Our Transhumanist, Sci-Fi Future Has Arrived. But You’re Not Going To Like It
Technological progress isn’t ushering in an era of prosperity and bliss. It’s inaugurating an era of demonic, inhuman evils.
It doesn’t take a prophet or a philosopher to see that technological progress isn’t leading us into some futuristic utopia. Quite the opposite: it’s amplifying and instrumentalizing the worst aspects of human nature — for domination, for power, for the indulgence of our appetites, above all for mastery over the created order, including over death itself.
The desire for immortality is of course what’s behind the transhumanist movement. For as much as our cultural discourse these days focuses on transgenderism, that’s a relatively minor aspect of the larger ideology of transhumanism, to which many of our tech elites in Silicon Valley, the people who are building out artificial intelligence, openly subscribe.
That being the case, one of the things we need to wrap our heads around as we march further into the era of AI and mass digital technology, is that everything that can be done with technology will be done.
That doesn’t just mean we might find a cure for cancer, or invent a source of renewable clean energy. It also means the transhumanist dream of immortality will turn into a demonic, inhuman nightmare. Forget about transgender medical mutilation, as evil as that is. I’m talking about things like the development of artificial wombs, human-animal chimeras, and clones grown in a lab for the purpose of harvesting organs and blood.
These aren’t things that might happen in some sci-fi future, they’re beginning to happen now. Bryan Johnson, the Silicon Valley tycoon who believes he can reverse the aging process through technology — and is experimenting on himself, in a very public way, to prove it — announced this week that he has cloned himself for the purpose of growing replacement organs and harvesting blood.
“I just cloned myself… as a newborn,” Johnson wrote on X. “This baby-bryan lives in a petri dish for now. This may be scary to some people … a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.”
While Johnson might not have a full-grown body double he’s keeping in a lab somewhere, what he’s done looks forward to a future where that might be possible — indeed, is likely inevitable (note that he says his clone is in a petri dish “for now”). Johnson had his blood drawn, cells extracted, and then reprogrammed as stem cells. With these cells, he can in theory grow spare body parts, organs for transplantation, inject “young cells,” and, as Johnson puts it, “become my own blood boy.”
He intends to do all of that, and possibly more. Johnson, who often appears in public wearing a “don’t die” T-shirt, believes these technologies can reduce what he calls his “biological age.” This will be accomplished, he believes, in part by turning over all his choices to specially-created AIs that dictate what he eats, when he sleeps, what he does. Almost every aspect of his life is determined by what this technology tells him to do. It is, for him, a kind of god that he serves.
Johnson first became widely known a few years ago when TIME Magazine featured him in a puff profile. I wrote about him in my book, Pagan America, as an example of how the transhumanist movement is a form of neopaganism that will treat AI like a new form of deity, veritably worshipping it in exchange for powers and abilities that would otherwise be out of reach — like prolonged life.
The desire for prolonged or eternal life is of course a perennial aspect of the human condition. In ages past, a witch or a pagan priest might consume the blood of a sacrificial victim for this purpose. Not much has changed in our time. In Johnson’s case, early on in his experiment he injected himself with the blood plasma of his 18-year-old son in hopes it would reverse his own aging process. He abandoned the practice only because it didn’t produce results. --->READ MORE HERE
Biohacker Bryan Johnson says he’s ‘cloned himself as a baby’ to harvest its organs:
‘This technology gives us a path to reverse aging,’ says 48-year-old tech entrepreneur
Millionaire biohacker Brian Johnson claims to have created a “clone” of himself as a newborn baby in order to test novel therapies and grow organs for transplantation.
The 48-year-old tech entrepreneur, who has become well known attempting to defy death through extreme health protocols, said his latest stunt could open up a new path to reverse aging.
“I just cloned myself... as a newborn,” he wrote in a post to X.
The cloning process refers to something known as induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, which involves isolating cells from a blood sample and reprogramming them into cells that behave similarly to embryonic stem cells.
It is a well-established research field that was pioneered in the 2000s by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, who went on to win the Novel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012.
“This baby-bryan lives in a petri dish for now,” Mr Johnson said. “This may be scary to some people… a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.” --->READ MORE HERE
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