To Be a Machine Read online

  “Of course, I could get hit by a truck,” Max said. “Or someone could murder me. But the idea of sitting in one of those tanks, not being in control of my own destiny, doesn’t actually appeal to me very much. It’s just that it’s obviously better than the alternative.”

  Laid flat on the floor by the entrance to the patient care bay was a dewar much smaller, and much older, than the others. It was open at one end, so that its narrow interior tube was visible. At the other end, a plaque announced that this was the very dewar in which one James H. Bedford, PhD, was originally contained before he was relocated here from Southern California, and moved to a more modern container in 1991. Bedford, a University of California psychology professor, was (or is) the first human ever to be cryopreserved. His preservation was performed in 1966 by a chemist, a physician, and a television repairman from L.A. named Robert Nelson, who was involved in his capacity as president of the Cryonics Society of California.

  Max mentioned casually that because Bedford was born in 1893, this technically made him the world’s oldest living person. I suggested that it was a bit of a stretch to call him living; Max suggested that it was not.

  The idea, he reminded me, was that these patients were resuscitated shortly after the point of legal death, and cryopreserved when their bodies were still undecayed. It was a central premise of cryonics that real death, actual death, occurred not when the heart stopped beating, but several minutes later, when the body’s cell and chemical structures began to disintegrate to the point where no technology could restore them to their original state. And so these cryopreserved corpses were not by conventional standards deceased—were not, that is to say, corpses at all—but rather human beings preserved between conditions of life and death, abiding in some state outside of time itself.

  And standing in the cool of the care bay, surrounded by the unseen bodies and severed heads of techno-utopians, I thought of the Catholic concept of limbo, a place that was neither heaven nor hell, but a state of suspension, a holding pattern for the souls of the righteous who had died before they could be properly redeemed by the coming of Christ, and must wait in ontological détente for that day of salvation.

  Here in the Sonoran Desert, I thought, protected by stainless steel receptacles and Kevlar walls and bulletproof glass, these patient souls were being held in a state of hopeful deferral, until the future came to deliver them from their own deaths. These men and women, these bodies and heads, would almost certainly never be returned to life, yet there was something inscrutably sacred in their suspension, in their waiting. This warehouse—mausoleum though it was of modern delusions—was at the same time a site of something ancient and primal. I was standing, I felt, on consecrated ground, in a place that was neither here nor there.

  But no, I thought, that wasn’t quite true, because I was very much in a specific place called America. I was here, in the old open ground of the colonial frontier, the theater of westward expansion in which the American drama of boundless national potential and individual fulfillment—the vast blood-and-gold fantasia of Manifest Destiny—was first enacted. The scene in which I was standing, with its immense silver canisters and its intricate display of gadgetry, began to seem a crazed pageantry of technological ingenuity and control, a sci-fi film set that might suddenly be dismantled and carried away, leaving nothing but the desert of the old American West, which had always been a landscape of death.

  I imagined a delegation of explorers from some civilization of the distant future excavating these dewars from the depths of the desert, and looking with detached fascination at the half-preserved remains within, the bodies, the cephalons, puzzling over who these people were and what it was that they believed. And I wondered how I might answer their questions, if I could somehow do so. Would I say that they believed in science? That they believed in the future? That they believed in never growing old? That they believed in their life insurance policies? That they believed in the mysterious power of applied money? That they believed in themselves? That they were, in one way or another, Americans?

  —

  Alcor’s mission is presented as a humanitarian one: like any business, they want to expand their customer base, but this objective also happens to be theoretically aligned with the overall aim of defeating death. A rising tide lifts all boats, is the idea. There’s a long article on the company’s website about what it would actually involve, at a technical level, to ensure through cryonic suspension the future resurrection of every person now living. The article, called “How to Cryopreserve Everyone,” is by the computer scientist Ralph Merkle, the inventor of public key cryptography. Merkle describes Alcor’s animating principle as a “vision of the future in which everyone alive today can enjoy good health and long life in a world of material abundance for all.” What we know for certain, the author asserts, is that “advances in technology will eventually make this future a reality.”

  But it’s not like anyone is saying there aren’t some kinks to be worked out here. The financial costs of suspending all these patients would be one issue, certainly, as would the brute geometry of storage: where do you put them all, the bodies of those named in the book of life? Actually, we’d be talking not so much about bodies as heads, because the logistics of whole body preservation for every living person would be truly nightmarish, as opposed to merely problematic. Merkle’s article proposes, as a potential solution to this difficulty, the idea of Really Big Dewars (RBDs).

  The annual global mortality rate, Merkle writes, is somewhere in the region of 55 million. Now let’s say we build a gigantic spherical dewar thirty meters in radius. Given the dimensions of the average human head, this thing would comfortably accommodate 5.5 million cephalons; and so if you built ten of these RBDs per annum, you’d have the means to store the head of every person who died in the entire world, going forward, until such time as their deaths could be remedied.

