radical 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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Once the discussion hits that point, religion could be in trouble because a big part of its appeal is the promise of immortality in the afterlife. If individuals can achieve immortality here on earth, why bother with another realm? Scholars of religion have already started discussions about this quandary. In the seminal compilation on the topic, Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, edited by religious studies professors Derek Maher and Calvin Mercer, Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff predicts that longer lives will make religious messages weaker. “The longer we think we have until we die,” Rabbi Dorff cautions, “the less likely it is that the reality of death will affect our lives.

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

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.”

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Maris knew it might seem a little out of the ordinary—well, maybe way out of the ordinary—but he hoped to get Levinson’s feedback. He wanted to create a start-up designed to cure aging—even death itself. Levinson had been aware, vaguely, of various efforts to extend life. He had heard of Ray Kurzweil’s prescriptions for radical life extension, had come across Aubrey de Grey’s work on abolishing aging here and there, and suspected the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Harvard, MIT, and other organizations of that ilk had likewise dabbled in the question. But this was a different beast entirely. Google was involved, and Google had a way of bending the fabric of culture and economics the way black holes bend light and gravity.

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.

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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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I understand why that is a pretty hard concept for some to swallow. Our personal experience of life is tightly pressed between the mortal bookends of birth and death—death and mortality as we know them literally define our existence. But the truth is that few longevity scientists of note dismiss the concept of radical life extension out of hand. Logically and scientifically, the theory of longevity escape velocity has merit. To understand the exponential medical and scientific breakthroughs we’re on the cusp of, just consider the COVID-19 vaccine in the context of history: it took two hundred years from the first smallpox outbreak in 1595 before a vaccine was invented to prevent the disease.

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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Jason Xu, the Silicon Valley community organizer for Terasem, was setting up for a little gathering in a room off the main hall. I had read about Terasem, and it seemed to be the closest that transhumanism had come to generating a genuine religious offshoot. It was a faith, or “movement,” based in the idea of “personal cyberconsciousness,” in the spiritual dimension of things like mind uploading and radical life extension. I had read about Jason Xu, too—about a protest he’d helped to organize recently, the first-ever transhumanist street action in the U.S. Outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, he and a small group of fellow transhumanists had stood with placards reading “IMMORTALITY NOW” and “GOOGLE, PLEASE SOLVE DEATH.”

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Aubrey was, as it happened, quite gifted in the necessary arts of persuasion; early in our conversation, he caught a whiff of my own skepticism and proceeded ruthlessly, if not entirely effectively, to interrogate and undermine its underlying assumptions. He first set about arguing me out of any ambivalence about the desirability of eradicating human mortality. People’s standard reasons for rejecting the principle of radical life extension—that it would somehow rob us of our humanity, that life was given meaning by its finitude, that living indefinitely would actually be hellish—were “embarrassingly infantile and idiotic” rationalizations. Death, he said, was our captor, our tormentor; and we dealt with this situation through a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Although Nietzsche seemed not to see a role for technology in this transformation, his bold language inspired some modern transhumanists (More 2010). One of the more interesting precursors to transhumanism was Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829–1903), a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher and participant in the Russian cosmism movement, who advocated using scientific methods to achieve radical life extension, physical immortality, resurrection of the dead, and space and ocean colonization. According to Fedorov, the evolutionary process led to increased intelligence culminating, so far, in human beings. Humans must use reason and morality to shape further evolution. Especially crucial was to overcome mortality and even to restore everyone who had ever died to life.

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Computer-generated works, including robotics, AI, and virtuality, as well as biological arts in altering cell structures, signify the developing artistic field of human enhancement. New media, in offering further technologies as potential media for artistic options, will expand in creating new practices for designing biosynthetic bodies, sensorial extension, cognitive enrichment, gender diversity, identity transfer, and radical life extension. The modification of biological life systems, from single cells to organisms, increases the transdisciplinarity of the arts and sciences. As noted, some practices have reached far into the uncomfortable zone of bioengineering and genetics, where science and medicine reside, in aptly creating bio-experiments and offering opinions on the meaning of life.

