This is AI’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Economist (2024)
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The highest expression of human dignity and human nature is to try to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution, and our environment.
—Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology (2005)
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It is a loathsome and cruel trick that nature takes such an exquisitely wondrous creation as the human brain and imprisons it inside the weak, inefficient, fragile, and short-lived structure that is the human body.
—Mike Treder, “Emancipation from Death” (2004)
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Is the finitude of human life, as our ancestors experienced it and as our faiths and our philosophies have taught us to understand it, really just a problem waiting to be solved?
The anti-aging medicine of the not-so-distant future would treat what we have usually thought of as the whole, the healthy, human life as a condition to be healed. It therefore presents us with a questionable notion both of full humanity and of the proper ends of medicine.
—BEYOND THERAPY: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, issued by the President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington, D.C. (2003)
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Thomas [Aquinas] saw that a being obviously directed toward something else “cannot possibly have as his ultimate goal the preservation of his own existence!” In other words, the allaying of the thirst cannot consist simply in the mere continued existence of the thirster.
—Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation (1957)
With the exception of Kurzweil, these quotes come from Gilbert Meilaender’s excellent and timeless treatment of the topic of human life and frailty in his book Should We Live Forever?
In the end, “more time” would not quench the thirst that drives us to look for ways to retard aging. We need a fuller conception of our humanity and a deeper and richer understanding of love — one that is shaped by patience and hope in the struggle to understand what, really, is good for us.