Slaying the dragon of death: Silicon Valley's race for immortality

BIOHACKING, SUPER AI, SENDING OUR BRAINS TO JUPITER CAN ANY OF IT CONQUER DEATH, ASKS ALEKS KROTOSKI

- ALEKS KROTOSKI

Once upon a time, there was a dragon who terrorised a whole world, demanding a sacrifice of 10,000 people every day. After many years and many futile attempts to defeat it, life settled around the inevitability that, one day, everyone would end up in the belly of the beast.

This is the setup for The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, written in 2005 by technology philosopher Nick Bostrom as an allegory for the eternal war humans have waged against The End. Bostrom was responding to what he described as our "deathist" culture - one that has given up believing we could live forever. He proposed that technological innovations would deliver the solution we need to kill death.

Bostrom is Silicon Valley's favourite philosopher. His ideas have helped form the tech billionaires' logic and feed their drive to live longer: he believes they hold the power to bring us all eternal life. The result is that these tech bosses are already changing our world.

At its most fundamental, technology demands that our human complexity is reduced to code. Our messy, unpredictable natures are noise in a machine that prefers pure data. We've seen this already in the extraordinary tech solutions created for us to manage our lives.

When these solutions feel like they're out of our control, or are taking liberties with our information, it's because they don't account for all the things that are part of us but cannot be coded and so are stripped away to make their services work. This phenomenon has a name: Engineer's Syndrome, the tendency of engineers to apply their tools to problems they know nothing about. This syndrome is driving their fixes for death.