Opening Positions

KURZWEIL: Thank you. I want to begin not with technology but with a number, because the number is the moral fact that the entire discourse on this subject manages to ignore. Roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people die every day. Of those, about two-thirds die of causes related to aging — the slow, systematic accumulation of damage in cells and tissues that we have been taught to call "natural" and therefore to accept. A hundred thousand people a day. Every one of them a complete universe of memory and love and unfinished work, extinguished, permanently, while we are sitting here. If a meteor were killing a hundred thousand people a day we would consider it the only thing worth talking about. Because it's death, and death has always been with us, we've built an entire civilization of consolation around not talking about it — around calling the catastrophe wisdom.

I call that deathism. It is the rationalization of death as a good thing because, until very recently, there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. Every culture in history has had to make peace with mortality, and the way you make peace with an enemy you cannot defeat is you tell yourself the enemy is actually a friend. Death gives life meaning. Death makes room for the young. Death is natural. I understand why we said these things. For a hundred thousand years they were the only psychologically survivable response. But they were never true, and the moment they stop being necessary they become something worse than false. They become an excuse not to build the thing that would save a hundred thousand people tomorrow.

Now the engineering, briefly, because the engineering is why this is no longer philosophy. Aging is not a mystery. It is a set of specific, identifiable, increasingly addressable processes — the damage accumulates, the repair mechanisms decline, and the whole system degrades on a schedule. We are learning to read that schedule and to intervene in it. And the reason I'm optimistic is the same reason I was right about language in 1999: the tools that solve this problem are themselves on the exponential curve. AI is now doing biology — folding the proteins, simulating the interactions, searching the space of interventions at a rate no laboratory of humans could approach. I've described what I call longevity escape velocity: the point, which I expect within the next decade or so, at which medical progress adds more than a year to your remaining life expectancy for every year that passes. Cross that line and you are, for practical purposes, outrunning the wall. Not because you've become eternal. Because the road keeps extending faster than you travel it.

And here is the part Bernard will fight, so I'll state it as cleanly as I can. The pattern that is you — your memories, your values, the particular way your mind connects things — that pattern is information. It is currently running on a substrate of meat that degrades, but there is nothing about the pattern that requires the meat. Substrate independence is not mysticism; it's the most basic fact about information there is. A song is not the vinyl. A novel is not the paper. As we learn to read the pattern with sufficient fidelity, we will be able to back it up, to repair it, eventually to run it on substrates that do not die. I am not promising the soul. I'm promising that the thing you actually are — the pattern — can, in principle, persist. I have my father's records in boxes for exactly this reason. When people call that grief-stricken or deluded, I tell them: I am the only one in the room behaving as though I actually believe death is a problem and not a fact of nature. Everyone else is grieving. I'm engineering.

So my opening is this. We stand at the one moment in the history of our species when the oldest enemy becomes, for the first time, a worthy opponent rather than an undefeated god. To refuse to fight it — to dress the refusal up as wisdom about the meaning of finitude — is not philosophy. It is Stockholm syndrome with footnotes. The river found a channel that doesn't die. I intend to be in the water.

EDO SEGAL: Bernard.

WILLIAMS: That was very good, and I agree with more of it than Ray expects, and the part I reject I reject completely. Let me start where we agree, because the agreement matters and I won't be accused of the thing he just accused me of.

Ray is right that most of what passes for wisdom about death is consolation — is, as he says, a way of making peace with an enemy we couldn't beat. I have no patience for the pieties either. I do not think death is a friend. I do not think a particular death, at a particular time, taking a particular person, is anything other than a catastrophe for those who loved her. If Ray's longevity escape velocity means a man gets to know his granddaughter, or finish the work that was his reason for living, or simply have more of the life he was in the middle of — I am entirely for it. Curing the diseases that kill us young is not in dispute between us. Nobody at this table is defending tuberculosis. So let us not pretend my position is that you should die at seventy of something a machine could have fixed. It is not.

