Live long and prosper?

There are lessons for the transhumanist movement to learn from science fiction, but look to Frankenstein and Ex Machina rather than Star Trek

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Mankind has always hankered after immortality... sorry about that, but I've been overdosing on social media for several weeks and had begun to worry that my column isn't bombastic enough. It's not just social media, either: last week The Guardian ran a piece about a US investment boom in "transhumanist" technologies such as Musk's Neuralink that claim they'll enable us to upload our brains and download them again into new bodies. Concerned scientists say this is diverting funding away from sensible medical research. I've written plenty here about the delusions most software engineers (even billionaire ones) harbour about brain function and so am not going there again, except to say that it isn't static data, it's an evanescent flux, geddit?

What interests me more is the replacement body aspect, prompted by watching Guillermo del Toro's excellent new film of Frankenstein followed by Alex Garland's equally brilliant