Can AI Cure Death?

Hi

In a previous post, I asked if AI could make us laugh. 

The answer was a resounding "meh, doubt it". It's time for a different type of question. 

Can AI cure death?

Have you heard of Bryan Johnson? Worth $400 million, or thereabouts. Swallows 111 pills daily. Spends $2 million a year trying to live forever. The man rises at 4:30am, downs precisely 1,977 calories, and is in bed by 8:30pm like some Silicon Valley vampire afraid of the night.

When asked how he'd like to be remembered, Johnson replies: "as still alive."

Fair enough.

But here's where it gets interesting. Johnson's not alone. 

The ultra-rich are throwing money at death like it's a parking ticket they can pay their way out of. 

They're funding AI research into ageing, disease prediction, and genetic manipulation. 

They want their neural patterns uploaded, their consciousness preserved, their mortality deleted like a bad file. Just like in a thousand movies or TV Series. 

In my coming novel, Virtual Witness, (where Hard-Boiled Crime Meets Cutting-Edge Tech) billionaire Adrian Spanker builds OMNI - an AI system that promises to eliminate human error. 

Spanker doesn't just want to fix the world's mistakes. He wants to undo them entirely.

"The old world failed you," Spanker tells his son. "The new one won't."

That's the seductive promise of AI and immortality. No more accidents. No more disease. No more death. Just endless, perfect existence under silicon control.

But here's the rub. Can something artificial truly understand something as human as mortality? Death isn't just biology - it's meaning, urgency, the thing that makes our brief moments matter. 

Take that away and what's left?

Bryan Johnson might live to 200 or even longer. But will he still be human? Or just a very expensive, very bored algorithm?

The novel prompted me to take a closer look at what death is.

At the cellular level, ageing is your body's 'software' slowly corrupting itself. Your telomeres - bit technical, sorry - shorten with each cell division like a fuse burning down. And your mitochondria (sorry, again) break down, producing less energy and more toxic waste. 

DNA accumulates damage. Proteins start folding wrong. The scientist say that's the death process and that it starts in our twenties. 

Can it be stopped? 

In theory, yes.

Mouse lifespans have been extended by up to 40% already. Scientists have reversed ageing in human cells using telomerase activation. They've cleared senescent "zombie" cells and watched tissues regenerate.

It's truly amazing.

The real breakthrough would be AI-designed interventions. Instead of Johnson's sledgehammer approach - 111 pills hoping something works - AI could model your specific breakdown patterns and design personalised gene therapies.

But even if we solve cellular ageing, we'd still have accidents, violence. You might live 200 years only to get hit by one of google's self driving cars.

Which brings us back to Spanker's vision. He's not just trying to cure ageing - he's trying to eliminate all the random chaos that destroys us. 

So can AI cure death? Yes, I think it's possible. We'll certainly see lifespans of 200 years or so. 

But perhaps the real question is whether we'll still be human when we do.

I've been thinking about this for a while and wrote 'Threads', a short story with similar themes. You can download it for free from the link below.

FREE DOWNLOAD: THREADS