Once all five of us had briefly introduced ourselves, Jason said a few prefatory words. “Transreligion,” he explained, meant that you could join the church even if you were already a practicing member of some other religion. Insofar as Terasem is a religion at all, it seems closer to Buddhism than any of the Abrahamic faiths—at least in the narrow sense that there is no deity at its center, no one entity calling the celestial shots, demanding the fealty of prayer and obedience. The first truth of Terasem, according to the booklet, is that “Terasem is a collective consciousness dedicated to diversity, unity and joyful immortality.”
Probably the most attention-grabbing aspect of the religion was one that Jason totally neglected to mention here, but which I knew about from research I’d done online: the practice of “mind-filing,” an idea taken from Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. This is a daily techno-spiritual observance, whereby you upload some measure of data about yourself—a video, a memory, an impression, a photograph—to one of Terasem’s cloud servers, where it will be stored until such time as an unspecified future technology will be capable of reconstructing, from this accumulated data, a version of you, of your very soul, which can in turn be uploaded to an artificial body, that you might live eternally, blissfully, unencumbered by your mortal flesh. It’s not totally clear whether the practice is meant to be symbolic; the whole thing was a little sketchy in terms of details.
From a shoulder bag beneath his seat, Jason withdrew a MacBook Air. Propping it open on his knees, he queued up a recording of Terasem’s anthem, “Earthseed.” It began with a minor-key arpeggiating piano, into which stately setting a woman’s soulful vibrato interposed itself. The sound quality and volume from the laptop speakers were poor, and whatever emotions this anthem was intended to stir remained unstirred, at least within my own doubtful heart, but the words could nonetheless be made out with clarity:
Earthseed, come to me!
Earthseed, come to you!
Earthseed, one are we!
Earthseed, that’s the truth!
Truth for you, truth for me!
Earthseed, stand with us!
Earthseed, march with us!
Earthseed, strengthen us!
Earthseed, consciousness!
Collective…consciousness!
The song, Jason explained, had been composed by Terasem’s founder, Martine Rothblatt, who was also responsible for the piano accompaniment and flute solo. Martine was a particularly strange and intriguing figure, even for a transhumanist. She had made her considerable fortune from founding the first-ever satellite radio company, Sirius FM, and had later established the biotechnology company United Therapeutics, of which Kurzweil is a board member. I’d read a New York Times article about Bina48, the talking robot doppelgänger she had made of her wife, Bina, with whom she had had four children before undergoing a sex change in 1994, having spent her first forty years as Martin Rothblatt. Over the last decade or so, she had spearheaded a campaign to secure peace in the Middle East by making Israel and Palestine the fifty-first and fifty-second states of the U.S. In all of this, she seemed a parodic extrapolation of the figure of the billionaire individualist.
Her advocacy of transhumanism was intimately linked with her status as a transgender woman; in what I had read of her writing, the rhetoric of liberation was always in play—liberation not just from gender, but from the fact of embodiment, the flesh itself. (“It is the mind that is salient, not the matter that surrounds it,” as she put it in an essay called “Mind Is Deeper than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form.”)
Jason announced that we would be reading aloud this evening from section three of The Truths of Terasem, taking the short subsections in counterclockwise turns around our little group. There was a flurry of page flipping, a brief salvo of throat clearing, and Jason began.
“Where is Terasem?” he read. His voice was flat and expressionless, and he kept his eyes on the page as he spoke. “Terasem is everywhere and everywhen consciousness organizes itself to create diversity, unity and joyful immortality.”
Jason nodded at Mike, who sat to his right.
“Everywhere means physical and cyberspace,” read Mike in his rich and equable baritone, “real and virtual reality, because vitology can thrive in many spaces.”
Jason nodded toward me. I read:
“Spaces where Terasem thrives are limited only by their ability to support consciousness.” I pushed hard against the words, enunciating them louder and more clearly than was strictly necessary; hearing them spoken aloud in my own voice seemed to heighten their absurdity. (I was reminded of the morning assemblies I attended thrice-weekly throughout secondary school, in which my fellow students and I were obliged to read Bible passages and sing hymns, and I recalled the strangeness of those words in my mouth, the invocations and supplications to a god I could never imagine as anything other than an unreal abstraction, a void around which the world had been arranged.)
The baton was then passed to Tom, who it turned out had a very serious speech impediment. The room went into that strange state of almost meditative suspension that prevails in the presence of extended stuttering. He was about halfway through his sentence—“Physical places that support Terasem consciousness include the earth, heavenly bodies and colonies in space”—when Jason leaned forward and flatly informed him that it was totally okay to skip syllables, putting it in such a way as to imply this was obviously the sensible option. I wondered whether Jason was really cut out for this whole community outreach venture, even if the community he was reaching out to was Silicon Valley.
There now entered, noisily, a latecomer, a sort of classically hippieish guy who looked to be in his late sixties. His hair was long and entirely gray, and his beard, likewise long and gray, was forked into two tapering dreadlocks. He sat down next to me, and looked around at the group with an air of open amusement. He was a ghost of California past, this man, come to haunt its present, its future.
