Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘In his 2024 book Why We Die, Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan describes “the characteristic arrogance that many physicists and computer scientists display toward biologists” that causes the engineers to miss something crucial. That something may be physical, but it’s more likely to be something impossible to break down into data. Seamus O’Mahony, the doctor and prize-winning author of The Way We Die Now, found this when he went to a longevity conference in 2025. “They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable,” he says. “I heard a great deal over the four days about AI-designed drugs, glycans, the transcriptome ageing clock, but almost nothing on the complexity of death systems and the social determinants of death and dying. They seemed strangely uncurious about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed.”

The irony is that the mechanistic metaphor that served us so well is now dramatically impeding further progress. Too much faith in data and engineering overlooks the value of the unknown and the unknowable. In order to defeat ageing and death, we must bend to the technical tools that are supposed to serve us – from spreadsheets to large language models. We must become more like appliances. “This impulse, this motivation, this moral mandate to want to improve yourself means we must become like a machine,” says Dr Elke Schwarz, political theorist at Queen Mary University of London.

Yet “we live an inconvenient life”, says Schwartz. “We are weird. We are messy. Our bodies are mortal. We die. Why can’t we be like products? Why can’t we be like the things that computer scientists make that they can improve and fine-tune?” Because we aren’t.’ (from the Guardian)