 101, 117 Swanson, Mike, 59, 61–62, 65, 69–73 Switzerland, Santis peak in, 8, 9 Tahiti, Teahupoo of, 23–27, 29–30 Talent Project, 79–80 Tart, Charles, 29 Teahupoo, 23–27, 29–30 technology advancement in, 170, 177, 179–82 bionic, 181–82 disruptive, 164 flow triggered by, 98–99 video recording, 137–39 temporal awareness. See time Teton Gravity Research (TGR), 154, 156–57 theta brain waves, 33, 40 time bionic life extension, 182 dilation, 9–10, 30, 53–54, 98 flow blocks and, 98, 100, 113 future versus present, 82–87 practice and, 80–81, 84, 86–87 present moment, 113–14 training advancement in, 170, 177 for deep embodiment, 106 for flow, 62, 69, 72, 106 need for, 127 weaknesses, 124 See also mastery Transformers: Dark of the Moon, 60 trust, 68–69 truth, 97 “Twenty-First Century” skills, vii, 200 ultimate human performance, xvii, 22 unconscious decision making and, 34 intuition and, 44 unity.

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin

23andMe, classic study, do well by doing good, double helix, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, life extension, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, medical residency, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, sugar pill, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Some may view diagnosing more people (and treating more people) as the price that has to be paid for most of us to achieve an extension of life. This assumes that early diagnosis and treatment is the only explanation of a longer life span. But because other things are more important (such as not smoking, nutrition, exercise, and medical care for the acutely ill), it’s likely that most of this life extension would occur regardless of whether or not there was more diagnosis. And since for many, length of life is not the only goal, questions about whether the health-care system introduces disease and disability into the population become more relevant. What this book is about My mother thinks she knows what this book is about.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Most life-forms are just a few days, months, or years old, making the zeitgeist of the planet one of the energy of youth. But the entire question of cheating death may be moot. We may be making the same basic error as Gilgamesh, and each time we think we have found that plant that will let us live forever, a serpent will take it away. There are many good arguments for why radical life extension isn’t possible. With all our medical advances we have decreased infant mortality, cured many diseases, and helped people live more active lives for longer, but we haven’t really increased maximum life expectancy at all. Right now, there are about 400,000 people who have hit 100. Of those, only 400 will see their 110th birthday.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

One American company has announced plans for commercial missions to Mars in the near future. One American company has announced plans to operate a commercial lunar habitat. New On-Orbit Activities Several American companies have announced plans for new on-orbit activities, with start-up time horizons ranging from 1 year to decades, including: End-of-life extension modules, which attach to a satellite to aid in station-keeping or transfer to a graveyard orbit; Satellite repair utilizing robotic arms; Satellite refueling utilizing fuels launched from Earth; Satellite refueling utilizing fuels derived from space resources; and Commercial orbital habitats.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

By having to spend less money on food, individuals might have had more time for leisure activity or more time to exercise, which would have improved their quality of life. A high percentage of medical cost has been the result of artificial incentives, through government policy, to invest in short-term life extension. If you ask me whether I would rather live better now and until I am 85 or live an extra 6 months, I will take now. Furthermore, government bureaucrats do not have the right to make that choice for me. 4. Government regulations must be radically reduced. According to an annual study, the total cost of U.S. federal government regulations in 2008 was $1.75 trillion, which was 12 percent of GDP, 46 percent of total federal spending, and 120 percent of pretax corporate profits, and the cost has been rising by 10 to 15 percent per year in the past decade.7 One way to control the indirect cost of government is to require every government agency to reduce its regulatory rules by 50 percent in 18 months.

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

Hoping to unravel the mysteries of longevity, Aristotle investigated aging, senescence, decay, and death in his treatises Youth and Old Age, Life and Death, and Short and Long Lifespans. Aristotle’s scientific theories about aging concluded that senescence is controlled by reproduction, regeneration, and diet. The philosopher noted that sterile or continent creatures live longer than those that drain energy in sexual activity. Perhaps it is no surprise that modern life-extension researchers also focus on nutrition and caloric restriction. And Aristotle would be gratified to learn that there is indeed an evolutionary trade-off between longevity and reproduction, and that long-term modern studies suggest that sexual abstinence can add years to individuals’ life spans.24 In all the iterations of the Tithonus myth, ancient and modern, the final image of the once-vital singer is one of lost dignity.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