My position is about the other thing — the thing Ray slides into without marking the transition, which is the move from more life to endless life, from a longer run to a run with no wall at all. And here I want to introduce the woman who has been sitting in the back of this room since before we started. Her name is Elina Makropulos. She is a character in a play by Karel Čapek, which Janáček made into an opera, and she is, when we meet her, three hundred and forty-two years old. Her father, a court physician in the sixteenth century, concocted an elixir of life and tested it on her — she was forty-two when she took it, and she has been forty-two ever since, for three centuries. And the thing the play shows you, with terrible clarity, is what she has become. She is not wise. She is not radiant. She is frozen, cold, bored in a way that has passed all the way through boredom and out the other side into something glacial. Everything has become indifferent to her, because everything has happened, and happened, and happened again. The condition of her endless life is a coldness in which, eventually, nothing means anything — and at the end she refuses to take the elixir again, and chooses to die, and the choice is presented not as a defeat but as a release. She gets her humanity back at the moment she consents to lose her endlessness.

Now, why does that happen to her? Not because three hundred and forty-two years is a big number. The number is a distraction. It happens because of the structure of what a self is, and this is the claim I'll defend all evening. A person is not, as Ray says, a pattern of information that happens to be running on meat. A person is a set of categorical desires — projects and attachments and loves that are not conditional on her being alive but are the very things that give her a reason to go on being alive. The desire to finish this work. To raise this child. To be with this person. These desires propel a life forward; they are what it is for. And here is the cruelty Ray's framework cannot see: these desires are answered. You finish the work. The child grows. The person you loved dies, or you love them so completely that the loving is, in some sense, complete. Categorical desires are not an infinite renewable resource. They are the specific shape of a specific character, and a character is a finite thing, and when its projects are exhausted, you do not get a person with new projects. You get Elina Makropulos. You get a self that has outlived the desires that constituted it — which is to say, you do not get the self at all. You get the cold.

So my opening is this. Ray thinks the locked door at the top of the stairs is the thing stealing your life. I think the locked door is the thing that makes it a life rather than an endless corridor. The meaning was never in spite of the finitude. The meaning was made of it. And the most dangerous thing a benevolent engineer can do is offer to remove the one condition that authored everything he's trying to save.

EDO SEGAL: Before I frame the rounds, one discipline I impose on every long conversation, because it pays off three hours later. Each of you, in a few sentences: what do you envy in the other's position? Not respect. Envy. The thing their side gets to have that yours doesn't. Ray first.

KURZWEIL: I envy the peace. Bernard's view comes with a kind of settledness I've never had access to — the ability to stand at the bedside and say this is how it's meant to be and mean it, and find rest there. I can't. I stand at the bedside and I see a solvable problem that we failed to solve in time, and there is no rest in that, only work and grief and the next experiment. His philosophy lets a person be reconciled. Mine condemns me to never be reconciled until the last preventable death is prevented. There are nights when I would give a great deal for his peace. I just don't believe I'm entitled to it while the meteor is still falling.

WILLIAMS: And I envy the love that has no governor on it. Ray's position lets him refuse, completely, the loss of anyone — to say to his father, I will get you back, and organize his life around the promise. My position requires me to look at the people I love and know that the loving and the losing are the same fabric, that I cannot have the one without consenting to the other. There is something magnificent in a refusal that total. I think it's a mistake. I think it mistakes the pattern for the person and will hand him back a convincing stranger. But the love behind it is not a mistake, and there are mornings when my own clear-sightedness feels less like wisdom than like a failure of nerve dressed up as maturity — which is precisely the charge he leveled at me, and I'm honest enough to feel its edge.

KURZWEIL: That may be the most generous thing anyone has said to me about the boxes.

WILLIAMS: I meant it as the most dangerous thing. The two are not different, with you.

EDO SEGAL: Two openings and two envies, and you can already see the architecture of the evening. It is not that one of them loves life and one of them is reconciled to death. They'd both tell you they love life ferociously. It's that they locate the source of life's value in opposite places. Ray says the value is in the experiences, and more experiences is therefore more value, without limit. Bernard says the value is in a finite shape, and an unlimited run doesn't add to the shape — it dissolves it. Hold both. We start the rounds at the exact seam: is death a defect we should fix, or a feature we cannot remove without losing ourselves? The engineer's gospel, first. After this.