May 14, 2024
(The Guardian) – Digital recreations of dead people are on the cusp of reality and urgently need regulation, AI ethicists have argued, warning “deadbots” could cause psychological harm to, and even “haunt”, their creators and users. Such services, which are … Read More
May 8, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where … Read More
April 30, 2024
(Wired) – China’s brain-computer interface technology is catching up to the US. But it envisions a very different use case: cognitive enhancement. At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a “homegrown” brain-computer interface that allowed … Read More
April 29, 2024
(The Guardian) – Founded in 2005 and lauded by Silicon Valley, the Nick Bostrom’s centre for studying existential risk warned about AI but also gave rise to cultish ideas such as effective altruism. Two weeks ago it was quietly announced … Read More
April 26, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks … Read More
April 16, 2024
(The New Yorker) – On a recent afternoon, I chased my three-year-old daughter around the playground for an hour. When we returned home, she spread a jigsaw puzzle out on the floor and looked up expectantly. I liked the idea … Read More
March 4, 2024
(The New Atlantis) – Transhumanism is so over. Wrinkles are so back. Young women’s social media feeds are flooded with plugs for Botox. By our early twenties, modernity is already dangling opportunities in front of us to flee from a … Read More
February 15, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Joaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland school shooting. Now with AI, the 17-year-old’s voice can be heard again. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sat down with Joaquin’s parents to find out how and why they are preserving … Read More
January 26, 2024
(Engadget) – A woman has a text chat with her long-dead lover. A family gets to hear a deceased elder speak again. A mother gets another chance to say goodbye to her child, who died suddenly, via a digital facsimile. … Read More
January 9, 2024
(Nature) – The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality Timothy Recuber NYU Press (2023) Many of us will have turned to the Internet to grieve and remember the dead — by posting messages on … Read More
December 21, 2023
(Bloomberg) – About a million tourists descend upon Roatán each year. The island, just off the coast of Honduras, boasts a large barrier reef ideal for scuba diving and snorkeling, and it has the beaches, jungles and slow pace of … Read More
December 19, 2023
(Bloomberg) – Retro Biosciences, a startup with $180 million from Sam Altman, has a simple and audacious goal: Add 10 good years to your life. And until now, we haven’t had a glimpse of its best ideas. (Read More)
December 12, 2023
(New York Times) – Some people are turning to A.I. technology as a way to commune with the dead, but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it … Read More
November 21, 2023
(Vox) – While mimicking conversational style is just one of the many uses of the popular generative chatbot ChatGPT, there’s a niche yet growing slate of platforms that use deep learning and large language models to re-create the essence of … Read More
November 10, 2023
Bioethics (vol. 37, no. 8, 2023) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Relational Approaches in Bioethics: A Guide to their Differences” by Mercer Gary “The Delivery of Health Services as Resistance” by Ryan Essex “A World of Difference: … Read More
November 6, 2023
(Gizmodo) – Fantasies of immortality and extended life preservation are likely as old as humanity itself, but new advances in robotics and advanced artificial intelligence models are inching those transhumanist tales closer to reality at a rapid pace. AI researchers … Read More
September 27, 2023
(Vox) – The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age. Participants compete not on physical abilities but on … Read More
September 25, 2023
(Axios) – A slew of podcasters are building massive followings and businesses online by exploring the human curiosity about living longer. Why it matters: Enthusiasm for the topic has grown in recent months as streamers and celebrities elevate the field, … Read More
September 22, 2023
(TIME) – Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called … Read More
September 13, 2023
(Slate) – On the 21st anniversary of her death, I used the “Aged” filter on a handful of photos of my mother to see what she would have looked like if she’d had the chance to grow old. It was frighteningly … Read More
September 8, 2023
(Vox) – The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists … Read More
August 21, 2023
(Wired) – Given enough data, one can feel like it’s possible to keep dead loved ones alive. With ChatGPT and other powerful large language models, it is feasible to create a more convincing chatbot of a dead person. But doing … Read More
August 9, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – Real-estate investors Ari and Kellie Rastegar are devotees of biohacking, a wellness lifestyle aimed at optimizing physical and mental performance. He takes 150 custom vitamins and supplements per day; she takes 23. They eat a diet … Read More
July 18, 2023
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics (vol. 44, no. 3, 2023) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Implicit Understandings and Trust in the Doctor-Patient Relationship: A Philosophy of Language Analysis of pre-Operative Evaluations” by Monica Consolandi “Phenomenology’s Place in the … Read More
June 13, 2023
(New York Times) – A.I. is Silicon Valley’s ultimate new product rollout: transcendence on demand. But there’s a dark twist. It’s as if tech companies introduced self-driving cars with the caveat that they could blow up before you got to … Read More
