Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  But Trump is the least of it. The path we’ve started down is the not-so-gradual replacement of humans with something not so slightly different: a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already. Even our posture has begun to change. A 2016 study in the Journal of Physical Therapy Science found that there were “significant differences in the craniovertebral angle, scapular index, and peak expiratory flow depending on the duration of smartphone usage.”12 That is, having taken a few million years to stand up straight, we are hunched once more—text neck, iPosture. And we’ve already subcontracted a good bit of our memory to the Web: seven in ten people can remember phone numbers from their childhood, but not the numbers of their current friends now plugged into their phones. We spend roughly ten hours a day looking at a screen and roughly seventeen minutes a day exercising—that is, using our bodies. “Our lives now are only partly biological, with no clear split between the organic and the technological, the carbon and the silicon,” the venerable National Geographic intoned in a recent special issue on “the next human.” “We may not know yet where we’re going, but we’ve already left where we’ve been.”13

  And how’s that working for us? It’s hard to study, both because it’s so new and because, aside from the Amish, there’s no control group. But the data so far are sobering. The psychology professor Jean Twenge reported that beginning in 2012, when the number of Americans with a smartphone passed the 50 percent mark, there were “abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states” completely unlike anything that showed up in decades of analysis of generational data. The good news is that teens are physically safer because they’re drinking less and having far less sex, and the bad news is that that’s because they rarely go out. The number of teens who get together with their friends every day dropped by 40 percent from 2010 to 2015, a curve that’s accelerating. They’re in their bedrooms, but not studying, not working. They’re, of course, texting and looking at social media, “alone and often distressed.” The more Facebook they look at in a day, the unhappier they feel, and this unhappiness isn’t just a mild malaise. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to be at risk of suicide; depressive symptoms among girls spiked by 50 percent. Three times as many teenagers killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007.14

  None of this is an indictment of young people. Millennials can use their connectedness to do remarkable things, as everyone saw in the months after the Parkland, Florida, school shootings in the winter of 2018. Instead, it’s an indication: because they’re the first emerging citizens of this particular technological world, they offer us a glimpse into what it will be like. But ask yourself, if you’re old enough to remember and your memory still works, what it was like to live before email and Twitter and text? Not for nostalgic reasons, but instead so we can anticipate what it will be like to move into a world ever more dominated by technology.

  When we last talked, Ray Kurzweil told me his vision: “As we get smarter, we can create more profound intellectual expressions—music, literature. Beauty and artistic expression of all kinds.” Indeed, this is often how technologists imagine the future: Freed from the need to work, we’ll paint paintings, play the saxophone, write books all day. Art will be the last human refuge, in the way that Roman nobles composed poems while their slaves raised the grapes and olives for the wine and oil.

  But why couldn’t computers produce “better” art than people? They can, after all, analyze what we like and then reproduce it. Already there are AIs that compose Bach-like cantatas that fool concert hall audiences, and the auction house Christie’s sold its first piece of art created by artificial intelligence in the fall of 2018. But at a deeper level, that’s not even how art works. The point of art is not “better”; the point is to reflect on the experience of being human—which is precisely the thing that’s disappearing.

  Even—and here is more rich, sad irony—science is at risk. The profound pleasure that keeps people working on precisely the technology that now threatens to supplant us will vanish, too. You don’t think robot biologists will soon replace the real ones?

  What are we left with? Nick Bostrom, the early apostle of transhumanism, offers the best case: a superintelligence could “assist us in creating a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to joyful game-playing, relating to each other, experiencing personal growth, and living closer to our ideals.” Or we could just smoke weed.

  * * *

  So, why do we do it? Why do we keep on with this ever-accelerating rush into territory that everyone involved understands is risky?

  Partly, it’s inertia—a body in motion stays that way, and we’ve been in motion for some centuries now, headed toward something called Progress. It’s hard for us to imagine the alternative (though not, as we’ll see, impossible).

  Partly, it’s money, the great magnetic attraction that ensures the motion never ceases. Whatever business you’re in, its future success depends on mastering these new technologies. Capitalism played by its current rules doesn’t allow anyone to step easily aside.

  But there’s also something weirder.

  18

  We know of no story older than Gilgamesh, the epic poem of the Sumerians, which dates back about four thousand years. It begins with the friendship of Gilgamesh the king and Enkidu. In the middle of the book, however, Enkidu dies, and after sitting by the body seven days and nights, Gilgamesh sees a worm drop from the nose of his friend’s corpse. A great fear rises in him, and he speaks words that could be spoken today:

  Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh be like that?

  It was then I felt the fear of it in my belly. I roam the wilderness because of the fear.

  Enkidu, the companion, whom I loved, is dirt, nothing but clay is Enkidu.

