The Immortalists
Also by Aleks k rotoski
Untangling the Web
The Immortalists
The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life
Aleks k rotoski
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To the Grim Reaper: congratulations on your retirement.
Introduction
Driving into St Augustine, a coastal town in north- eastern Florida, I’m bombarded by signs pointing me to the Fountain of Youth. Like the millions of visitors over the last century that have made a pilgrimage to this place, the oldest attraction in the longest continuously inhabited European- established settlement in what is now the United States (eclipsing in popularity the historic city centre, the Bluebird of Happiness statue and the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche by several hundred visitors per day), I’m here because of the slimmest chance that I might regain a little bit of vim and vigour in my ageing body. I’ve hit the fifty-year mark and though I’ve never believed it would happen to me after a lifetime of athletics and moderately clean living, my eyes appear to be going, and all the sports injuries I’ve played through or endured are reminding me they’re there. I’m a psychologist with decades of scientific training behind me, and so I’d like to think that I’d rely on empirical evidence if I chose to treat my ‘age’ in any way, but today I’ve convinced myself it’s worth the mosquito bites and the humidity and $22.95 for an adult entry ticket and the tiniest plastic cup of water: I’m going to get a taste of eternal life.
The story goes that one day in 1901, Dr Luella Day McConnell rode into St Augustine wrapped in ermine with a diamond in her tooth and bought up a nice piece of land using the money she’d made prospecting for gold in the Yukon Territory in Canada. She was already notorious; rumour had it that she’d
abandoned two husbands and her medical practice in Chicago, that the British government had tried to assassinate her, and that she’d made a dramatic return from the dead. The locals dubbed her Diamond Lil.
Lil’s new property had two things going for it: ruins of a couple hundred years of Spanish settlements and 3,500 years of Native American history, and a small spring.1 She fixated on the spring, which she fiercely marketed as the spot where the conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed in 1513 (it wasn’t) while in search of the fountain of youth (he wasn’t). For a good twenty years, she spread remarkable stories about the spring water, until her untimely death in 1927 – at the wheel of a car when it met with the bottom of a ditch – which is still rumoured by some to have been a murder. After she died, the property and its popular attraction was sold to Walter B. Fraser for $100,000 – that’s almost $2 million in today’s money – who maintained it as an attraction to educate the public about Ponce de León, 2 and to exploit the spring for its life-giving properties.
Full disclosure: not one person who has visited Lil’s spot has (so far) lived beyond the longest-recorded human lifespan (122 years and 164 days), and the vast majority have in fact since died – due to circumstances, of course, entirely unrelated to the fountain. And I know this uncompromisingly expensive thimbleful of Department of Health-inspected water won’t do anything about my creaking back, but my ceremonial sip is part of an immortality ritual that stretches back to the beginning of time, and which has kept even the most rational people in history captivated. The possibility of keeping death at bay and staving off the ravages of age makes us feel good. It gives us the illusion that we have control over nature. People throughout history have chased the dream: popes, emperors, kings, and everyday folks too. And it has a new set of explorers in
the twenty- first century: technologists who struck it rich in the Silicon Valley gold mines and who believe that they, with their unique skills and the technology at their disposal, can keep death away.
I have been a technology reporter for twenty-five years, chronicling the rise of the web from its early days through booms and busts. I fell into early Bulletin Board Systems (BBS s) when there was no World Wide Web, and got sucked into the internet’s Usenet forums around the time the very first spam message was sent out. My closest friends were the people who created the first BBC webpages, and hosted the first open Wi-Fi hotspots, and designed the Wi-Fi symbol. I was one of the first thousand people to use both Twitter and Instagram. But I wasn’t a maker; I was documenting the breaking news from this other, virtual world. Later, after my curiosity in the subject became more consuming, I studied it for my MS c and my PhD, and for fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. I have continued to report on it, investigating the at-times dangerous ways the online world outpaces the old system. And now I also have the honour of provoking the next crop of designers to think about the holistic human using their machines, in my lectures at NYU ’s ITP MA , the information technology programme in the Tisch School of the Arts.