  There would, naturally, be significant costs attached to all of this. Each of these RBDs would have a volume of about 113 million liters, which means your outlay for liquid nitrogen—which tends to come in at 10 cents or so per liter—would be about $11 million per RBD. There’d also be some added expenses associated with boil-off rate and insulation and general dewar maintenance, but ultimately the cost of cryopreserving the entire population of earth would come in at a surprisingly competitive amortized capital sum of $24–$32 per literal head. (For whole body patients, we’d be looking at putting a zero at the end of those figures.)

  The point is that cryonics, as both a business and a tactic for evading the fate that awaits us all, is an at least theoretically scalable model.

  —

  Alcor was a place built to house the corpses of optimists; the silence there was thick with ironies. And the irony with which I found myself most immediately preoccupied was the situation of Max himself, or the picture of that situation I could not help but cultivate in my mind.

  This was a man who had dedicated his life to the idea of transcending the limitations of our natural condition, to a vast expansion of the range of human experience and potential. This was a man who, before he left Britain for the U.S. in his twenties, started the Extropian movement, named in defiance of an entropic principle whereby all that exists tends toward disintegration and disorder and decline, in a universe in which the center cannot hold. This was a man who had dedicated himself to what he called “perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species.” This was a man who changed his name, in a youthful gesture of radical self-invention, from Max O’Connor to Max More because, as he once put it in an interview with Wired magazine, “it seemed to really encapsulate the essence of what my goal is: always to improve, never to be static. I was going to get better at everything, become smarter, fitter, and healthier. It would be a constant reminder to keep moving forward.”*1 This was a man who had undertaken, in an explicit and sustained fashion, the Nietzschean task of self-overcoming.

>   And yet here he was, this man, spending his days in a small office in a kind of industrial estate in a suburb of Phoenix, surrounded by the dead. He was a cultivator of hope, it was true, but he was also a processor of bodies, a custodian of corpses: an executive-level necrocrat.

  In his introduction to a recently published anthology called The Transhumanist Reader, which he had edited with his wife, Natasha, Max wrote the following: “Becoming posthuman means exceeding the limitations that define the less desirable aspects of the ‘human condition.’ Posthuman beings would no longer suffer from disease, aging, and inevitable death.”

  Max’s conviction that the technologies of the future would release us from our human deficiencies grew out of what seemed a kind of congenital optimism. (His mother, he claimed, named him Maximilian, meaning “Greatest,” because he was the heaviest baby in the hospital ward where he was born.) It was, he felt, almost as though he was born with some kind of transhumanist gene. As far back as he could remember, it was always there in him—this hunger for transcendence, this yearning to overcome.

  Growing up in the port town of Bristol, in the southwest of England, he was fascinated with space, with the idea of colonizing other worlds. “When I was five,” he told me, “I watched the Apollo moon landings. I was one of the few people who stuck with it. I watched every landing after that. I just loved the whole idea of getting off this planet.” He was devoted to the children’s television show The Tomorrow People, which ran through most of the 1970s on British television, and which centered around a group of teenagers whose extraordinary capabilities—telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation—revealed them as a sort of advance guard of future human evolution. The teens were assisted in their world-saving ventures by an artificial intelligence named TIM, who was housed in a disused London tube station. Max haunted the science fiction sections of Bristol’s bookshops and libraries; he read a great many superhero comics, too, and these last exerted a formative pressure on his developing sense of the possibilities for a human future. (Stan Lee’s Iron Man comics, with their fantastic vision of a technologically enhanced human body, were a particular influence.)

  By the age of ten or eleven, his precocious interest in human enhancement led to his dabbling in the occult mysteries of Rosicrucianism. By thirteen, he had moved on to the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah. At the otherwise very conservative boarding school he attended, his Latin teacher gave classes in Transcendental Meditation, and he was one of two boys who signed up. But he soon found that he lacked the temperament for meditation, for it its rigors of stillness and patience.

  By his mid-teens, he was, as he put it, developing stronger critical thinking skills, and moving away from the more esoteric fascinations of his early adolescence. He discovered libertarianism—something that has remained a central strand of his thinking ever since—through reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (although the novels in fact represented libertarian and Randian ideas only in order to ridicule them). And it was through Wilson, too, that he first learned about cryonics. In a book called Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, Wilson wrote of his decision to cryonically preserve the head of his daughter, Luna, who was beaten to death in a robbery in the San Francisco clothes store where she worked.

  Through a group called the Libertarian Alliance, which he’d joined after reading the Illuminatus books, Max became friendly with people whose interests extended to space colonization and the enhancement of human intelligence. Cryonics was a popular topic within this new circle of acquaintances, and he began to establish himself as a leading vector of the idea. In 1986, while still a student in economics at Oxford, he spent six weeks in California, on a sort of fact-finding mission at Alcor’s original headquarters in Riverside. When he returned to England, he helped set up the first cryonics society outside America.

  In 1987, after finishing his degree at Oxford, he moved to L.A., where he started a PhD in philosophy at the University of Southern California. His dissertation explored the nature of death, and the continuity of the self over time. This work was clearly drawing on his interests in cryonics and life extension, but whenever he tried to raise these issues directly with his advisor, she would become visibly uncomfortable.

