Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has invested $180 million of his own fortune in Retro Biosciences, a Bay Area biotech concern aimed at stalling and potentially reversing human aging. Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the major funders of Altos Labs, a company that hopes to find stem cell therapies to extend human life spans. The treatments pursued by such initiatives exist somewhere on the spectrum of plausibility; you could even imagine a scenario in which some of them eventually become accessible to ordinary people. Yet it also seems obvious that the tech moguls’ obsession with longevity most specifically applies to their own. Thiel has signed himself up to be cryogenically preserved. Altman has said he takes the diabetes medication metformin as part of an anti-aging regimen, despite somewhat shaky evidence of its efficacy.

And then there is Bryan Johnson, who has devoted his online-payments fortune to the monomaniacal pursuit of eternal life through a bewildering array of approaches: prodigious consumption of supplements, gene therapy, immunosuppressants, transfusions of plasma from his son and the taking of detailed measurements as to the quality and durability of nocturnal erections. A lot of Johnson’s endeavors are, at best, long shots — or less charitably, symptomatic of some deep pathology — but his naked yearning to escape the human condition itself exposes the half-sublimated desire at the heart of the more scientifically reputable life-extension projects.

The goal of this enterprise, of Johnson’s sacramental observances in a monotheism of the self, is to slow and eventually reverse the processes of aging, and to thereby become (and remain) biologically indistinguishable from an 18-year-old. Johnson’s motto, and the tagline of his proprietary longevity regimen, Project Blueprint, is “Don’t die.” In its reduction of multiple disparate imperatives — of the pharmaceutical industry, of the Christian faith, of American individualism — to a single command, it must be admitted that this formulation has about it the simple-minded genius of a classic advertising slogan. Don’t die is the precise message audible in your heart’s every finite beat, encoded in your troubled dreams and futile anxieties.

What do these men, these autocratic heads of state and staggeringly wealthy technologists, have in common, other than the desire to don’t die? They have, for one thing, arrived — through ruthlessness and ingenuity, through the obsessive pursuit of power and personal enrichment — at an Olympian distance from the mortals from whom their profit and power derive.

Consider the tech billionaire: This is a man who has amassed unimaginable wealth through the disruption of economic and social relations. He has completely reshaped how we buy things, how we pay for them. He has changed how we interact with our fellow humans. He has restructured our brains and reordered the global economy, and is now creating the ultimate technology, the one that promises to do away, once and for all, with the need for human intellectual labor. Is it not right that such a man should buy his way out of death, that he should break this last tie that binds him to the fate of his fellow humans?…

For now, though, no matter how greatly a person is enlarged by his wealth, his own power and prestige, there is no escaping the determinism of death. Bryan Johnson will die. Peter Thiel will die. Sam Altman will die. Xi Jinping will die. Donald Trump will die. Vladimir Putin will die. And so will you, and so will I, and so will all those now living and yet unborn. Not a one of us will be saved: not by 3-D-printed organs, not by artificial superintelligence, not by transfusions of plasma from our beloved and indulgent teenage sons. None of these things will intervene between even the richest and most powerful of us and our common animal end. The great and terrible democracy of death abides.’ (from the New York Times)