Michelle Santiago-Cortes
Appearances
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
If only you deregulate... Let them have access to all the water, to all the fossil fuels so they can advance their technologies. It seems convenient that the product you're selling is going to solve the world's problems. And it's urgent, right? And I know it's cynical, but at the end of the day, Brian Johnson is selling oil.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Yeah, I think something to layer with Tara's point is that what strikes me, I guess, sad about not him specifically, but the way he frames like the rascal brain being this horrible thing and like AI or technology thing. almost being like that benevolent God that's like watching over and everything. What I guess what really saddens me is that dichotomy, right?
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Between the smart, enlightened, rational science and the sticky, gooey, nasty work of being human. The dirtiness of it all, the messiness of it all. I think there is a beauty to being human that I feel like this rhetoric around AI and living forever. Personally, I don't want to live 120 years of non-messy, perfectly ascetic life.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
I guess when we're thinking about these people that are actually designing our futures, like, are we getting designed out of it? You know, might we be deemed too messy, too human, too rascal-brained to belong? Yeah.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Yeah, I think it's almost like you could call it a perfect storm of one of our fastest growing consumer sectors being like wellness and tech are working together to create kind of this hybrid of longevity as a new market category to expand on. Longevity, for me personally, I am vigilant about how this shaking of the hands between tech and wellness.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
To me, it does seem like cementing that ideology in the public, that machine is better, science knows better, their science knows better. I don't want to be a pessimist about it, but I do feel like It's a lot of very clever marketing, and I do think it's going to pay off for them.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
I mean, I guess that's kind of like the million-dollar question because he claims his protocol, which he calls Blueprint, is science-based, evidence-backed. He often refers to it as an algorithm. Some of these things are...
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
proven some are not and that kind of is what makes his let's say his influencing because so far that's really mostly what it is compelling he's trying all kinds of interventions there's no way of knowing what interventions are successful because he's doing a
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
you know, science and religion weren't always in opposition to each other, historically speaking. And as they've been separated and competing in terms of who gets the final say of what it means to be alive at what this earth means, I think that the science camp has proven to be a bit more lucrative where someone like Brian Johnson can kind of build the church that sells olive oil and protein bars.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
You know, I'm not one to speak on the lives of the uber wealthy, but I would imagine that That you conquer finance, you conquer land, you conquer, quote unquote, like the laws of physics and stuff. Through these technologies, why not conquer the laws of biology? I think it's like a conquest mindset thing. That is also a really compelling point.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Like we don't live in a time when you're going to get charged with heresy and, you know, tortured for those kinds of goals. You get VC funding for that now. Right.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
People today are less and less able to save up for retirement. Imagine the torture of having to save up for an extra 20 years. I don't think most people are in a financial position to finance the last 10 years of their life, much less an additional 30. So I almost feel like... Only someone with money to spare could think of it as like an attainable goal.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Yeah, I mean, it's like deeper than you can imagine. This algorithm, the rascal brain, right? I feel like he's appealing to this conception that science is somehow more rational, purer, more enlightened, right? than this disgusting, sticky mess of a human body, right? Science is almost like second to God and like who knows best and what's the best form of knowledge.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
This is where it can get a bit nerving. If you were on Twitter in the last two, three years where Elon Musk and Salman Altman and Andrasen and all these other tech people were having discussions about how important AI is, how urgent it is, what should we do with it? Some people kind of cycled through these labels that we would often see on their bios.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
He's doing a lot of common sense things like prioritizing sleep. I think he's the most bullish on sleep. He's minimizing his sun exposure. He's exercising.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
For example, some people would say, if we don't accelerate AI, we're all going to die. And so there's accelerationism. Or they would call people that would... say, hey, we need a bit more regulation on AI. We need to pump the brakes. They would call them doomers. So it was very much a part of their public discourse about basically framing AI as an existential milestone.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
Basically saying that we are on the cusp of developing a technology so powerful that And this is the part where it's up for discussion. It's so powerful, it will make death become obsolete. Or it's so powerful that it might kill us, so we have to be really nice to it. Or it's going to solve all our problems, so it's our moral imperative that we give it everything we've got.
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The "priest of AI" & tech's pursuit of eternal life
I think what that did was create an urgency, right? Not coincidentally... AI requires a boatload of water, boatload of power, a boatload of fossil fuel to make it happen. So I do feel like a lot of this was their making appeals to mobilize resources. They'll basically promote their product as the one solution to all of humanity's problems. If only you invest all your money into them.