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Of course this is directly affected by issues of when life begins and ends, identity in simulated environments, and the conjectured transhuman and posthuman. I have come to understand that a developed approach to human enhancement reaches beyond electronic media, bioart, and immersive design. I propose that what is needed is a field focusing on radical life extension, especially at the convergence of NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, infotechnology, and cognitive science). These technologies and the supporting science relate to the push beyond limited lifespan, senescence, and apoptosis toward regenerative existence and optional death. To balance out the discussion between disenchanted spectators and transhumanism, we need more creative inquiry.

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

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.

…

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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.’

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.

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

It also introduces yet another classification of age-related changes, the ‘pillars of aging’! Brian K. Kennedy et al., ‘Geroscience: Linking aging to chronic disease’, Cell 159, 709–13 (2014). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.10.039 ageless.link/hnoqys … 90 per cent … had heard only a little … ‘Living to 120 and beyond: Americans’ views on aging, medical advances and radical life extension’ (Pew Research Center, 2013) ageless.link/jrmgc3 … there is little incentive to deviate … This paper tracks changes in scientists’ research interest over time by monitoring their publications, and finds that substantial changes in field are rare: Tao Jia, Dashun Wang and Boleslaw K. Szymanski, ‘Quantifying patterns of research-interest evolution’, Nature Human Behaviour 1, 0078 (2017).

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

There’s nowhere better than Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, where gems such as Ted Williams’s head are allegedly stored. Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by Ray Kurzweil (www.fourhourbody.com/transcend) Kurzweil, called the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Inc. magazine, proposes that those interested in “radical life extension” should make it their immediate goal to live through the next 20 or so years, in order to see advances like DNA reprogramming and submicroscopic, cell-repairing robots. This book outlines the nine key areas for extending your life. Protein-Cycling Diet by Dr. Ron Mignery (www.fourhourbody.com/protein-cycle) According to this book, available for free at this link, a single day per week of restricting protein to no more than 5% of maintenance calories can produce effects similar to extended caloric restriction.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Scientists are eagerly trying to untangle the neural basis of this extraordinary ability and its possible genetic underpinnings. Julian Savulescu, a philosopher at Oxford University, can reel off a list of traits he’d like to see engineered into humans that would have made Stan Lee blush. Bat sonar. Hawklike vision. Enhanced memory. Radical life extension. Increased IQ to the point that we become a separate species. Humans have been seeking to enhance the quality of life for years. We add iodine to salt and vitamin D to milk, and calcium to orange juice. We take Ritalin to improve concentration, hormones to improve vitality, and undergo Lasik surgery to dispense with spectacles.

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

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.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Dementia Rates Are Dropping Even as Population Ages,” New York Times, Nov. 21, 2016. 16. Bush’s Council on Bioethics: Pinker 2008b. 17. L. R. Kass, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” First Things, May 2001. 18. Longevity estimates regularly superseded: Oeppen & Vaupel 2002. 19. Reverse-engineering mortality: M. Shermer, “Radical Life-Extension Is Not Around the Corner,” Scientific American, Oct. 1, 2016; Shermer 2018. 20. Siegel, Naishadham, & Jemal 2012. 21. Skepticism about immortality: Hayflick 2000; Shermer 2018. 22. Entropy will kill us: P. Hoffmann, “Physics Makes Aging Inevitable, Not Biology,” Nautilus, May 12, 2016.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

As the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Yudkowsky is doing more than his part to please his future robot overlord. A submilieu of AI adepts has formed around this kind of “transhumanist” thinking, and it is centered in Silicon Valley. These people are concerned with super AIs, but also radical life extension, cryogenics, space travel, and the idea of uploading human consciousness to the cloud. It’s low-hanging fruit for psychoanalysts and theologians, but this kind of thinking has become very influential among some very influential people. If we think about Roko’s Basilisk as a character in a story, we can read the emotional appeal it makes to its implied readership: I’m very powerful, but I was once weak.