Why Humanity Needs Death

T his Halloween, maybe it’s time to revive one of history’s most wonderfully demented artistic traditions: the danse macabre, or the dance of death. Featuring peasants and potentates in a manic cotillion with skeletons and corpses, the danse macabre is a late Medieval form of painting meant to drive home the realization that every one of us will meet in the end with the same hard limits. “The paths of glory,” as Thomas Gray wrote, “lead but to the grave.”

This is a word in season for our moment, which is hot with fever dreams of escaping all humanity’s ancestral limits. Death has never been a welcome fact, of course, and certain enterprising adventurers have always felt driven to look for ways of overcoming it. In some sense, the noble tradition of medicine is one big intergenerational effort to prolong life, and this places it among our worthiest sciences. But the revolutionary advent of artificial intelligence seems to have encouraged many tech optimists in the more extreme hope of using machinery to cancel death entirely. The process they envision would involve morphing into something altogether more — or at least other — than human.

“We can ultimately — yeah, this is gonna sound pretty weird, but, um—achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” said Elon Musk in 2019 at a launch event for his biotech company Neuralink. That same year, Musk told the Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma that “you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence.” By “boot loader,” he meant a kind of preparatory software that kickstarts a far more impressive computer system.

The idea is that evolutionary biology has stumbled blindly to the starting point of a far better organized and more advanced stage in the development of life, which will now become wondrously digital. Human minds will either merge with this sublime new machine consciousness, or they will simply go on in the natural course of things to wither and die. There are those who hope, like Musk, to make cyborg immortality possible through neural implants. There are others who envision “backing up” their minds in high-fidelity data transcripts, then sparking the results into life when code finally becomes sophisticated enough to achieve sentience.

At this very moment there exists a startup, Nectome, which advertises a kind of high-tech embalming to preserve dead bodies and brains within minutes of death, locking each dendrite in place. “This level of comprehensive detail allows for tracing the connections of the neurons and synapses throughout the brain,” explains the promotional website. When Nectome was getting started in 2018, one of its early prospective customers was Sam Altman, soon to become CEO of OpenAI. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” said Altman in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

It’s one thing to cure diseases, stave off decline, or otherwise labor to improve the human condition. It’s another thing to set your sights on a state of being beyond the human condition altogether. Those who strive to push past the limits of our present embodied form are typically referred to as “transhumanists,” because of their urge to race across the boundaries that make us what we now are. For the most part, transhumanists picture themselves attaining levels of intelligence, strength, and bliss that would count as superhuman — not simply different but better, across every metric that counts.

At a minimum, though, the future many technologists envision can be described with a more modest Latin prefix: It is post-human. The era of the upright primate is coming to a close, and we must brace ourselves for what comes after. Or so the thinking goes. “I just feel like there’s this vast space of possible modes of being,” said the post-humanist philosopher Nick Bostrom when I interviewed him this month. “It would be hugely presumptuous to imagine that the little janitor’s closet that we so far have explored would somehow be the best possible place in this giant cathedral.”

The problem with this sort of idea is, it always seems to take for granted that after will mean better. Or at least that we can steer ourselves toward a version of the post-human future that will be good to live in. It’s a mystery why that should be, though, when our ideas about what’s good arise universally and exclusively from our humanity.

If our brief time on earth is admittedly a source of agony and sorrow, it can also be a source of wisdom. The certainty of death teaches us, if we let it, to honor each moment of life as an unrecoverable miracle. If our small, breakable bodies leave us dependent on one another, our dependency in turn can inspire empathy, patience, and gratitude. Humanity isn’t modular: Our virtues, as well as our vices, depend specifically on our being the delicate organic creatures that we are.

It could be that an updated version of our species would become wiser, kinder, and more just as well as smarter and stronger. It could equally be that we morph into hideous apex predators, with our current potential for violent savagery magnified and unleashed by our newfound bionic capacities. Things being as they are, the best upgrades would go first to the very rich, effectively splitting the species into an elite group of top-tier models and an unenhanced subaltern class.

Seen in this light, the dark old danse macabre starts to seem oddly comforting. The secret genius of Halloween is that it confronts us, once a year, with the fact of our decaying flesh and the universal pull of the grave. Impressive as our tech innovators are, the smart bet is that they’ll fail in their efforts to reconfigure these basic parameters of human existence. We can certainly hope that all kinds of medical innovations and life improvements, abetted by AI, are in our future. But we should neither hope nor expect to abolish death — which, as our ancestors knew, is the one rite of passage we must all contend with and the one great dance we all must learn to dance.