“I’m totally new here,” he drawled, superfluously. “What am I supposed to do?”
Jason told him to tell us all a little bit about himself. It was difficult to say whether he was mildly irritated, or whether that was just his social default mode.
“What do you want to know?” said the man, whose name I didn’t catch, or who never offered it to begin with.
“Well, how did you find out about the conference, for instance?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said, with a slow and needlessly elaborate shrug. He seemed quietly amused by himself, or by the situation, or both. “Just surfin’ the Web, I guess.”
We returned to our readings.
“Instantiating yourself into software form is like getting an education—some things change and some things don’t,” read Mike.
“Never fear multiple versions of yourself—they’ll all update each other just like family does,” read Bryce.
“Creating your cyber-self accelerates your joyful immorality,” read the bearded latecomer.
Jason interjected. “That’s supposed to be ‘joyful immortality,’ actually.”
“Says ‘immorality’ here.”
“No, it should definitely say ‘immortality.’ ”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t. There’s no ‘t.’ ”
“I don’t see how—”
The man brought his copy of the handbook closer to his face, the better to read it.
“Oh yeah, sorry, my bad,” he said, in a manner that did not convey much in the way of remorse. “There’s the ‘t.’ ”
We continued reading aloud for a further five minutes or so, each of us in turn announcing things that he likely neither believed nor understood: that we should never say goodbye to deceased loved ones because we will see them again in cyberspace; that living in an emulated environment beats living “raw” because suffering will be “deleted”; and so on. The more we read, the less sense I could make of any of it. It was an impenetrable torrent of words now, an overwhelmin
g profusion of mere assertion. Effective immortality is achieved by dispersing throughout the galaxy and universe encoded data emulations of reality. Nature is honored by recreation of the past and immortal preservation of joy and happiness.
Eventually Jason announced that the evening’s reading had concluded, and he asked whether anyone had any questions. Given that I had already outed myself as a writer, I was aware of some vague professional and social obligation to ask him something about the movement, but nothing presented itself to me. I was still feeling a little overwhelmed by the unchecked deluge of proclamations that had just concluded.
“No questions, then?” said Jason.
The old hippie raised his hand with a facetious hesitance.
“I got a question,” he said. “Can I get a slice of that pizza?”
There was a general silence as he made his way over to the wheeled hospital-style tray on which the pizza was laid out, as he sat back down with his slice of pepperoni and cheese. As he ate, he flipped backward through the pages of the handbook and then held it outward, hefting it in his palm. In a voice muffled by the pizza he had yet to finish chewing, he asked Jason why it was that the handbook didn’t have any Web address on it.
“Like, if I get home and I want to look up this thing, this whole Terasem deal? I won’t know how to find the website.”
“You can just Google ‘Terasem,’ I guess?” said Jason, who was no longer trying to hide his irritation with the attitude of this puckish interloper toward his meeting, his movement, his faith.
“Yeah, okay, sure. But just in terms of like PR or whatever, it seems like it’d be a good thing to have on there. The Web address. Just for the sake of people’s convenience, is all.”
Jason then explained that we would not actually be taking the handbooks home, that he would in fact be getting them back from us when we were finished here, which (he looked at his watch) would have to be pretty soon.
At this point, I panicked a little. Up until the early afternoon, I had been relying quite heavily on my phone as a mnemonic prosthesis, for retaining things I would need to draw on later, and which I couldn’t trust my own defective memory to hold on to—photographs of people whose appearance I wanted to recall, audio snippets of conversation, the occasional brief video clip. Pretty quickly, my phone had run out of memory, and, because I had maxed out on data roaming and therefore could not access cloud storage, the only way I would have been able to continue recording things on it would have been to ruthlessly delete photographs and videos of my wife and son, which I was not prepared to do.
So I had since then been relying largely on my own haphazard note-taking, scrawling impressions and quotes on whatever came to hand. For the last hour or so, I had been jotting down these quotes and impressions in my copy of the Terasem handbook, and so I was reluctant to hand it back to Jason, because I would be needing these notes in order to reconstruct the scene in writing. A more acute cause of this reluctance was that some of the impressions I had been jotting in the handbook were quite blunt in their portrayal of Terasem, and of Jason himself. (“ ‘It’s okay to skip syllables’? Jason = kind of an asshole.”) I had no wish to sour my relationship with a potential source, or to cause myself any undue awkwardness, and so I did the only thing I could think to do at that point, which was to grab my jacket from the back of my chair and make straight for the door, head down, heedless of any questioning gazes that may have followed me from the room.
Outside in the otherwise empty foyer, one of the Mormons was sitting alone, bowed in the whitish glow of his laptop screen. I asked him for the WiFi password, and he gave it to me. I opened the Uber app on my phone, and summoned a car to my location, unknown though it was to myself, and gave thanks for the graceful intercession of technology.