There were Hollywood stars in attendance—Goldie Hawn demanded that a Nobel Prize geneticist offer an opinion on glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that features in many health regimens—but the real celebrity was Google cofounder Sergey Brin; you’ll recall that his ex runs 23andMe, the pioneering genetics firm. At this gathering, his current girlfriend, Nicole Shanahan, said Brin had phoned her recently with the sad news that he was going to die—someday. Or maybe not, given that Google was investing huge sums in life-extension technologies. In 2009 it hired Bill Maris to run its venture capital fund, and he quickly began devoting most of its vast resources to life sciences start-ups. Why? Because “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”6 “We aren’t trying to gain a few yards,” Maris says.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

“You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code love or hate,” says Miguel Nicolelis, a neurologist at Duke University.11 On our current technocratic path, we can see a developing society much like that portrayed in Stanley Bing’s chilling novel Immortal Life. Set in the near future, it depicts a society where artificial intelligence has become dominant and life extension has emerged as the obsession of the ruling oligarchy. The world’s richest man develops a technique for transferring his consciousness into the body of a “lesser” young person. The masses have essentially been neutralized by the availability of cheap commodities peddled by a handful of global corporations, and are largely removed from “any so-called real experience.”

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

Maisie Meyer pioneered the study of the Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai, and her books and conversations provided a rich portrait of their life in Shanghai. Stanley Jackson and Cecil Roth both documented the life of Victor Sassoon in the 1940s and 1960s. H. Parker James has researched Victor Sassoon’s life extensively and generously shared with me his many insights. Taras Grescoe captured the world of the Cathay Hotel and the relationship between Victor Sassoon and Emily Hahn in his book Shanghai Grand. Peter Hibbard shared with me his research materials and insights behind his books on the Cathay and the Kadoorie hotels.

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, index card, indoor plumbing, Johannes Kepler, life extension, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Thales of Miletus, walking around money, white picket fence, Winter of Discontent

He rode one of the walkways, enjoying the warm air, his coat folded over one arm, and wandered into another hotel, the Shamrock. He stopped by the convenience store but saw no magazines or books. He would have liked to buy a chocolate bar, which were on plentiful display, but nobody seemed to be using paper money. He wondered about himself. He’d be ninety-one now. There was a lot of talk about life extension during the first two decades of the century, but as of 2019 nothing much had happened. It was possible he was still charging around out there, playing tennis, living the good life. If that were true, the Shelborne of 2079 would remember that his younger self had visited Rittenhouse Square on this day.

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame by Pete Walker

Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live

My reclaimed anger became the emotional foundation of the assertiveness work that taught me how to protect myself from people who were as unfair as my parents. Role-playing with anger helped restore me to a full ownership of my rights in relationship. This in turn helped me shift my attraction toward people who valued fairness and respect. Truly intimate relationships finally began to flower in my life. Extensive grieving has convinced me that any interpersonal disappointment, past or present, can be healed by allowing its hurt to flow out through grieving. Nietsche said: “Anything that does not kill us makes us stronger.” I think that grieving is the alchemic process that makes this statement true. In my experience, the broken heart that has been healed through grieving is stronger and more loving than the one that has never been injured.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“There’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can do around the solar system, but the thing that’s going to move the needle for humanity the most is mining near-Earth objects and building manufacturing infrastructure in place,” he said as he sat in the conference room at Blue Origin. “That’s the big thing.” That would be in the distant future, after he was gone—“unless somebody does a good job on life extension,” he added. But it was not that far in the future. “We only have a couple hundred years.” “If you take baseline energy usage today, compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years and you have to cover the entire Earth’s surface with solar cells” to keep up with demand, he said.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

This was evident, for example, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the new urban pioneers were called yuppies, the predecessors of today’s hipsters.17 In 2011, people in their 20s made up roughly 24 percent of the population of central business districts, injecting vitality and a renewed fashionability. But these much-reported CBD-dwelling, inner-city millennials represent less than 3 percent of their overall population.18 More important still is the question of where millennials plan to settle later in life. Extensive generational survey research by Frank N. Magid Associates reveals that 43 percent of millennials describe suburbs as their “ideal place to live,” compared to just 31 percent of older generations. Only 17 percent of millennials identify the urban core as their preferred long-term destination.19 A 2014 survey by the Demand Institute came up with similar findings, with most millennials expressing a desire for more space and suburban locations.20 The following year, according to a National Association of Home Builders survey, roughly two-thirds of millennials said they ultimately desired a home in the suburbs.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game