Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.
Original photo by Nick Webb
Perhaps the most annoying example of the “technology will save us” hand-waving trope is this iteration: that soon technology will save us from death itself.
You may have seen this post making the rounds on Reddit and Hacker News last week, but just in case, I’ll briefly summarize the argument. The post asserts that if you’re alive in 30 years, you’ll be alive in 1,000 years, because exponential advances in technology will allow us to stop and ultimately reverse the aging process. Obviously, we won’t be able to turn a 90-year-old into a 25-year-old in 30 years, but we might be able to turn a 90-year-old into something more like a 70-year-old, which buys them another twenty years of life during which technology keeps advancing and…you get the picture. To explain how this will happen, the author cites Moore’s Law and posits that since medicine is increasingly using computing tools to become an IT field, our exponential advances in processing power will translate into medical and aging research advances.
I think that timeline is wildly optimistic for a number of reasons. But whatever, even if the author’s off by a few decades or centuries, we probably are headed towards some kind of immortality (provided we don’t kill ourselves off first). Hooray, right? Wrong. There are two kinds of immortality (medical and technological), and both of them are going to suck.
Immortality for all? Not happening.
No one is going to be giving immortality away for free. (Photo: PIxabay)
When people write about our future as immortals, you see a lot of the word “we.” But make no mistake, there will be no “we.” No one will be granted access to immortality, whether it be achieved through medical or technological means. Immortality-granting technology would certainly be the most valuable commercial product in all of human history. There is absolutely no way that it’s going to be given out for free.
Sure, it might eventually be made available to the middle class as something like a subscription-based service once the technology is advanced enough that it can be scaled on that level in an economicall feasible way. But in the early days of immortality, it’s likely to be insanely expensive, both because it’ll be extremely advanced technology and because people will be willing to pay it. So while perhaps someone like Jack Ma can look forward to immortality if he simply lives another 30 years, you and I are going to have to wait a lot longer.
In fact, there’s a fair chance that immortality technology will widen the gap between rich and poor. Most people would pay any sum to prevent their own death or the death of a loved one, even if it meant going into tremendous debt and essentially becoming a debt slave. And if people will pay the money, what incentive do you think immortality companies will have to lower prices? Until the technology is cheap enough to be truly universal, prices will stay high, shareholders will stay happy, and the rest of us will scrimp and struggle to keep ourselves and our families alive.
Medical immortality sucks.
No more doctor visits? Sounds pleasant, but it won’t be. (Photo: Pixabay)
Medical immortality – the idea that we’ll be able to reverse the biological ageing process and eliminate the diseases that kill us – seems attractive at first. But there are a litany of reasons why long-term medical immortality would actually be kind of a nightmare.
First and foremost: our brain capacity is limited. This is why the older you get, the harder it gets to remember details of things that happened when you were young. There are only so many memories you can store and recall efficiently, and the higher they pile up, the harder and slower they are to recall at a moment’s notice. That’s a problem, because we recall on quick memory recall for virtually every part of our everyday lives. The end result is that even if you stay biologically twenty years old for 200 years, you’re still going to have the slow, embarrassing brain of a very old person: misremembering names and dates, calling up random or incorrect memories, and telling the same jokes over and over. Your perception of time would likely also become extremely warped, as the older you get, the more quickly time seems to pass.
Digital immortality is death.
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
