Transhumanism

By James Harkin (THE GUARDIAN, 11/03/06):

Who wants to live forever? Time was when only Michael Jackson and a few narcissistic billionaires imagined that they could cheat death with the help of wacky science. Recently, however, the idea of radically extending human life has found itself a more respectable audience. Next week a far-flung group of scientists, philosophers and future-gazers will descend on Oxford University for a conference about it, titled Tomorrow's People: The Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement. At around the same time, Ray Kurzweil, a longtime prophet of radical life extension, will launch in Britain his book, The Singularity is Near. Humans, he argues, are shortly approaching lift-off to immortality.

Kurzweil is one of the leading figures in an informal movement of evangelists for radical life extension called transhumanism. What unites them is the belief that if we humans can just hang on for the next 30 or 40 years, the science will have reached such a level of sophistication that we will be able to live for the next 1,000. In his book, Kurzweil argues that the route to radical life extension will evolve through a series of "bridges" - that we can use our existing knowledge to slow down the ageing process, enabling today's middle-aged to stay healthy until advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology allow us to turn off ageing and disease.

Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge geneticist and one of the speakers invited to the Oxford conference, is a disciple of the same school, and believes we are close to switching off the ageing process entirely. Within a decade, he argues, we will be capable of producing "robustly rejuvenated" mice, which will prepare public opinion for something more ambitious. He likes to use the metaphor of maintaining a house. How long a house lasts depends on how we take care of it. But if we repair all damage and rebuild parts of it using new materials and new technologies, its life can be extended without limit.

Transhumanists share a welcome zeal for overcoming our limitations. For them, there is little that is natural about when we get old or die, and the subtle alteration of our incubator, our scientific and technological surroundings can keep us alive longer than ever before.

But we should take the claims of the transhumanists with a pinch of salt. The science of radical life extension is something of a gamble - many scientists in the field balk at the suggestion that life expectancies are on the brink of an exponential hike - and seems to entail a daunting regimen of pill-popping. In his book, Kurzweil reveals that he is "aggressively reprogramming" his biochemistry by taking 250 supplements a day and half a dozen intravenous therapies every week.

The idea of radical life extension is also a little antisocial. A house, to borrow De Grey's metaphor, is a place to live in as well as an investment. As with the house-buying and renovation craze, transhumanism risks turning all our energies inwards, rather than out into society, where they might be of more immediate use. Sometimes, the urge to escape the ageing process seems like an attempt to escape everyone else.