If technology extends our lifespans, the most important question might not be what we do with the time, but what we become by transcending biology.
Longevity technology is moving at a breakneck speed, and as I wrote earlier could offer the possibility of extending our lifespans indefinitely (presuming we avoid extinction).
We could be on the verge of never have to face the news that a loved one has cancer, or hearing a doctor say we only have a few more years.
But that leaves one important question: in solving biology, what will we become?
The Hollywood version would have us on a sunny day, living carefree lives of leisure. No cane or walker, fit and thin, aging slowly and gracefully until we hit some idealized version of the age each of us wants to be, then staying there. Living the life of the “after” in a Claratin commercial.
This isn’t going to happen.
Even the most optimistic version of longevity will look nothing like it. Because in stretching lifespans, we’re changing the very meat we’re made of, then possibly replacing it. Most likely the future will be weird and fucked up to the eyes of today.
But before we get there, let’s see where we’ve been.
The Degrading Human Chassis
As I write this I’ve got an intermittent pain shooting up my left hand; my deadlift isn’t what it was three years ago; and things are just harder.
Our chassis didn’t evolve for long duration missions. All that was necessary was to live long enough to pass on genes then raise offspring enough to set them on the path to do the same. We needed to be smart enough to outwit the other animals, sturdy enough to survive to raise our young, prosocial enough for our version of generic base-pairs to keep doing their thing.
Evolution doesn’t care about me playing tennis. Cells decay, DNA replication errors increase over the years.
This is who we are. Or, at least what we used to be –
The Unbroken Arc of Augmentation
Here I am, alive at fifty five and beyond my biological usefulness. But I’m here because one of our most ancient projects has been surviving as individuals, beyond the 30-odd years our selfish genes optimized for. Humanity’s survival drive and inventiveness letting me lift weights at what in hunter-gatherer times would have been considered freakishly old.
First we restored the chassis: Walking with canes is older than written history. A human was found from 13,000 years ago, a tooth cavity drilled out with stone tools and filled with bitumen. A 3,000 year old Egyptian mummy had a prosthetic toe.
Next we upgraded the sensors: The 13th century brought the advent of eyeglasses. In the 17th our hearing was upgraded with the ear horn. In 1898, the electric Akouphone hearing aid.
Now we’re integrating machines inside us: Feel the tempo rise, biological improvement begins to speed up as we embed machines in ourselves. Pacemakers, artificial hips, a cochlear implant bypassing broken biology to feed digital signals directly to the brain.
At the bleeding edge, we augment our minds: Neuralink’s brain-computer interface just let a paralyzed veteran control his phone and computer without functioning limbs.
As long as you and I have been alive, humanity has always been headed to a cyborg future.
Which brings us to today. Until now, augmentation was a process of manipulating atoms (shape wood, forge metal, grind glass), and even in the small examples above we see the beginnings of an exponential curve. But now we hit the inflection point, because the driving force of technology is the manipulation of information. AI, as a system of pure information, kicks the exponential into overdrive.
Human-led innovation was linear: hypothesize, test, analyze, repeat. AI-driven innovation creates a recursive, compounding loop. AI designs a novel protein, lab automation synthesizes and tests it, the results are fed back to the AI, which designs a better protein within hours instead of years. This feedback loop between AI and robotics (in drug discovery, material science, etc.) means the rate of discovery has gone from additive to multiplicative.
And the demand is there; the search for eternal youth didn’t end with Juan Ponce de León. Most of humanity may not risk life and limb sailing in search of it, but would happily pop pills to get stronger, faster, smarter. Many would upgrade themselves with machines today. Many more will when it becomes socially normalized.
We’re staring at a multi-trillion-dollar global market for wellness, anti-aging, and biohacking. A massive injection of capital and economic incentive is fuel on the exponential fire, compressing biological upgrade timelines from generations to fiscal quarters.
The only brakes on it are the impedance mismatch between technology and regulatory bodies. But where the market wants it, the market finds a way.
From Repair to Replacement
Achilles’ mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx seeking what every parent wants for their child, immortality. We see an unbroken line from canes, to pacemakers, to brain interfaces. The human drive, technology, and capital are all aligned to drive exponential changes in longevity.
The problem you and I face, and the problem that the market will be driven to solve, is that each new therapy under our current paradigm is just a patch. You cannot outrun entropy, infinitely repairing a machine evolved for a limited useful life.
And we already think this way. I keep computers until they’re well past their prime, upgrading them over and over as they get less capable to handle the workload of modern software. But at some point, it falls so far behind that I just need to replace the hardware entirely. I copy over everything I’ve saved going decades back, and move on happy to finally be able to keep up.
This is us, starting now.
The meat is the problem. It’s susceptible to radiation, disease, cosmic rays, and the wear-and-tear of existence. Until just now we’ve only been able to poke at the edges, but technology has just opened another door from minor patches to major upgrades. It’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be a movement to a new chassis in our not too distant future.
A silicon-based existence for our descendants feels like sci-fi fantasy. I don’t want it. My mind fights the idea, it’s weird and wrong. My kids are my kids, not weird cyborgs.
But what I want doesn’t matter. Human nature, technology and markets are a riptide pulling us from the shore of familiar, messy, beautiful, flawed biology.
The Inevitable Next Step
Today we celebrate pacemakers, and are excited that one veteran had his life changed with a primitive brain-computer interface. Because these changes haven’t really altered who we are, only extended the time we have here and the ability to do the things our ancestors could.
We’ve already started the merger. As technology gets better, we will replace more and more of our decaying meat sacks with more durable, better performing, replaceable parts for mind and body.
“Immortality” won’t be achieved by band-aiding our fragile biology. We’ll replace it. Living forever with replacement parts, part human, part machine. In the not-too-distant future deciding how far each of us wants to go, perhaps abandoning biology all together.
At that point, are we human, or something different?
I set out to ask what the optimistic case looks like – what happens if the machines don’t kill us all – and it turns out it might be a little less scary, but no less weird. If this path means systematically replacing the very thing that makes us human with more durable machine parts and minds, at some point we are not us.
I don’t know what that means for my kids, which is what matters to me. I can’t yet accept that the optimistic scenario is our species survives extinction by ASI only to commit a quiet, perfect, technologically-assisted suicide.
So I continue to think and write, in search of the happy ending. Part of me realizing the ending I’d have today without the sci-fi future wouldn’t be so pretty, either.
Maybe a happy ending is like the horizon; a concept and not a real place.
Maybe the important thing is today.
