AI, LONGEVITY & THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE
We Are the Last Generation of Real Humans?
If you had the power to prevent every painful event in your life, would you take it? That question is no longer a philosophical. It is 2030 technology.
For all of human history, we have fought simply to survive. We could not choose whether a child would live, or whether a grandmother would remember us to the end. We could only try to keep up. Now everything is changing. We can design our own future.
Today we can upload the voice, video, and text messages of someone who has died, and an algorithm will answer in their voice. With technologies like optogenetic lasers, we can already switch off the cells tied to a traumatic memory in a mouse. In a human, within a decade.
Suddenly, the power is in our hands.
And the question is what we do with it.
What do we become if we are never allowed to lose, to miss, to long for anything?
What becomes of love if we never grieve?
Everyone will say they would not want their hardships undone. “It made me who I am.” It is a respectable truth — the one we return to ten years later.
But it is not the truth in the moment of pain.
When you are standing there and someone has just ended it. When someone you love has just died. When the diagnosis arrives and you are sitting in the corner of a sofa, unable to breathe. In that moment, you would do anything to make it un-happen.
And now, for the first time in human history, you can.
That is where the real question lies.
Will human beings truly accept loss when they no longer have to? Will we let a painful mark be carved into us if we can erase it? Will we let someone we love die if we can keep them in virtual form — someone who is ninety-nine percent like them?
I do not think we will. Not most of us. Not over time. Human beings are not built to refuse a technological shortcut. When we could numb childbirth, we did. When we could edit the genes of embryos, someone did — in China, in 2018 — even though it was illegal.
We do what we can do. Then we wonder what we should have done.
And if we choose away the pain, what are we then? Can we love if we never grieve?
What most convincingly proves that I exist is not my happiest moments. It is the losses. It is the missing of a grandmother I barely had the chance to know. It is when my mother calls and I know we do not have an infinite number of conversations left.
These are the moments that carve me into being.
A person who has erased her scars is not more whole. She is flat. A skin-coloured app without a history.
We are, in all likelihood, the last generation that will have to live as humans in the sense we have understood the word. Who must grieve. Who must long. Who must endure.
Your children will have every choice. Your grandchildren, more still.
And if we do not stop now and think — they will not be human in the same sense we are.
They will be something else. Perhaps better. Perhaps not.
But they will not be us.
— Mouna