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)

…

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)

…

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)

…

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)

…

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.

Clearly Meghan does not share my enthusiasm for printed magazines, especially this one. Otherwise she would have told me this arrived yesterday. 🙂

While I was reading JD Hunter’s recent book, the routine was to take 5-month-old Will and before reading to him ask, “Do you wanna read about demooocracyyy?” The subject matter is more or less as bleak, but now that I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff that routine has taken a more ominous tone…

”Do you wanna to read about surveillance caaapitalism?”

He prefers Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. 📚

Jürgen Moltmann:

Hope alone is to be called “realistic,” because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught.

I’ve been talking about the Jevons effect for years, but without knowing it had a name: the Jevons effect. Yes, it’s mostly about technology and energy use. But for its most concrete evidence, look no further than Taco Tuesday. I’ll put it in the form of a ubiquitous maxim, heretofore known as the Jevons Taco (non)Dilemma:

If given a larger taco shell, I will invariably overstuff that one as well.

🌮

Kierkegaard, describing “the whole of modern philosophy” as a wholly immanent, telos-less genius:

The humorous self-sufficiency of genius is the unity of a modest resignation in the world and a proud elevation above the world: of being an unnecessary superfluity and a precious ornament.

Here’s that in the funnier form of a meme a friend once sent me:

Car(e) Free 🤓

Finally Reading: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚

I’ve put this off because a) I’m sure I already agree with it, b) I’m sure I already hate everything it’s about as much as anyone can hate such things, and c) I stubbornly refused to order it and for the last 5 years I felt like maybe I was politely shaming bookstores across the country who didn’t stock it on their shelves.

I’m reading it now because a) last month I finally found a bookstore in Brunswick who had it (the owner simply said, “It’s terrifying”), b) I’m inspired by the fun fact that the author lives not far from us (or so the bookstore owner tells me), and c) I’ve fallen behind on the anti-smart phone project this year and need a little extra motivation.

It’s also an increasingly important and unavoidable question: How as parents are we going to handle the incredible stupidity of this invasive and life-destroying rectangle?

And so, without further excuse or ado…

From spit-up rag to mysterious descending cloud of happiness