Please see below selected recent immortality-related change.
See also:
- What's New? - Immortality
- What's Changing? - Ageing
- What's Changing? - Death
- What's Changing? - Religion
- What's New? - Transhumanism
November 2023
- Most ideas of an afterlife are fairly explicit about how we have to die, sometimes in the proper way. However, immortality is sometimes a separate concept, suggesting an unending existence. Not all versions of the afterlife imply eternity. For instance, in Buddhism, achieving enlightenment can end the cycle of reincarnation, suggesting that souls don’t remain immortal forever. So, does this mean souls were never truly immortal to begin with?
- Canadian researchers doubled the lifespan of mice using antibodies that boosts the immune system. The team at Brock University said these antibodies encourage the clearing out of damaged proteins that accumulate over time, and that they could form the basis of an effective anti-ageing treatment for humans.
December 2022
September 2022
- The CIA invested in Colossal Biosciences, a DNA startup that wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
April 2022
- In The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, author Peter Ward explored the science, origins, and goals of the "immortalist" community. Silicon Valley infused massive capital into anti-ageing research since the year 2000, but despite bold claims from immortalists, they've yet to produce concrete evidence that humanity can someday engineer death into becoming optional.
November 2021
- New Statesman noted that while the quest for eternal youth may not be new, it is now bankrolled by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the world. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Oracle’s Larry Ellison are among the many billionaires investing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a Google subsidiary focused on combating ageing. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is in the game: he was reported to have invested an undisclosed sum in Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s Altos Labs. Overall, it is estimated that the industry will be worth $610bn by 2025.
September 2021
- Jeff Bezos partnered with billionaire investor Yuri Milner on a startup that wants to solve ageing and death. Bezos invested in Altos Labs, a biotech company founded by Milner that intended to pursue research in the biological reprogramming of living cells. New World Same Humans pointed to other high-profile projects aimed at human immortality, including Alphabet’s Calico Labs, and the Sens Research Foundation, founded by British scientist Aubrey de Grey. Proponents say there has been progress, but a breakthrough moment so far remains elusive. However, according to people familiar with the plans. Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalise entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.
July 2021
- New World, Same Humans noted that Michael Laakasuo, an adjunct professor of cognitive science at the University of Helsinki, surveyed 1,007 people on their attitude towards mind uploading: the idea that an individual consciousness can be uploaded to a computer, allowing the bearer of that consciousness to live forever in digital form. Laakasuo found that those who approved of the idea were more likely to demonstrate psychological traits associated with the manipulation of others. The transhumanist dream of tech-fuelled immortality, added Laakasuo ‘could potentially redefine what it means to be human’, so we need more research on what motivates that dream and the ethical implications of a cloud full of minds.
June 2021
- Futurist and Google's Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil claimed humans could achieve life everlasting as early as 2029.
May 2021
- AI will afford creators a kind of endless, ghostly afterlife. Artists, writers, and actors will spend a lifetime training an AI via their work. After their death, that AI will be able to emulate their style, and generate new works, indefinitely, claimed New World, Same Humans.
February 2021
- New World, Same Humans reported on the following developments:
- South Korean broadcaster SBS, which used an AI system called Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) to recreate voice of the legendary folk singer Kim Kwang-seok. SVS was was exposed to 20 of Kim’s songs; a further 700 folk songs were used to train the AI to emulate his style. The results were unveiled on the SBS music reality show Competition of the Century: AI vs Human. Fans liked it: CNN reported superfan Kim Jou-yeon’s reaction: ‘The recovered voice sounds…as if Kim recorded it alive.’
- The rise of virtual humans is colliding with an eternal human obsession: our quest for immortality. Via recorded sound and vision we’re already accustomed to the reanimation of people who’ve died. But now it’s clear that AI will extend that, so that cultural figures can live a kind of extended, ghostly afterlife. Living cultural figures will see AI incarnations as a way to scale themselves; spiritual guru Deepak Chopra launched his in 2020. Microsoft is meanwhile developing chatbot tech intended to digitally reincarnate ordinary people.
- A Los Angeles startup called YOV (You, Only Virtual) claims to have built the first app that allows users to continue talking to loved ones who have died. The idea is that you loop friends and loved ones into the app while they’re still alive. YOV’s proprietary technology will analyse your message threads and other data, and then create convincing AI versions of your friends and relatives when they’re gone
September 2020
- Could a TED talk be used to digitally reanimate people 100 years from now, asked Future Today Institute? Researchers at Facebook used this corpus of TED talks to train a generative AI that now replicates the voices of Jane Goodall, Bill Gates and many others
February 2020
- A viral two-minute video showed a mother interacting with her young daughter inside virtual reality. They are being reunited after a long time apart. The mother sobs and reaches out to her child. They sing a birthday song, and eat seaweed soup. We see the woman’s husband and three other children looking on via a monitor in another room. The mother in the video is Jang Ji-sung, from South Korea. Jang’s daughter, Nayeon, died three years ago from a rare blood disease. The Nayeon that appears to Jang is a virtual entity, created by the producers of a documentary called I Met You. Those producers used a child actor and motion capture to reproduce the movements of a seven-year-old girl, and then superimposed a representation of Nayeon’s face on to that digital mannequin. They synthesised a digital version of Nayeon’s voice. The result inside the VR environment is an apparently living, breathing, talking child. One can see the full clip here
December 2019
- Tech gurus drew headlines in 2019 for trying to “hack” their way into living longer, with one man reportedly going so far as to inject stem cells into every joint in his body. Such biohacking is expanding beyond Silicon Valley techies to become a more global, commercialised trend.
May 2019
- According to science, we couldn't live forever because the reasons we die include both natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics. We die, one predominant view goes, so that our progeny may live - because there are limited resources.The whole universe runs down too, so, ultimately, even if you could lengthen your lifespan indefinitely, the universe itself will eventually die in a heat death.
March 2019
- Quartz analysed how the present-day pursuit of physical immortality - or, at the very least, a substantially extended lifespan - is a booming business. The big tech companies have ageing research ventures; tech titans invest in startups focused on longevity; and one entrepreneur has even publicly declared his goal of living to 180.
- From gene therapy and fad-diets to cryonic frozen corpses, many still hope to find a way to live forever, claimed iai. Some scientists are starting to think death might be reversible, but might life's transience give it meaning, or does our fear of death prevent us from living fully? Could we enhance experience by embracing its end, or could science one day remove death's shadow?
October 2018
- 47% of American respondents to a survey by YouGov said they believe in ghosts. Indeed, around 15% of them reckon that they have seen one. People who left school aged 18 or younger and those who identify as either Middle Eastern, Native American or mixed race have a far higher propensity to believe in ghosts. Most striking is the large gender gap. Some 53% of women believe in ghosts compared with 40% of men.
- Further reading:
September 2018
- In his essay The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality (1973), the English moral philosopher Bernard Williams suggested that living forever would be awful, akin to being trapped in a never-ending cocktail party. This was, for Aeon, because after a certain amount of living, human life would become unspeakably boring. We need new experiences in order to have reasons to keep on going. But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating.
- Aeon adds that the moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. Everything that we value – and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life – must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings.
- A leading futurist argued that humans will effectively become "immortal" around 2045.
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