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
June 1, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro has provided a temporary home for people who plan to set up a new jurisdiction to encourage biohacking and fast-track drugs that slow or reverse aging.
February 2, 2023
Christian Bioethics (vol. 28, no. 3, 2022) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “‘Perfect in Humanity’: The Analogy of Perfection in the Person of Christ” by Anthony D Baker “Techne and Teleios: A Christian Perspective on the Incarnation … Read More
July 29, 2022
(Big Think) – Transhumanism is an intellectual and technological paradigm that seeks to leverage this progress to further enhance the human condition. It cultivates a belief wherein by freeing the human body and mind of their biological limitations, humanity will … Read More
July 28, 2022
(The New Yorker) – In October, 2019, Peter Scott-Morgan (1958-2022) announced that he had evolved from Peter 1.0 to Peter 2.0. What that meant in practical terms was that, at that point, he had made enough modifications to his body … Read More
June 3, 2022
(Undark) – At first glance, one might assume that Peter Ward’s “The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever” is yet another book promising secrets to regain youth, restore health, and outlive those who lack the knowledge or willpower … Read More
May 23, 2022
Bioethics (vol. 36, no. 4, 2022) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “One Health Ethics” by Benjamin Capps “Is Enhancement inherently Ableist?” by Lysette Chaproniere “Two Internal Critiques for Theists who Oppose Moral Enhancement on a Process Virtue … Read More