{"id":35202,"date":"2017-03-09T08:02:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T16:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/life-and-death-when-the-end-arrives-should-we-upgrade-or-shut-down"},"modified":"2017-04-24T18:46:30","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T01:46:30","slug":"life-and-death-when-the-end-arrives-should-we-upgrade-or-shut-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/life-and-death-when-the-end-arrives-should-we-upgrade-or-shut-down","title":{"rendered":"Life and death: When the end arrives, should we upgrade or shut down?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/life-and-death-when-the-end-arrives-should-we-upgrade-or-shut-down.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Transhumanism appearing in the American Association for the Advancement of Science\u2019s (AAAS) magazine: Science\u2026<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Modern technology and modern medical practice have evolved over the past decades, enabling us to enhance and extend human life to an unprecedented degree. The two books under review examine this phenomenon from remarkably different perspectives.<\/p>\n<p>Mark O\u2019Connell\u2019s <em>To Be a Machine<\/em> is an examination of transhumanism, a movement characterized by technologies that seek to transform the human condition and extend life spans indefinitely. O\u2019Connell, a journalist, makes his own prejudices clear: \u201cI am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist,\u201d he writes. However, this does not stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement.<\/p>\n<p>The book mostly comprises O\u2019Connell\u2019s encounters with transhumanist thought leaders in an assortment of locales ranging from lecture halls to Silicon Valley start-ups to transhumanist conferences and even the campaign trail, where O\u2019Connell interviews Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist and 2016 U.S. presidential candidate whose goal is \u201cto promote investment in longevity science.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Connell\u2019s interaction with Max More, the president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world\u2019s largest commercial cryopreservation facility, is particularly timely, because the legal, social, and ethical issues related to cryopreservation are far from settled. Likewise, as O\u2019Connell notes, the promise of cryonics relies on the improbable notion that science will someday enable reanimation.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sciencemag.org\/books\/2017\/03\/06\/life-and-death-when-the-end-arrives-should-we-upgrade-or-shut-down\/\">http:\/\/blogs.sciencemag.org\/books\/2017\/03\/06\/life-and-death-...shut-down\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transhumanism appearing in the American Association for the Advancement of Science\u2019s (AAAS) magazine: Science\u2026 Modern technology and modern medical practice have evolved over the past decades, enabling us to enhance and extend human life to an unprecedented degree. The two books under review examine this phenomenon from remarkably different perspectives. Mark O\u2019Connell\u2019s To Be a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":267,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,2017,5,1496,269,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-cryonics","category-geopolitics","category-law","category-life-extension","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/267"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48584,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35202\/revisions\/48584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}