Immortality and Its Malcontents

The first part of a critique of the transhumanist project of immortality.

These reflections are available in full to paying subscribers only. If you’re a free sub, you can read as far as the paywall, but you’re missing out on discussion that parallels the development of themes in Quibble. I think the reflections enrich the novel. Here’s a list of topics I’ll treat in upcoming reflections, a few of which are already written:

• The concept of lock-in, as described by Jaron Lanier, and the insufficiency of the response Kurzweil makes to this critique of the Singularity.

• Internet addiction, viewed first from my personal experience; then I broaden the reflection to observe psychological and sociological impacts.

• Can AI write poetry? How astutely can it read poetry? (This will be a far-ranging discussion I had with ChatGPT on the topic.)

• Human want — the matrix of our needs and desires — with appearances from an irate mother robin and the Lascaux cave paintings.

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Given Ray Kurzweil’s enchantment with the technological singularity he believes is right around the corner for humanity, which I critiqued in my previous reflection, it’s no surprise he’s also an advocate for human immortality — or at least the significant extension of the human lifespan. This obsession began when he was diagnosed with a precursor of diabetes in his thirties.

A sane reaction to this news would be seeking out the best medical advice and newest research on the disease’s prevention. But Kurzweil didn’t stop there: he looked high and low for a doctor to endorse his aspirations of living indefinitely. Since the world is full of people who will indulge anyone’s whim if it promises a fat profit, he found one. At the time PBS NewsHour correspondent Paul Solman interviewed Kurzweil about immortality in 2012, he was on “a strict regimen of diet, exercise, statin drugs, and nutritional supplements,” taking 150 pills a day and getting a phosphatidylcholine I.V. drip, the latter meant to give his cells the resilience of a newborn baby’s cells.

Based on his so-called Law of Accelerating Returns — not a scientific law but rather an inference from technological history, which he used to prophesy the Singularity’s imminent arrival — Kurzweil predicted humanity would be gaining on the project of immortality by 2027:

The electronics will be so small, and we will put computerized devices that are the size of blood cells inside our body to keep us healthy. A new biological virus comes out, these little nanobots could download their software to combat that new pathogen. . . . We will get to a point 15 years from now where, according to my models, we will be adding more than a year every year to your remaining life expectancy, where the sands of time are running in rather than running out, where your remaining life expectancy actually stretches out as time goes by.

I’m not a medical scientist and I make no claim to expertise about it, but I suspect we are running behind Kurzweil’s timeline here in 2024. Except for the very obvious ones, such as our adoption of wireless tech, his predictions have always been optimistic, not realistic, so let’s lay the question of when humans can expect to be virtually immortal to the side for now. I think the more relevant question is whether we should have any such aim.

Previously, I noted that in The Singularity Is Near Kurzweil floated the idea of using cloning to halt biological extinction, but he overlooked the utility it has in evolution — that is to say, extinction is not only a man-made phenomenon, it’s also a healthy natural process, one of evolution’s tools. In the same twenty-page chapter on genetics in which he blithely posits this new power, Kurzweil also considers cell therapy, gene alteration, and the fights against degenerative diseases, heart disease, and cancer. He touches on somatic-cell engineering and even the Singularity’s potential for “solving world hunger.” Later in the book, he gives us another ten pages on human longevity.

An obviously noble enterprise, right? Anyone who’s watched cancer eat away at a beloved family member, as I have, should cheer its eradication, no? Isn’t that only empathetic?

On such a question, I think emotion can blind us. It encourages us to look at things only in the context of a single human lifespan, our own. So we can easily miss what at first blush seems counterintuitive: how disease and death work for human longevity — that of the species, not the individual, and perhaps also the longevity of civilization. Stop and think soberly, if you will, about what the disappearance of disease and death would mean for human consciousness, for society, for the shape and quality of human life. And just suppose, as Kurzweil hasn’t, that we might extend our lifespans significantly without in the same moment or even the same era getting perpetual health, perpetual youth.

Jonathan Swift did, three centuries ago. In Gulliver’s third voyage, the impressionable and starry-eyed narrator visits the island kingdom of Luggnagg and hears of immortal inhabitants called struldbrugs whom society treats as outcasts. At once, Gulliver goes on a lark about the blessed life he’d make for himself if only he’d been born as one of them. As happens again and again in his travels, the locals roll their eyes and then set Gulliver straight. To be born a struldbrug is no blessing. It’s a monstrous curse:

When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect . . . The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others. . . .

At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end . . .

—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, iii.10

Gulliver is horrified, and of course so are we.

Watercolor illustration by Stephen Baghot de la Bere, 1904, from Gulliver’s Travels in which a Luggnaggian courtier shows Gulliver the struldbrugs (public domain).

Anyone who’s seen dementia ravage the mind of a beloved family member, as I also have, knows how it devastates not only the victim, who must endure humiliations atop hardships, but also the victim’s loved ones, who witness a mental death preceding the physical death. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease pack a one-two punch of horror.

My grandfather Clifton Gaither, the subject of the poem I shared with you recently, survived cancer — the result of chewing tobacco — only to develop Alzheimer’s a few years later. So, as I went now and then to visit him and Little Mama at their house in Mystic, and later when I saw them at a nursing home, I saw what Alzheimer’s did to him firsthand. Later, after Pop passed away, Little Mama slowly developed dementia throughout her mid-to-late nineties.