  Weeping as if I were a woman I roam the paths and shores of unknown places saying:

  “Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh be like that?”

  Determined to find the secret to immortality, he undertakes a perilous journey, battling a pride of lions, passing through a tunnel guarded by two scorpion-men, destroying stone giants, and felling 120 trees, which he uses to propel himself across a deadly sea. He survives a storm so horrific that it sends the terrified gods scurrying to the heavens—but all of it is in vain. “Eternal life, which you look for, you will never find,” he finally learns from the one man who knows. “For when the gods created man, they let death be his share.” Indeed, he’s told, the constant hunting for immortality only ruins the joy in life.

  From Gilgamesh onward. We are, of course, the animal with consciousness, which is to say the animal that knows that it will die. We don’t dwell on it constantly, but it shapes us and the cultures we’ve constructed. The great psychologist Ernest Becker was convinced that Freud had it wrong: it wasn’t sex that our minds repress, but the fear of death, and from that fear we’ve constructed everything from mighty pyramids to the mightier idea of heaven. The pattern of our lives is set by the span we hope to live: we know how much time we can allot to education, and we can tell the prime of our lives, and if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it, we can prepare for our approaching death.

  It’s true that the average human life span has increased, mostly because far fewer babies die and because advances such as basic sanitation have dramatically reduced disease. Researchers studying chlorination have found that clean water led to a 43 percent reduction in mortality in the average American city, a reminder of what happens when we work together.1 But the people who live the longest aren’t living any longer. A hundred and fifteen years appears to be pretty near the upper edge, a boundary set by the so-called Hayflick limit on the number of times human cells can divide; so far it has been as inviolate for humans as the speed of light. And we have, more or less, made our accommodations, as individuals and as societies. The people we admire most are the o
nes who seem to have come to terms with their mortality—we nod when we hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.” Death is what finally takes the measure of our self-absorption: Ayn Rand and the first libertarians may have wanted to do away with taxes, but even to them mortality seemed a given. David Koch announced his retirement from business and politics in 2018 because of declining health.

  Not so, however, the Silicon Valley wave, who are driven in no small part by precisely the fear that haunted Gilgamesh but who have persuaded themselves that they finally have immortality in their sights. Ray Kurzweil takes a hundred pills a day, the better to ward off aging long enough for his peers to figure out how to guarantee he’ll never die. That’s not particularly unusual behavior among the tech elite—it’s easy to find people taking resveratrol, or off-label diabetes medications. As Wired magazine reports, “The most daring are rumored to use rapamycin, a powerful drug that prevents organ transplant rejection,” even though it suppresses the immune system. The theory is that it “initiates a process where dysfunctional cellular components are degraded or recycled.”2 Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and Trump supporter, either does or does not transfuse himself with the blood of young people, in an effort to retain his youthful vigor. One tech journal said that he was paying forty thousand dollars every three months for the blood of eighteen-year-olds, but he told another reporter that he hadn’t “quite quite quite started yet.”3 But, intrigued? For sure. “I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting,” Thiel said. “This is where they put the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect.” A Silicon Valley start-up called Ambrosia has at least one hundred clients who will pay eight grand a pop for the blood of young’uns.4

  Thiel’s Breakout Labs invests in many other start-ups trying to conquer aging—and why not, given that he believes that “probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead”? (This is saying something when his own net worth exceeds the GDP of roughly thirty countries.) “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” he explained in an essay detailing his reasons for being a libertarian.5 “I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing.”

  Among Silicon Valley tycoons (again, arguably the most powerful people on Earth), defeating death is high on the to-do list. Yes, they want to make even more money. Yes, they’re enchanted by the sheer pleasure of building new technology. And no, they do not want to die. If you want to know why they push ahead so relentlessly with artificial intelligence and germline manipulation, despite the obvious dangers, then you need to listen to them speak. You need to sense precisely how freaked out they are.

  The New Yorker reporter Tad Friend memorably described an evening at Norman Lear’s house, set high in the hills above Los Angeles. The party was a kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine’s Healthy Longevity Grand Challenge, which will award millions of dollars for breakthroughs in the field. There were Hollywood stars in attendance—Goldie Hawn demanded that a Nobel Prize geneticist offer an opinion on glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that features in many health regimens—but the real celebrity was Google cofounder Sergey Brin; you’ll recall that his ex runs 23andMe, the pioneering genetics firm. At this gathering, his current girlfriend, Nicole Shanahan, said Brin had phoned her recently with the sad news that he was going to die—someday. Or maybe not, given that Google was investing huge sums in life-extension technologies. In 2009 it hired Bill Maris to run its venture capital fund, and he quickly began devoting most of its vast resources to life sciences start-ups. Why? Because “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”6 “We aren’t trying to gain a few yards,” Maris says. “We are trying to win the game. And part of it is that it is better to live than to die.” Again—this is not some outlier cult. “There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place,” Maris says. “If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?”7

