A lot in the news this week made me go back to a piece I wrote just over ten years ago for Porter magazine.
Last weekend, in a custom-built arena on the edge of the Las Vegas Strip, athletes competed in the inaugural Enhanced Games — a sports event where performance-enhancing drugs are not just permitted, but provided. Testosterone, human growth hormone, Adderall. Sixty-two percent of the athletes took stimulants. The drugs come with medical supervision and six-figure salaries. The investors include a German biotech billionaire who injects himself daily and a venture fund backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. The founder calls it a step toward “superhumanity.”
The news cycle has been focused, rightly, on Big Tech — on its billionaire founders and their grip on our attention and our data, on AI and its appetite for our creative output and our jobs. Karen Hao’s new book Empire of AI makes a convincing case that these companies have all the trappings of colonial powers. What’s worrying is the broader empire is bleeding into somewhere most of us haven’t been looking. The drugs we’ve been warned about for years are the drugs being promoted in Las Vegas.
This isn’t new. It is the endpoint of a movement that has been building for nearly forty years. In 1988, a philosopher named Max More founded the Extropy Institute in California, publishing what became the founding doctrine of modern transhumanism — the belief that human beings as currently constituted are merely a starting point. That the body needs upgrading, creativity needs automating, connection needs optimising, and mortality needs solving. And that anyone who finds this dystopian is simply standing in the way of progress. By the mid-2000s, the World Transhumanist Association had moved to Palo Alto.
Peter Thiel has said he plans to live to 120. He injects himself with human growth hormone and has invested in experimental blood-transfusion therapies using plasma from young donors. Sergey Brin has said he hopes to “cure death.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison has spent hundreds of millions on anti-aging research because, he says, “death makes me very angry.” Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur, believes death is optional. He handed his body over to what he calls an anti-aging algorithm and, in December, announced that human immortality by 2039 is “a reasonable target.”
Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neuroscientist whose Huberman Lab podcast became one of the most listened-to shows in the world, built on a premise of science-backed performance optimisation. Using his own physique as proof, he has for years promoted supplements to naturally elevate testosterone while his podcast was sponsored by the companies selling them. In February this year, during an interview with a professional bodybuilder, he revealed he had been on testosterone replacement therapy — 125 milligrams a week — since the age of 45. His fans were furious. One said it was like a weight loss coach selling diet tips while taking Ozempic. Huberman is now a contributor to CBS News.
The harm this normalisation is doing — particularly to young people — is not incidental. It is the point. A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year, examining more than 1,500 boys and men in the US and Canada, found that social media use was directly associated with intentions to use anabolic steroids — and concluded that supplement and drug marketing has become so normalized in online fitness culture that researchers are now calling for media literacy to be treated as a public health intervention. The platforms were designed this way. The infinite scroll, the like button, the autoplay video — these were not accidents of design. They were built deliberately to keep you there, using behavioural science developed at Stanford, by researchers whose alumni went on to build Instagram and write the industry handbook on psychological addiction engineering.
When I wrote my Porter piece in the Summer of 2014, I was trying to understand why America had developed such a uniquely disordered relationship with prescription drugs. Drug-overdose death rates had more than tripled since 1990. Americans were consuming 80 percent of the world’s pain pills despite being only 4.6 percent of the global population. The number of children prescribed stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin had exploded from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million. My friends in London, in Hong Kong, in Johannesburg — when I asked how many children they knew who had been diagnosed with ADHD — looked at me blankly. The diagnosis, like the drug, was largely an American phenomenon, driven not by science but by greed, and a pharmaceutical industry that had, since the late 1990s, been permitted to market prescription drugs directly to American consumers. It’s no surprise that since 2000, the FDA has cited every major ADHD drug — Adderall, Concerta, Focalin among them — for false and misleading advertising.
Last year I wrote about some of the most rigorous scientific research into consciousness underway anywhere in the world — adversarial collaborations funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, in which neuroscientists and professors from Oxford, UCL, Harvard, Yale and MIT (to name a few) design experiments intended to challenge their own theories. The work has been building for decades, is widely published and open-sourced. Still, the academics and scientists involved are the first to admit they don't yet have the answer. Consciousness, one researcher told me, "will remain a mystery for decades."
Earlier this week, Jeff Bezos committed $500 million to a startup called Flourish, which claims to have identified the brain's "core algorithm" and intends to replicate it in silicon. The scientists who have spent their careers on this question — without billionaire backing, without proprietary ambitions, with full humility about what they don't know — have been at it for decades. Rather than fund continued research for the benefit of humanity, Bezos arrives with enough money to distort the entire field — think Mansa Musa passing through Cairo in 1324, distributing so much gold that he crashed the Egyptian economy and devalued the metal for over a decade — not to advance our understanding of what makes us human, but to build a replacement that doesn't need us at all.
I was recently a guest on AI Script to Screen, a podcast hosted by Quint Boa that explores the collision between artificial intelligence and creative industries. Quint told me one of the biggest commercial upticks his production company has seen is requests to resurrect the dead — recreating deceased CEOs in photorealistic AI to address shareholder meetings, generating versions of people from their digital archive so they can keep speaking after they are gone. Val Kilmer, who died two years ago, is apparently returning in a film this summer. Quint asked me how I felt about it all.
What I said was this: it is the finiteness and even the cruelty of life that also makes it beautiful, that inspires gratitude for every day. Val Kilmer was extraordinary not just because of his talent, but because of what was drawn out of him by the people he worked alongside — the collegial, unrepeatable chemistry of human beings making something together. You cannot manufacture that. You can generate a likeness. You cannot generate a life.
Christopher Nolan has never owned a smartphone. Nor does he use email. And he is finishing what may be the most ambitious film of his career by cutting IMAX film by hand. When former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asked whether that was a deliberate rejection of technology, Nolan said: “In my lifetime, we all lived that way. I just haven’t changed.”
That line haunts me. The burden of proof ought not to be on the people who resist. But rather on the people insisting the rest of us need upgrading. Who decided that? And why should we take their word for it?
I’m republishing my Porter piece as part of the All That I Have Met archive. Draw your own conclusions.
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