Justifications for aging and death helped people cope, but now make it harder to see how AI could make aging a solvable problem, says immunologist Derya Unutmaz
Justifications for aging and death helped people cope, but now make it harder to see how AI could make aging a solvable problem, says immunologist Derya Unutmaz
On October 25, immunologist Derya Unutmaz published a long post on X about the origins of beliefs that aging brings wisdom and death has meaning.
In his post, Unutmaz writes that once humans became aware of their mortality, they needed a way to cope with that knowledge: constantly contemplating inevitable death could make life almost unbearable. Over thousands of years, people developed philosophical, psychological, religious, and social explanations to justify aging and death: “We learned to see beauty in transience, wisdom in aging, and even meaning in dying.” These beliefs helped people endure what they could not change.
Unutmaz asks what will happen when the inevitable becomes avoidable. His answer is that AI and the coming superintelligence revolution will radically change our ability to understand and engineer biology, potentially making aging a solvable engineering problem for the first time. Reversing aging, eliminating age-related diseases, and potentially extending healthy life indefinitely are, he says, moving from science fiction to serious scientific goals. He attributes passionate defenses of aging and death as virtues to the same coping mechanism, rooted in biology and reinforced by centuries of culture:
“But the coping mechanism that once helped us accept reality can become a powerful obstacle to recognizing that reality itself is changing.”
Unutmaz is increasingly uninterested in arguing with people who romanticize aging and death, although he acknowledges that everyone is entitled to find meaning in mortality. He continues to discuss longevity escape velocity, the point at which advances in medicine and rejuvenation could add to a person's remaining healthy lifespan faster than time reduces it. He believes that AI, soon followed by superintelligence, will accelerate progress far beyond the expectations of conventional biomedicine. He wants to persuade as many people as possible to stay healthy, curious, and optimistic so that they can live to reach that point.
The post includes a clip of actress Cameron Diaz saying: “There is no such thing as anti-aging. We are all aging, period… Aging is a privilege: not everyone gets to grow old.” On October 24, aging researcher David Sinclair quoted the same clip, applying the argument to cancer: “Getting cancer is a privilege. Not everyone gets to have cancer.”
Long before Unutmaz's post, anthropologist Ernest Becker described human civilization as an elaborate defense mechanism against the knowledge of mortality in The Denial of Death (1973). In “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” (2005), philosopher Nick Bostrom portrayed aging as a dragon fed ten thousand people every evening: spiritual leaders promise life after death, speakers insist that being eaten is part of being human, and most people try not to think about it. People have grown so accustomed to the dragon that many no longer see it as an evil; Bostrom argues that the same has happened with aging.
In the moral of the fable, Bostrom writes that while aging could neither be prevented nor slowed, stories about accepting old age with dignity served a purpose. Now, stories that encourage passive acceptance of death are “fatal barriers to urgently needed action.” He attributes this change to research that could yield ways to slow aging in the foreseeable future, while Unutmaz attributes it to AI.
Back in February, gerontologist João Pedro de Magalhães described the claim that “death gives life meaning” as a way of coping with the inevitable that has been mistaken for a moral truth.