  Doubtless the actual answer is both. Google has gone beyond merely funding other people’s start-ups. In 2013 it launched its own venture, Calico, which stands for California Life Company. It’s been highly secretive—all anyone really knows about the operation is that it has squadrons of mice eating different diets—but its focus is “the challenge of aging,”8 and it’s definitely not alone. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, has diverted some of his cash to the San Francisco–based start-up Unity Biotechnology, which is hard at work on “a cure for aging.” At a recent seminar on “the business of longevity,” hosted by The Economist, an “acolyte” of Peter Thiel (who has also invested in the company) rated it as one of the most likely start-ups to get a drug to market soon. The start-up was, she said, “one of the most exciting companies in a space that’s gone from fringe science to hot new field.”9 Typical headline, this one from the British papers: BEATING AGEING IS SET TO BECOME THE BIGGEST BUSINESS IN THE WORLD, SAY TYCOONS.10

  One way to judge the seriousness of these men and women is to look at their ankles. A great many of them wear a thin leather band with a metal tab engraved with the contact information for Alcor, the world’s leading cryonics facility. Much like the flying car, the idea of cryogenics has been around a long time without quite being real. For a 1948 edition of Startling Stories, Robert Ettinger (the fellow hoping for the reengineering of human beings so they could defecate small, dry, odorless pellets through an “alternative” orifice) wrote a short story about freezing people, followed up in 1962 by a nonfiction account called The Prospect of Immortality. That prospect was slim at first—Alcor technicians had to open the chamber of their initial client and toss in more dry ice to keep him from thawing—and the business has always been plagued by controversy. Who can forget some of the children of Ted Williams suing some of the other children to keep his head from being iced? Things were so sketchy that Timothy Leary, an early Alcor client, gave up and had his ashes shot into space from a rocket (along with those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry). His former cryogenic colleagues accused him of succumbing to “deathist ideology.”

  The industry is maturing, though. Alcor currently has 147 human beings on ice, each of whom paid $200,000 to preserve their whole bodies or $80,000 for the “neuro option,” which involves sawing off the head. (There’s also a $10,000 discount if you’re willing to die in Scottsdale, Arizona, so they can frost you on-site.) “Our view is that when we call someone dead it’s a bit of an arbitrary line. In fact they are in need of a rescue,” says Alcor’s CEO, Max More (a name he bestowed on himself as a reminder of “what my goal is: always to improve, never to be static”).11 Ralph Merkle, a hero in Silicon Valley as one of the inventors of public-key cryptography for computers, is on the board of Alcor, and as a public service, he calculated what it would take to preserve everyone on the planet. Given that fifty-five million humans die annually, it’s easier if you just save the noggins; and with a double-walled cooling flask thirty meters in diameter able to accommodate 5.5 million brains, you’d need to build just ten per year to store “the head of every person who died in the entire world, going forward, until such time as their deaths could be remedied.” Amortized across the Earth’s entire population, Merkle estimates a “surprisingly competitive” price of $24 to $32 per person.12 Currently, at least a thousand people are waiting for their chance, and they include a large selection of Silicon Valley pioneers.

  This being the tech industry, though, a newer iteration of the idea is already available. Nectome is one of the handful of start-ups chosen to be part of Y Combinator, the most important of California’s tech incubators. (They’re the people who first championed Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.) In fact, Y Combinator head Sam Altman has already
plunked down his $10,000 for Nectome’s service, which involves embalming your brain when you’re near death so that it can later be digitized and encoded. “The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation,” writes Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review.13

  In fact, this notion that we will one day be meshed with computers and thus live forever has gained currency perhaps because, while bizarre, it seems somehow less absurd than the idea of Ted Williams lumbering around again in the real world. (Presumably alongside Oscar, Max More’s goldendoodle, who also has a storage flask awaiting him.)

  Ray Kurzweil is an Alcor customer, but it’s clearly a fallback position; his real hope is not to die at all and instead to live long enough to reach the point where his failing cells can be repaired by nanobots in the blood. In fact, he says, those nanobot blood cells could perhaps power their own movement, dispensing with the need for a heart, which is after all just a large pump prone to failure. And Kurzweil’s pretty sure we’ll someday be able to connect our brains directly to the cloud. By the time we can implant a hundred thousand electrodes per square inch of scalp, there will be “no need to read a book—the computer just squirts its contents into your head.”14 Remember, this is the chief scientist at what is by some measures the biggest company in the planet’s history.