Please Solve Death
IN THE DAYS and weeks that followed the Terasem gathering, I thought frequently of Jason Xu’s “protest” at the Google campus. I kept thinking, in particular, of the “GOOGLE, PLEASE SOLVE DEATH” placard. The phrase, for all its absurdity, seemed to enclose within itself the strange cluster of desires and ideologies at the heart of transhumanism, with its faith in the power and benevolence of techno-capitalism.
It was less a protest than a supplication, a prayer. Deliver us from evil. Save us from our bodies, our fallen selves. For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.
The word “solve,” in this context, seemed to me to encapsulate the Silicon Valley ideology whereby all of life could neatly be divided into problems and solutions—solutions that always took the form of some or other application of technology. Whether the problem was having to pick up your own dry cleaning, or negotiate the complexities and uncertainties of sexual relationships, or face the reality that you would one day die, that problem could be hacked. Death, in this view, was no longer a philosophical problem; it was a technical problem. And every technical problem admitted of a technical solution.
I remembered what Ed Boyden had told me in Switzerland: “Our goal is to solve the brain.”
In the foreword to a 2013 book on the science of life extension, Peter Thiel wrote that the key distinction between computer science and biological science, that “computers involve bits and reversible processes” while “biology involves stuff and seemingly irreversible processes,” was on the verge of dissolution; computational power, he argued, would be brought increasingly to bear on the domain of biology, permitting us to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program.” “Unlike the world of stuff,” he wrote, “in the world of bits the arrow of time can be turned backward. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”
Solve the brain. Solve death. Solve being alive.
Among the life extension researchers who had received funding from Thiel was an English biomedical gerontologist named Aubrey de Grey. De Grey was the director of a nonprofit called SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He had attracted considerable notoriety for the claim that he was currently developing treatments which would enable human beings now living to extend their life spans indefinitely. It was his specific contention that aging was a disease, and furthermore a curable one, and that it should be approached as such: that we should be prosecuting a great counteroffensive against our common enemy, mortality itself.
I’d been aware of Aubrey’s work for some years before I met him. He was one of the most prominent figures within the transhumanist movement. Max and Natasha Vita-More had both spoken approvingly of his work, as had Randal Koene; he had been the subject of a handful of books and documentaries, and of a profusion of variously credulous and dismissive newspaper articles. Among the ideas he had popularized (through, among other channels, a widely consumed 2005 TED talk) was something referred to as “longevity escape velocity.” This was the notion that the pace of technological advancement in the area of life extension would eventually increase to the point that, for every year that passes, average human life expectancy increases by more than a year—at which point, the theory goes, we put a comfortable distance between ourselves and our own mortality. Over the past century or so, life expectancy had been increasing at the rate of about two years per decade, but the optimistic expectation within the life extension movement was that we would soon reach a point where the ratio flipped—thereby, as de Grey put it, “effectively eliminating the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year.”
This idea of longevity escape velocity was something like an article of faith among transhumanists and life extension enthusiasts. It was an idea that Max More, for instance, had raised a number of times when I spoke with him—as the source of his hope, for instance, that he would not himself have to rely on the fallback of cryonic suspension to ensure the radical extension of his own life. And it was the central premise, too, of Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman’s 2004 book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which argued that if middle-aged men like i
ts authors could simply live to the age of 120, they would then be in a position to never die at all.
I met Aubrey one August morning at a cavernous bar near Union Square in San Francisco, right across the street from the Hilton where he’d just given a talk at a conference of real estate investors. It was shortly after breakfast, and Aubrey was blowing the froth off what may or may not have been the first pint of the day.
Physically, he was an extraordinary proposition: long and somber as a scarecrow, and exhibiting an immensely unreasonable beard, a Rasputinian profusion of wiry russet that terminated chaotically somewhere around his lower rib cage. This beard, for which he was almost as renowned as for his Promethean claims, exerted an almost literally overpowering influence over my interaction with him, not merely in its rich source of visual distraction, but also in the effect it had on his speech, which emerged as somehow both stentorian and muffled, so that for all the dramatic resonance of his disquisition, I occasionally had to ask him to repeat himself.
For the last few years, Aubrey had been dividing his working life evenly between Cambridge and California. He’d flown in from Heathrow late the previous evening, though he betrayed no obvious signs of jet lag, a condition to which he anyway claimed outright immunity. In the last few years, he had moved most of SENS’s operations to Silicon Valley, where the culture was a great deal more amenable to his vision of indefinite regeneration and youth, the possibility of a final triumph over death.
“I find,” he said, “that there are a higher proportion of people here who are visionaries, who have not lost the ability to aim high.”
He dragged a hand downward through his beard, settling to his task. He spoke in the unmistakable drawl of the English upper class, the congenital weary irony.
Although Thiel was one of SENS’s major sources of philanthropic donation, by far its largest funder these days was Aubrey himself. On the death of his mother in 2011, he had inherited £11 million worth of property in the London borough of Chelsea, most of which he’d avoided paying any tax on by funneling it into SENS, a registered charity.
To Be a Machine Page 19