Over the years, I have become impervious to the hype coming out of Silicon Valley. Instead I use my academic chops to track the cultures that built the digital world, and the people who have gathered there. I have railed, frustrated, against developers who are often entitled, overzealous, and quick to reduce
the complexities of human psychology into the simplistic solutions that work – for a while – until the shortcomings of their disruptive innovations inevitably collide with society at large.
I love technology and I love technologists, but my job has been to call them out on their impossible promises and to show them how their extraordinary inventions don’t just help us, but also – because of how they’re designed – can harm us too. For the last quarter century, I’ve written, broadcast and reported for the Guardian, BBC TV and BBC radio – for the award-winning Digital Human series and, since 2024, The Artificial Human – and many other outlets. I’ve written books about how the internet doesn’t really change who we are as people, just how we do what we do. My motivation has never been to ban technology outright, but to educate users to recognise that we can refuse what tech wants us to do, and we should criticise it like we would other forms of media, or public policy.
Very often, I am asked by concerned friends, family and even strangers whether it’s possible to stop being ‘corrupted’ by tech, or ‘addicted’ to it. So many people feel overwhelmed by what seems like an onslaught of change perpetuated by the technology industry – so many disruptions, all the time. And now, on the cusp of the AI age, once again we are told everything is going to change.
The developers, the funders, the Silicon Valley machine are preaching a total upheaval of humanity. They say that their tools must be prioritised above all. And because they feel they’ve already disrupted everything else, now they believe they have the power to disrupt death.
In these pages, you won’t hear about the supplements I take or the health routines I follow. This is not a lifestyle guide. What you will discover is cults, blind faith, and the pursuit of absolute power. You’ll hear about remarkable treatments that mostly
don’t work, some that we don’t know why they do, and some where the jury’s still out. You’ll get to peek into the motivations of the immortalists who are restructuring our world towards their vision of utopia: what they believe, why they believe it, and where this rubs up dangerously against ethics and decency. And at the end of it, you get to make your own judgement call about whether you think their version of tomorrow is the one you want. If so, enjoy the ride. If not, this book will give you what you need to know to fight back.
In Part 1, we’ll investigate how the lifeblood of Silicon Valley – data – is turning our bodies into machines. We’ll see how this has been translated into lifestyle hacks and medical innovations, and how this has extended our healthy lives, but how it’s also caused us to lose touch with ourselves.
In Part 2, we are introduced to the true believers: the investors, the scientists and the fanatics who believe that we truly are on the cusp of the next evolutionary step in humanity’s journey, and that they are the pioneers, or the lab rats, who will break through biological limits in order to prove that it’s possible to have a radically extended life. We also meet the entrepreneurs who are exploiting this passion, and discover the structures that are in place to keep all of us safe.
In Part 3, we’ll find out how a technological mindset takes this further, into futuristic scenarios in which immortal life means outrunning time, uploading our brains to computers, and living forever in computer server farms on Jupiter. We’ll meet the billionaires taking steps to make these wild ideas a reality, and the scientists they are investing in.
In Part 4, we take a breath, and ask what all this extra life might mean for how we live it. The future, as science-fiction author William Gibson wrote, is not evenly distributed, so who benefits from these extraordinary technologies, who’s left
The Immor T al I s T s behind, and – most importantly – who decides who gets to live forever?
In Part 5, we answer that question. We look at the context of the political landscape of 2025, as Silicon Valley gains unprecedented access to the highest positions of power in the western world, and restructures regulatory systems from within, so its vision of the future can come to pass. We also follow the grassroots immortality movements created by those who don’t have the ears of the powerful, but believe in the sermons of the tech billionaires, and are building a long-lived tomorrow, today.
This book began in a different form, as a chart-topping radio and podcast investigation called Intrigue: The Immortals for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in 2023. For that series, I travelled around the world to speak with leaders in ageing science, biotechnology and Silicon Valley investment. I heard stories from people who believed in immortality, and people who said they didn’t (but really wanted to). I built the foundations of the ideas you will read in this book for that project.
But over the last few years, I’ve dug into the history books, the policy papers and the academic journals, and I’ve attended lectures, visited archives, and spoken with many more people than appeared in the series. I have expanded on the themes and the stories, going much deeper into the motivations, ethical conundrums and doctrines that drive the belief that right now is the moment when we are on the cusp of immortality, and that these immortalists are the people who will give it to us.
What do I mean when I talk about ‘immortalists’? Well, there are several different kinds of immortality in this book. There’s
the literal live-forever kind, which is dominated by the people I have described as techno-fundamentalists since I first started talking about this group of tech believers in 2012: highly intelligent, mathematically minded computer scientists, philosophers and hopefuls who have such unwavering faith in technology they believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be the chalice of everlasting life. This is where traditional religion finds its way into the story – people in this community believe in a higher power: technology, and its archangel rationality. They imagine that, by the grace of technological progress, they will merge with artificial intelligence and become post-human, and will live forever in a state of surpassing bliss and delight. This dogma is inspiring what some of the people I have spoken with for this investigation describe as ‘moral catastrophe’.
Another version of immortality also comes out of the technofundamentalism camp, but is less apocalyptic. They also believe in living forever, but that there won’t be a big bang. Instead, we will experience an ever- evolving partnership between humans and technology, through which our moral failings will be solved, piecemeal, one tech innovation at a time. Life will continue not by merging with tech, but by using it to slow down the onslaught of time, thereby allowing medical science to develop treatments that will heal us. Medical science is trying to keep up with them, but it’s mostly outpaced by the greed that the open market is generating, which is causing a lot of friction. These immortalists believe they are living proof of age reversal, physical rejuvenation, and stopping time. They are the researchers at the fringes of ‘acceptable’ science, and the biohackers who are using their findings to optimise themselves with data. But, as I will argue, lifestyle disciples have lost touch with what it means to feel ‘well’ – and this is what’s driven the marketplace for supplements and unproven treatments.
And then there’s the kind of immortalists who I believe are the most dangerous of all. These are the people who are hungry for the same status that Diamond Lil achieved, by living forever through their legacies. They seek to reconstruct the infrastructure of the world we live in so that they can live forever. Already, and in plain sight, they are restructuring sovereign nation states, pushing forward an agenda of technological acceleration at any cost, and making deals with people in the highest political offices. Along with their nation-state-building activities, they are also pouring money into schemes that give them first dibs at unimaginably long lives. These powerful people aren’t searching for the fountain of youth; they’re building it, and their first attempts are revealing: their solutions are ableist, classist and racist. Some have even described them as eugenicist.
Philosopher Stephen Cave, director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, wrote in his 2012 book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization that our ‘will to immortality’ has created the engine of innovation, in part because we have a determination to survive and extend into the future (which Cave argues is something we share with all life forms), but also because we know we are ‘cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must’.3 In the past, we’ve seen it in religious movements, millennia of philosophy, the rise of cities, the evolution of science and technology, and the creative output of the arts. This book is about tomorrow’s civilisation, brought about by the solutions to the human condition that technologists are creating today.
Absolutely central to this is how the computer scientists and mathematicians in Silicon Valley define ‘human’, which is why the first chapter breaks this down in detail. What do they
imagine are the building blocks of humanity? I urge you to compare how this fits into your idea of what makes us ‘human’. For many experts – from biologists to psychologists to religious scholars to philosophers – the way technology is trying to reconstruct our complexity in 1s and 0s is woefully incomplete. Take an example of this in practice: in early 2025, in an attempt to make it more efficient, Elon Musk – technologist, investor, techno- optimist, and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) – eviscerated the internal workings of the US federal government by disaggregating the different agencies and branches and viewing them as isolated entities, simplifying the complexity of their national and international activities, and synthesising a solution by directing the remaining employees to use AI . This is the same mindset that is trying to hack ageing.
At the heart of this book is the question about why we avoid death at all. There are people who struggle with thanatophobia, the intense fear of death. Is this that? Or is it actually a generalised fear of an absence of one’s own being? Is it, to use today’s language, an existential threat? In his 1927 work Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger described death as an existential phenomenon, explaining that, as humans, it is impossible to imagine what’s through the veil. What we like about living is what we do when we are alive. Becoming dead, he posited, means losing something (life). As American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, ‘If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.’4 Is it possible to eradicate it entirely so we don’t have to consider the nature of our being? Or is it too much to deal with so we don’t, just as we don’t with other
The
concepts classified as ‘existential’: climate change, nuclear war, and artificial superintelligence? ∞
But before we begin, let’s consider a parable.
‘Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon,’ wrote philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2005 essay ‘The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant’.5 In this story, a village is terrorised by a terrible monster that lives atop a nearby mountain.
It demanded from humankind a blood- curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.
The story of this dragon, the devastation it created and the ultimate triumph of technology has become the immortalists’ dominant cultural narrative.
Decades before he imagined the mountain and the dragon, Bostrom had been a solitary and bookish child. ‘In Sweden, where I grew up, I knew nobody who was interested in how future technologies might radically change the human condition,’ he told me in 2023. It wasn’t until after he moved to London in 1996 that he discovered the internet, and it was there, online, that he was finally able to talk freely and at length about his intuition that technology could make us immortal. This seemed ‘much more profound than exactly where the border is between two countries,
or what the tax rate is’, he explained. The people he found online didn’t sneer or run away; in fact, they were a like-minded community who encouraged him to imagine how technology could – and should – be used to enhance human capabilities. This group, captivated by the opposite of entropy, which is the process of a system’s gradual decline into disorder, called themselves Extropians and became a formative collective of philosophers, academics, technologists and science-fiction authors whose ideas about life infected an entire generation of out-there thinkers.
On their online ‘listserv’ mailing list, Bostrom and tech celebrities such as Ray Kurzweil, inventor and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, grappled with how technology could extend human life ad infinitum. This was more than just an intellectual enterprise: technology was their magic wand, and since the 2000s the Extropians have truly believed that we are in a transitory phase towards a greater intelligence, always driven by the idea of perpetual progress towards wisdom, an indefinite lifespan, and selfactualisation, by removing political, biological and cultural limits. Philosophies splintered from it – such as a modern version of a 1950s thought experiment called transhumanism, the belief shared by billionaires such as Musk, Peter Thiel, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI ’s Sam Altman that it is a moral imperative to use technology to enhance the body and mind towards immortality.6
This is not a community based on vibes – or so they say. Behind this movement there continues to be a doctrine of rational thinking and reasoned evidence; flights of fancy are only acceptable if they can be proven to be probable. But this movement is also based on the faith that we can be immortal and, most importantly, on the faith in technology to get us there. This community believes that right now we are on the cusp of the most revolutionary moment in human history: the death of death.
Back to ‘The Fable’. Over time, the dragon sacrifices became
so commonplace that society bent to its will. The king built more railway tracks to the base of the mountain to make the delivery of mortal souls more efficient. Religious groups emerged to explain what lay on the other side. Scientists developed ways to make the inevitability easier. In short, Bostrom argued, the villagers – we – were being indoctrinated into a ‘deathist’ culture that counselled ‘passive acceptance’. ‘When I was writing this, there was in academic bioethics a weird neglect of the, as it were, pro side for regarding ageing as a problem to be addressed,’ he told me. ‘At that time, there were a whole bunch of different people who had been arguing that actually ageing and death are good. Like it’s somehow part of the natural order. And there were all these attempts to find some clever justification for why, even though it seems like a horrible thing, nevertheless we should welcome it or embrace it or accept it.’ The Extropians do not.
In his story, the voice of Extropianism is a clever sage known for his radical ideas, who says it should be possible to break out of the cult of mortality, if only there was money to invent the technology to do it. He and the others who agree are laughed out of town. Society says death is the accepted endpoint, and there is no way around it. Except, Bostrom told me, ‘ I think, with our advancing technical capabilities, it is going to cease to become an inevitability and something that we can prevent if we choose to do so.
‘It seems kind of sad that just as we are, you know, developing some maturity, and experience of life, it all starts to get taken away,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve learned enough to know how to live, then that’s about when life comes to an end and you don’t really have a chance to use all of that.’
The solution is always more investment, more development, more technology. In the parable, there’s a groundswell of public demand for the king to stop everything and pour money into
this dragon problem. This is exactly what many immortalists are trying to generate today. They expect that eventually, after generations of social and philosophical debates about the morality of dying and the purpose of life, today’s scientists, like the scientists in the fable, will develop a material that penetrates the dragon’s scales, and the kingdom will be saved. Technology and the people behind it are the heroes of Bostrom’s work: ‘The great wheel of invention’ will always continue to accelerate – as it does in ‘Dragon-Tyrant’.
Technology really is accelerating scientific discoveries – extraordinary findings that are ushering in a new way of thinking about and treating the underlying biological mechanisms of ageing. Generative AI really is solving decades- old fundamental biochemical problems, and winning technologists Nobel Prizes in Chemistry – science they are not trained in. But the tools they’ve invented are cracking biochemical codes: what else can they achieve? Can they really unravel mortal mysteries in our lifetimes? Do we have to die?
We are on the edge of an artificially intelligent future. It’s AI that immortalists believe is going to give us everlasting life. AI , says Bostrom, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman and other powerful venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen and Thiel, is what will help us pierce the dragon’s scales. Our belief that AI can solve everything is overshadowing the issues we collectively face: overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, inequality, marginalisation, ageism. While their technologies could be directed towards addressing these challenges, the immortalists seem uninterested in doing so – because AI will solve these things too. The Valley was founded on the principles of innovation, experimentation and learning. For more than seventy-five years, it has moved markets, transformed the workplace, and created prophets. It was born in the halls of academia and industry,
from the pocketbooks of government. And thanks to a confluence of smarts, cash, a permissive regulation system and a rebellious counter- culture, it’s become the number- one place in the western world to take risks, iterate quickly, and bounce back from failure.
This has empowered technologists to be the modern- day alchemists, thinking they can promise to bring us everlasting life. They have consolidated power in the centres of finance, politics and science. They have become the strategic minds that dictate the direction of travel. And their pursuit of eternal life is driven in large part by their unwavering faith that technology is the thing that will save us.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe they will crack the code of life. But here’s an alternative ending: maybe it will be humanity that saves the day. I invite you to raise a glass of water to Diamond Lil and start by asking, what are humans anyway?
P A rt i Bug Fix
cHAP ter 1
Engineer’s Syndrome
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge.
Tom Waits1
In January 1996, there were 100,000 websites on the World Wide Web. Much like human DNA , this new ‘information superhighway’ seemed to be a wild cacophony of disconnected material, with no real way to navigate it. There were search engines, but none were particularly good at delivering what seemed to be the right answer – until two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with their solution. They created a system that ordered the value of online information using an algorithm they called PageRank, cheekily named after Larry. More quickly and effectively than any other technology out there, PageRank indexed and sorted every destination on the rapidly expanding web, and used the results to determine the quality of a site. Google quickly became the search leader, and in thirty short years the company has revolutionised how we look for information, how we measure success, how we advertise, and how we learn. But its true worth is much more than that: Google’s value is that we use it to find something we want, whether that’s your pharmacy’s opening hours, or what to do on your dream
holiday. Unexpectedly, Page and Brin had invented something that psychologists like myself have been trying to access for almost a century: a window into our desires.
For years, people have been using Google as a kind of subconscious oracle, directly asking it some pretty delicate (or indelicate) questions, or a bunch of questions that add up to a delicate (or indelicate) insight. That we feel comfortable ‘confessing’ to the internet is similar to how some people might divulge secrets to a priest behind the screen; it feels less consequential than speaking face to face, like our words disappear the moment they are sent into the digital ether. But behind the scenes, tech companies hold on to your internet whims, and use them to make assumptions about you and the world at their discretion.*
By 2008, Google was the biggest compiler of data in the world, reliant on technology being able to process an everincreasing corpus, in order to index 172 million websites – up 50 million from the year before.2 What an opportunity, thought Larry Brilliant, who had been the executive director of Google’s charitable arm since 2005. Brilliant had announced his greatest wish to an audience at TED in 2006: ‘to help build a global system – an early-warning system – to protect us against humanity’s worst nightmares’.3 He and several engineers decided to experiment with the search engine’s powerful predictive tool to look for ebbs and flows in the world of public health.
They imagined that if they monitored certain search keywords related to health in real time across Google’s enormous database, they might be able to reveal where people are about to catch the flu. They started their experiment in the US . Except for paediatric cases, the flu isn’t a required reportable illness in
* Of course, what they can actually do is dictated by regulations in each jurisdiction, but most legal frameworks still have yet to catch up with what’s actually possible and so are more reactive than proactive in their data privacy statutes.
all US states; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC ) doesn’t have a complete dataset and therefore may not know where to target treatments or interventions.4 Just under half of all US internet users in 2008 used a search engine;5 69.5 per cent of them used Google.6 So Brilliant and his team wondered if there was a way to close this gap and help save some of the thousands of lives lost every year to influenza by addressing the spread early.
That year, the company released Google Flu Trends (GFT ).
GFT started out by tracking a list of automatically selected keywords – from ‘flu symptoms’ to ‘cold/flu remedy’ – across the 50 million most-common search queries the site received each week. It cross- referenced those against data reported by the healthcare providers about how many people were going to see their doctor with flu-like symptoms, and found a relationship between the two. The team then looked to see whether the search behaviour might predict a flu outbreak faster than the CDC . Their data suggested they could, up to ten days faster, according to a paper they published in Nature in 2009.7 It seemed that Google technology could turn individual searches into an epidemic alarm bell. Governments were intrigued, and quickly GFT moved beyond the US and spread to more than twenty-five countries.
But soon the shortfalls of Big Data started to appear. After a few years, GFT was predicting twice as many flu- like visits to doctors as the CDC was – which relied on reports from lab testing for the flu. The Google data was massively over-predicting.
As researchers dug into this, they found that the algorithms and machine learning that made the tech project work were at fault, as they assumed people would use certain search terms together when they felt poorly. As one commentator put it, ‘the initial version of GFT was part flu detector, part winter detector’.8 Even after the engineers found the problem, the updated system
consistently over-reported, and the predictions were never more accurate than those of the CDC .
This didn’t mean that the technology had failed, or that Google should throw the whole thing out. In fact, GFT combined with the CDC ’s data predicted outbreaks of flu better than either system on its own. This proved to the company, and to the world, that the search giant not only had a dataset of enormous social and public benefit, but that they also had the talent inside to explain and predict. The issue was that they had put too much of their faith in data alone. People, they discovered, are more complicated than computers.
This is a problem the immortalists intend to fix.
The best description I’ve read about the history of Silicon Valley is that it is a series of audacious claims that have been successfully achieved. Again and again, geeks have shocked us out of our bubbles, pushing us against our boundaries, and forcing us to rethink what we know about what it means to be human. They’ve done this with how we communicate, how we exchange, what we believe is true, and who we think we are. And what is most extraordinary is that they’ve done all this by turning us into data.
From my reporting over the last twenty- five years, I’ve found that there are three dominant paradigms that shape how engineers codify human beings and try to serve us their solutions. The first is the almost universal idea that the human is a machine. This idea has a deep history, but comes with a twist: today, our machines are made of data.
