[ExI] Amortality? (Nick Bostrom quoted in Time)

[Christopher Whipple]

Whoops, looks like spike beat me to this. :)

-c.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:41 PM, Christopher Whipple <crwbot at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884758,00.html
>
> Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil
> encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and
> cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen
> to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take
> advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and life-enhancing
> technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is
> toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in
> serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder
> and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to
> each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span
> of a mouse. It is "bleeding obvious," he adds, that it is possible to
> extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most people take the view
> that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of
> disease. That's nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are
> age-related diseases because they're the later stages of aging."
>
> .....
>
> "The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were
> born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute
> at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about
> yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't
> sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality
> has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.
>
> .....
>
> Earlier in the article the author claims to have coined the term
> "amortality" - but a quick Google search seems to show otherwise.  The
> article doesn't have anything we haven't seen before, but it's always
> nice to see more attention in the MSM (err, I think?).
>
> -c.
>