Bryan Johnson Proposes Making the Preservation of Intelligent Life a Goal for AI; Ross Douthat Asks How Longer Lives Would Change Power, Risk, and Personal Control

Bryan Johnson Proposes Making the Preservation of Intelligent Life a Goal for AI; Ross Douthat Asks How Longer Lives Would Change Power, Risk, and Personal Control

On August 13, in an edited transcript of the final episode of “Interesting Times”, host Ross Douthat discusses the Don’t Die movement with entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Johnson connects his personal Blueprint program to a future system of “autonomous health,” in which algorithms would use data from the body to determine what a person should do. He proposes that humans and AI work to preserve intelligent life.

Blueprint is Johnson’s personal program for measuring his body and selecting interventions. It combines his genome, his proteome, which is the complete set of proteins in his body, data from wearable devices, and other measurements. AI searches these data for patterns that would be difficult to identify through manual analysis. Johnson currently buys his own food and follows most of the prescribed steps himself, while his bed only adjusts its temperature automatically as he sleeps. The path to autonomous health began with a specific error: 232 sauna sessions failed to bring Johnson’s body to the selected temperature.

Johnson uses “autonomous health” to describe a future version of this practice. In his account, algorithms would determine the appropriate action directly from data about the body, reducing the need for a person to manage the regimen each day. The personal experiment would thus become a system designed to convert measurements into health decisions.

In a thought experiment set in 2500, Johnson imagines the XXI century as the period when humans created AI that surpassed human intelligence and stopped treating death as inevitable. He states the program as follows:

“Don’t die yourself, don’t kill one another, don’t kill the Earth, and align AI with Don’t Die.”

Douthat asks how additional time would affect power, wealth, and inheritance, whether people would be more willing to make way for the next generation, and what could still persuade them to risk their lives. One question captures this disagreement:

“What are you willing to die for, Bryan?”

Johnson replies that the inevitability of death has taught people to describe it as a virtue. He imagines a future system to which a person transfers control over the body: “And at that point, you let go of control. You give it away.”