Sunday, July 29, 2012

Immortality, Mitochondria, and Media Futures

With the idealized expectation of the technological 'rapture' goes a vision of technological oversimplification that is not quite a result of our being closer and closer to a future we once imagined.
 Said otherwise, talk of 2045 was, once upon a time, talk of some unimaginably distant era, as was talk of 2012. Or indeed 1998—which was indeed and to be sure the supposedly "future" time-period of the 1968 American television series Lost in Space.
  To see this it is worth thinking a bit about Aubrey de Grey, a software developer or programmer who, having learnt sufficient biology for the purpose[1] has been arguing that we can resist aging if we avoid its causes, to wit the oxidation of cells and the build-up of waste-products in those same cells. 

Having determined that it is the mitochondria that develop problems or ‘damage’ by getting gunked-up (or losing ‘efficiency’), de Gray proposes that we send in little nanobots to clean them out (or indeed, as de Grey also imagines, as so many mechanical replacements for what are clearly less-than ideal organelles). 
 
What de Grey has in mind is close to the miniaturized spaceships of Fantastic Voyage,the 1966 film of Raquel Welch’s travels on a microscopic level, which film title just happens to accord with one of Kurzweil’s first books for his ventures into technological rapture.  


De Grey not only runs an anti-aging foundation (and one supposes that he has all manner of highly motivated and well-heeled investors backing him) but also has an appointment on the faculty of Kurzweil’s Singularity University), straddling as he does both sides of the biotech and computer tech industry.

But for a critical overview that also applies to Kurzweil’s prediction of the coming ‘technological singularity,’ see Richard A. L. Jones, who is a professor of physics at Sheffield University, “Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture,”  IEEE Spectrum (June 2008): 64-67 and see further Jones’s earlier, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

And yet, as it turns out, de Gray's pitch, like Kurzweil's own, is less about biology than technology and marketing, precisely in the way we relate to technology as those who have, as fully vested heirs of a cargo cult, grown up with devices we know how to use from electric appliances, toilets (to be Illichian here), televisions and computers, cell-phones and coffee-makers, automobiles and airplane travel, but could not ourselves fabricate if our lives depended on it (this is the ominous and recurrent subtext of the future-as-desert film genre, like Road Warrior or Mad Max or Bladerunner and even short story turned film, The Hunger Games). Assuming, as we do, that someone else makes the tool, or writes the code for our app idea, i.e., assuming that some factory actually deploys the technology, the gadgets are what it is all about.  


[1] Although de Grey does not have a post at Cambridge University and there was a certain understated scandal associated with the implication that he did have one, he does hold a doctorate from Cambridge for his The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (Austin: Landes Publishing, 1999). See also Denham Harman, “Aging: A Theory Based on Free Radical and Radiation Chemistry,” Journal of Gerontology, 11 (3) (1956): 298-300.

No comments:

Post a Comment