Got immortality? This man says he has the secret.

Journalist Bari Weiss recently conducted a bizarre interview with Bryan Johnson, a man who has committed his body to the seemingly impossible task of living forever. Johnson is trying everything in his power to maintain biological longevity and believes that it’s actually feasible for us to stay alive long past the 120-year mark.

Johnson begins the conversation by noting how evasion from death is an ancient human interest. Religion, he says, tries to deal with the inevitability of mortality. “‘Don’t die’ is the most fundamental of all human desires,” Johnson said. “What I’m suggesting is right now may be the first time that legitimate Don’t Die is here. Whereas before we’ve had to make up stories, now it’s technically, potentially possible.” Religion for Johnson is just the story we make up to ward off the fear of death and imagine how we might achieve immortality. Suppose, though, that we now have the technology and the knowledge to live forever?

But living forever isn’t Johnson’s only radical endeavor. He also had some provocative things to say about artificial intelligence in his interview with Weiss, who edits the popular Substack publication, The Free Press. Provocative, though, might be too tame an adjective to describe Johnson’s views of AI; others have chimed in calling his comments dystopian, calling attention to the speculative novel by C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, in which a group of bureaucratic academics unleash hell on earth after trying to divine godlike power through their machinery. “The irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God,” said Johnson.

“We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you just say: What have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that the human storytelling got it exactly in the reverse, that we are the creators of God, and that we will create God in our own image.”

When Weiss pointed out that others have tried to create their own version of God without good results, Johnson responded by saying that we are creating an intelligence that goes beyond our capacity “in all things.”

Wrong About Religion

The notion that religion is just about dealing with death, though, seems limited. How to live a meaningful life in light of our mortality is the task for every honest human being, churchgoing or agnostic. Simply being physically alive isn’t enough to sustain humanity’s enduring hunger for a rich and fulfilling life. Victor Frankl wrote of the need for this type of meaning in his great book Man’s Search for Meaning. Contra the Freudians, Frankl wrote that meaning, not pleasure, is the ultimate aim of life. If we have a real purpose, something truly good and beautiful to hold onto in the darkness, we can endure even the most nightmarish of situations.

Johnson’s views on AI sound crazy, but they do reflect a burgeoning hope among technology futurists that computerized superintelligence will indeed somehow solve all the enigmas of existence. What religion did for the ancients, technology will do for us moderns. Paul Kingsnorth talks about this in a piece he did for The Free Press in 2023, writing,

Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems “we are making God.” Transhumanist Elise Bohan says “we are building God.” Futurist Kevin Kelly believes that “we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.” 

Kingsnorth refers to the coming age of “spiritual machines,” in which we will increasingly see technology as the superintelligent saviors of the world. Only, these computerized gods won’t be personal, but mechanical, and they won’t offer meaning, but efficiency. Then, humans will somehow live beyond nature, totally dependent on the machine and more distant than ever from real life, locations, and love.

Living a long life is a great blessing, but what about living a truly meaningful one? I’d rather live short and rich than long and empty.