Transhumanists believe that aging is a disease and must be cured. Just like science and technology cured so many diseases, science and technology should be used to cure this one and make people immortal. Since they live in the electronic age, in the age of computers, machines whose data are virtually immortal (as long as no hacker wipes them out in a millisecond), the transhumanists assume that this means becoming more like computers and less like flesh and bones animals, i.e. emancipation from biology. Death is viewed as a limit of biology that must be overcome by making humans less biological and more technological.

The book is a vivid introduction to a multitude of characters from various nationalities and backgrounds, most of whom the author interviewed personally: Max More, one of the founders of the movement; the "prophets" of the Singularity, such as Vernon Vinge, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil - see my reviews of "The Age of Intelligent Machines" (1990), "The Age of Spiritual Machines" (1999), "The Singularity is Near" (2005) and "How to Create a Mind" (2013); the gurus of "whole brain emulation" and "mind uploading", such as the Dutch neuroscientist Randal Koene, founder of the Carboncopies Foundation, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom, co-author of "Whole Brain Emulation" (2008) and author of the book "Superintelligence" (2014) and Martine Rothblatt, founder of the Terasem movement; "life extension" entrepreneurs such as the British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation, and enfant prodige Laura Deming, who studied with Cynthia Kenyon at UC San Francisco, and went on to manage on behalf of Peter Thiel the first venture-capital fund specifically targeting life extension, the Longevity Fund; neuroscientists working on brain-machine interfaces such as Miguel Nicoletis, author of "Beyond Boundaries" (2011); aspiring cyborgs like performance artist Stelarc and Grindhouse's co-founder Tim Cannon (Tim Cannon tells the author "I'm trapped in the wrong body because I'm trapped in a body - All bodies are the wrong body"); pioneers of cryonics, including James Bedford, the first human to be cryo-preserved (in 1966), who cannot be said to be dead because he is frozen; and spiritual futurists like Hank Pellissier (formerly known as punk poet Hank Hyena), organizer in 2014 of the Bay Area conference "Religion and Transhumanism", and Mike LaTorra, a Buddhist transhumanist.

We are also introduced to wealthy people who hope to find a cure for (their own) death: venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thief, who has invested in several longevity research projects, and the Russian tycoon Dmitry Itskov, founder of the 2045 Initiative.

For many of them the hope comes from the law (or wishful thinking) of "longevity escape velocity", the idea that life-extension technology will reach a point that the time added each year to human life will be more than one year.

Mark O'Connell didn't interview the skeptics, like me (i guess we would ruin the marketability of the book!) but he does a good job of introducing those who warn against the dangers of super-intelligent machines. Stephen Omohundro was probably the first thinker, in his essay "The Basic A.I. Drives" (2008), who warned that a machine capable of self-improvement would inevitably become a threat to humankind. Start with the think-tanks devoted to warning against the risk that super-intelligent machines may simply annihilate their creators, the human race, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligent Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. And then thinkers like Stuart Russell, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, who published a little manifesto in 2014 titled "Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines". O'Connell has a good point: there are thousands of A.I. engineers working on making machines smarter and only a handful of engineers working on making sure that those machines will be safe.

The book ends with the description of a road trip. O'Connell traveled with Zoltan Istvan, who drove his "immortality bus" across the USA to raise awareness of life extension projects and demand a cure for death. (I personally think that government would be scared of the idea that everybody lives forever: how are they going to pay all those pensions?)

The most profound part of the book is actually the brief sections in which O'Connell meditates on what all this means. He implicitly elaborates a philosophical skepticism that makes him prefer a natural death to an artificial immortality. At times he seems to view the liberation from (the limitations of) biology as a form of self-annihilation. There's a great book of philosophy hidden this amusing tour of eccentric projects.

Incidentally, his book shows that transhumanism is a field rich in visionaries and techno-capitalists but not in inventors: they mostly parasite on Silicon Valley inventions. At the same time they exert an influence on the culture of Silicon Valley.

You can read my version of the facts in the chapters Religion and the Law of Accelerated Exaggeration and A Brief History of Bionic Humans, Cyborgs and Neuroengineering of my book Intelligence is not Artificial. I guess i emphasize more the "religious" aspect of this movement. The human mind (the biology that transhumanists so much dislike) makes humans prone to start new religions all the time, and transhumanism is one of them.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi