The billionaire tech bros who think they can live forever. Seriously
SCIENCE
The Immortalists
Aleks Krotoski
Bodley Head, $36.99
For years, acolytes and investors have defended the ludicrous aspirations of Silicon Valley’s squillionaire venture capitalists and gadget gurus with “Hey, these guys are really rich and super smart – whaddaya mean ‘They’re crazy and dangerous?’”
To which one obvious rejoinder might be “Howard Hughes”, but history is littered with well-heeled weirdos who made a big splash before drowning in their own effluent. There are myriad reasons to worry about the mindset of the individuals and corporations that run, and often own, the digital networks we all use every day, just to get routine stuff done.
But these blokes (and with very few exceptions, they’re male) have far wilder ambitions than simply building giant, energy-ravenous and deeply thirsty AI server farms next door to your local reservoir.
Titanic data centres? A world run by hallucinating algorithms? These are but the opening gambits of a far bigger game. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and their monied mates also want to live forever, colonise the universe, and have future generations gaze awestruck upon their works.
American journalist and broadcaster Aleks Krotoski’s The Immortalists is a gory, slice-by-slice dissection of these wealthy maniacs’ obsession with the promise of eternal life. It’s not pretty, but like the proverbial flaming train wreck, it’s hard to take your eyes off it.
While Adam Becker’s horrifying 2025 More Everything Forever made it clear that this crowd have already dismissed the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an inconvenient truth and declared humanity’s destiny to be a merging of our minds with computers and the conquest of galaxies, Krotoski’s book lays bare a parallel and equally fraudulent techno-gospel, celebrating the imminent death of death.
She has certainly done her homework, and The Immortalists is the distilled product of two decades of sceptical enquiry. But her book is at its most harrowing when she lets these snake-oil merchants and their venture capitalist parasitic pals make their pitch. There are delusional rants here that need no outrage or derision from the author because the sheer lunacy of what these people believe to be inevitable, and inherently wonderful, does much of the work for her, and in their own words.
Krotoski picks her moments, then gives them free rein to insist that there are fortunes and fabulous futures to be had from technology that doesn’t, and indeed can’t, actually work.
These people, who really believe that a thousand-year lifespan is not only our evolutionary destiny but technically feasible, suffer from what she succinctly describes as “Engineer’s Syndrome”.
They are smashing square pegs into round holes, assuming that any problem, no matter how complex, must have a simple solution, and that by tweaking and modifying human biology, they can treat an essentially straightforward problem, like eliminating death, much like an everyday software-meets-hardware coding error.
They talk, for instance, about using the Moore’s Law principal (the logically flawed Silicon Valley credo that the component density of computer chips would double every two years) and assume that ever-accelerating bioengineering will soon outpace our natural bodily decline, until we reach – and note the Space Age terminology here – the point that all diseases will be cured, or curable, such that we’ll reach “longevity escape velocity”, leaving Grim Reapers shaking their fists at the skies in fury.
Emile P. Torres is a long-term mover and shaker in the eternal life caper. And there are many rich people giving money to people like them.
“If one believes,” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel raved, “that the future could contain astronomical numbers of super-enhanced post humans [as Thiel clearly does] one should care about every possible event that could preclude humanity from achieving that goal.”
And here’s where it gets scary, and why Krotoski’s book is important. It turns out that Torres remains an influential theorist and strategist for immortalists, and as such a most convincing preacher to insatiable venture capitalists (most of whom wouldn’t mind living forever either, funnily enough). Hence the signing of so many fat cheques.
Torres believes that anyone who stands in the way of this project is, by definition, a threat to the human species, and should logically be prevented from getting in their way. Their project includes mind-merging with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or the Singularity; the much-hyped “all-wise, all-knowing” son of AI), which thankfully doesn’t yet exist, and hopefully never will.
Whatever we are to make of all this, there remains one thing that I can say with complete confidence, and it is this. While there may be a way of reading this review in 2126, whether by cerebral download in a Martian cave, or from a post-apocalyptic cuneiform clay tablet, everyone mentioned in it, including me, will be dead.
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