  “I’d ask her whether she thought it wouldn’t work,” Max said.

  We were sitting, now, at an oval boardroom table, across from a large bulletproof window overlooking the vista of the patient care bay.

  He said, “I wanted to know did she have philosophical objections, did she think it wouldn’t be you if you were brought back to life, or if you had your mind uploaded? And she’d say ‘No,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, what’s the problem then?’ And she’d say, ‘The whole thing is just so ghastly!’ ”

  As he spoke, he leaned forward in his leather boardroom chair, and an old frustration fleetingly revealed itself in the tensing muscular planes of his face.

  “Well, it’s hard to know what to say to that,” he said. “Ghastly as opposed to what, exactly? Putting your body in the ground and having it slowly digested by worms and bacteria?”

  He shook his head, then spread his hands in a gesture of stoic forbearance. This whole reflexive disgust thing, he said, was a real problem. Leon Kass, he said, the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, had written a book called Beyond Therapy that was essentially a lengthy argument against transhumanism.

  “Kass came up with this idea of ‘the Wisdom of Repugnance,’ ” Max said, “which is basically if something feels wrong to him, then it is wrong. People have these kinds of instinctive reactions, based in all these myths that teach us to fear going beyond our limits. You know: the Tower of Babel; Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and getting his liver eaten by an eagle. But people will always think something is terrible when it’s in the future. Once it’s here, they’ll accept it.”

  Early in his time at USC, he met a young law student named Tom Bell, a fellow libertarian who shared Max’s vaulting optimism about subjects like life extension, intelligence augmentation, and nanotechnology. They started putting together a magazine called Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought, and soon afterward set up a nonprofit they called the Extropy Institute. Although Max is the figure most closely associated with Extropianism, which is generally seen as an early version of the transhumanist movement, it was Bell, he says, who coined the term. In those days, he went by the name T. O. Morrow, but since the late 1990s he has reverted to the less hurtlingly dynamic Tom W. Bell.

  Max maintains that a document he wrote in 1990 called “The Extropian Principles”—laying out the movement’s ideals of “Boundless Expansion,” “Self-Transformation,” “Dynamic Optimism,” “Intelligent Technology,” and “Spontaneous Order”—constitutes the “first comprehensive and explicit statement of transhumanism.” The Extropy Institute lasted until the mid-2000s, at which point it became more or less absorbed by the broader transhumanist movement, which is at least notionally contained under the official institutional umbrella of a group called Humanity Plus, an organization chaired by Max’s wife, Natasha Vita-More.

  Max and Natasha met at a dinner party in the early 1990s. The party was hosted by the 1960s acid guru Timothy Leary, who was by that late stage of his life a committed advocate of cryonics and life extension.*2 Despite Natasha being a decade and a half Max’s senior, there was an immediate attraction, and an intellectual connection, though Natasha was still at that point in a relationship with FM-2030. Six months later, when that relationship had finally ended, she invited Max to appear as a guest on a TV chat show she hosted on L.A. local cable, and they quickly began dating.

  I visited Natasha at the minimally chic house she and Max shared with a pleasant if somewhat overfamiliar Goldendoodle named Oscar, who was getting on in years but had lately become the beneficiary of a pet-specific cryonic preservation policy. Natasha was eating a hurried late breakfast of muesli and fruit when I arrived, having just returned home from teaching a
n early class on futurism at the University of Advancing Technology, a private college in Tempe.

  She was sixty-five, a composed and austerely elegant figure whose manner was alternately warm and watchful, her stern good looks remarkably well preserved against the advance of time. She spoke of her marriage to Max as a union of complementary opposites: a synthesis of the analytical and the artistic, the scholar and the socialite. She made much of his Englishness, of his undergraduate degree from Oxford, and of the fact that he was fifteen years her junior.

  “We’re from different generations,” she said, “and we come from very different worlds.”

  Natasha spent the 1970s and 1980s moving between the worlds of avant-garde art and independent film. She ran a performance art nightclub on Sunset Boulevard; she wrote for The Hollywood Reporter; she worked for a time for Francis Ford Coppola; and she was, she indicated, acquainted in those years with such luminaries as Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci.

  She spoke of this period of her life in long, free-associating riffs, dense with allusion to all manner of people, all manner of philosophies. She spoke of backing up the brain, backing up the body. She spoke of the weakness of the flesh, and the power of technology. She had the manner of a mystic, some crystal-gazing quality that was both intensity and absence, as though she was already speaking from the distant future.

  Her name, like Max’s, was the heraldic device of her commitment, her promise to herself. Vita-More. More life.

  It was, she told me, through a frightening encounter with her own bodily frailty in her early thirties that she began to think seriously about technology and mortality. In 1981, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and lost the child she was carrying. When she was taken to the hospital, having been found in a spreading pool of her own blood, she was minutes from death. When she talked now of her path to transhumanism, this was the time of her life she continually returned to, the moment when she realized, on a visceral level, that the human body was a feeble and treacherous mechanism, that we were each of us trapped, bleeding, marked for death.