Let’s go back to 2014 when I was living in Florence, Italy. My husband and I used to say our flat was around the corner from
the Renaissance, and the signs of it were indeed everywhere. A few streets away, in the piazza of Santo Spirito church, was a fountain. Today, it’s mostly obscured by the tables and chairs of cafés and restaurants; kids play nearby, lovers perch on its edge and hold hands, and tourists take photos. But five and a half centuries ago, in 1492, it’s where a teenage Michelangelo would go at dawn to wash after sneaking out of the monastery. He would be covered in blood and bodily secretions, having spent the night dissecting cadavers in its hospital in order to try to better understand the muscles, tendons and skeleton that are our physiological supporting structures.9
It was frowned upon in the Catholic Church to dissect bodies, unless you were a physician, yet across the Arno river was Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, where he too practised the art of anatomy. It’s also where the artist and inventor dreamed up wild engineering projects. His notebooks overflowed with his models of the world: meticulously designed flying machines, trebuchets, communication devices, and other fantastical objects. One of his most famous images, the Vitruvian Man, is just one example of his fascination with the human form, which he described as ‘the greatest instrument in nature’. Between 1506 and 1513, his notes also describe thirty human dissections. The first was that of a 100-year- old man whose death he had witnessed only moments before. As Leonardo dissected, he designed a humanoid machine – we’d call it a robot today – that had ropes and pulleys instead of joints and muscles. But he wasn’t just interested in how the body was constructed, or intrigued by how it worked; he also was looking to nail down something more ambiguous and less mechanical: the source of our emotions. He never found it. (He did, however, discover that the centre of our circulatory system is the heart, not the liver as previously believed.)10 Renaissance artists reproduced the human body at its most
mechanical, and this led to some of the greatest sculpture and art in history. But the cost was defiling our corpses – holy objects that were fearfully and wonderfully made, and, according to the values that were most widely held at that time, the locus of the spirit.
The dissections were sacrilegious deeds: it was against God to imagine that the body could be divided into its functioning parts. ‘Prior to the mid-1600s, people had all kinds of ideas about the body having mysterious forces and having been formed by divine interventions,’ explained Professor Randolph Nesse, the founding director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, when I interviewed him in 2015. ‘With Descartes, people started thinking about the body as if it was a machine.’
René Descartes: scientist, devout Catholic, mathematician, and inventor. He made his own models of human bodies less than a hundred years later than Leonardo, and, like the artist, Descartes was fascinated by automata. He believed these ‘selfmoving things’ could illuminate the universal mechanistic principles of the natural world: from recreations of inanimate objects to plants and other animals. He started out building replica mills and clocks, and wondered if their inner workings were like how animals, plants and humans operate. He began to consider what could be purely mechanised, and so reduced to mathematical function. In tandem with his philosophical musings, he believed that applying maths and pure logic to the conundrum of human-ness would reveal a fundamental truth.
But his mechanical models were only ever physical representations of living things. What was the difference between the maquette of nuts and bolts he put together in his workshop, and the things that were alive – particularly humans, made in the image of God?11 We surely had a divine spark that positioned us at the top of the hierarchy of creatures on Earth. Was it possible
to recreate our emotional and subjective experience in mechanised parts? Descartes needed to find a home for the soul, but he ended up as stumped as Leonardo: where exactly was the spirit? He compromised. He split us into mechanical bodies and immaterial minds. With only the technology available to him during his time, the latter could not be built. It occupied a space somewhere distinct from the physical world.
This concept, dualism, gave him the freedom to deconstruct and master the physical self, using metal parts. He had the spiritual permission to tinker with the body as one would tinker with a device. This was the first step towards objectivity, a basic idea in philosophy usually paired with its contrasting concept, subjectivity, to distinguish things that can be observed and measured – e.g. the temperature – and those which are perceived – e.g. warmth. However, the ‘Cartesian split’, or the mind–body problem, had a practical implication too: if we can know our constituent parts it is possible to figure out more effective ways of fixing ourselves when we break.
The belief that the body is a machine has become entrenched in our psyche. ‘It’s so pervasive,’ Nesse says, ‘no one even thinks of it as a metaphor.’ And over the centuries, we have continued to fill in blanks as we have exchanged nuts and bolts for accelerometers and electric pulses and 3D-printed valves, developing ever more precise technologies that can recreate our bodies. (Of course, this is much easier to do if we only have to deal with the body. The idea of psychology being used to ‘heal’ the mind is a more complex concept.)
Technological metaphors didn’t leap directly from mechanical automata to digital code; they updated with each innovation. Steam power gave scientists the language to describe the body’s homeostatic systems: the body seeks equilibrium, so it releases energy, and circulates it in a particular way. The internal