Dick Pountain /Idealog 377/ 24th November 2025 : 11:39am
Mankind has always hankered after immortality… Sorry about that, but I’ve been overdosing on social media for several weeks and began to worry that my column isn’t bombastic enough. And it’s not just social media either, because last week The Guardian ran a piece about a US investment boom into ‘transhumanist’ technologies like Musk’s Neuralink that claim they’ll enable us to upload our brains and download them again into new bodies. Concerned US scientists say that this is starting to divert funding away from sensible medical research. I’ve written plenty here about the delusions most software engineers (even billionaire ones) harbour about brain function and so am not going there again, except to say that it isn’t static data, it’s an evanescent flux, geddit?
What interests me more is the replacement body aspect, prompted by watching Benicio del Toro’s excellent new film of ‘Frankenstein’, followed by Alex Garland’s equally excellent ‘Ex Machina’ for the third time on TV. Mary Shelley was neither a software engineer nor a neurologist and hence avoided such delusions by getting Victor Frankenstein to use a real, wet brain from another human, along with all the other necessary bits collected from fresh battlefield slaughter. Garland’s egomaniacal Ethan makes a brain for his gorgeous female robot Ava from a lump of a special jelly, which he trained in LLM-style using the output of all the world’s mobile phones (which he stole with the full connivance of the phone companies). It’s as well to remember that the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ originally referred to the crude tricks that playwrights of old used to fill in gaping holes in their plots, and Garland’s movie isn’t just a remarkably prescient prediction of AI lunacy but also a cool and sardonic satire of the industry.
Of course the biggest problem for all transhumanist fantasies is powering the creatures. Shelley evaded this one neatly too, because her Monster just eats food like the rest of us (though the deeply unpleasant Victor F. in the new film probably skimped on his rations). Ava on the other hand appears to plug herself in like a smartphone every night, and a crucial plot-point is that this gives her enough knowledge of the power system to create the electricity blackouts which drive the story to its gory climax. It’s not obvious where she stores charge during the day though since her transparent midriff, while curiously titillating, reveals nothing resembling an adequate battery. And that brings us to the delicate matter of what these creatures are created for.
Victor Frankenstein made it quite clear that his purpose was unambiguously to ‘conquer death’, rather than anything more prosaic or economic, so Mary Shelley didn’t pursue what Victorian industrialists would have used his work for had it succeeded. Garland though is quite clear about
what’s on Nathan’s mind, because he gives Ava functional genitalia and a heterosexual ability to entrance susceptible males. Nathan is basically a dirty middle-aged mogul. A reasonably convincing static version of Ava might be cobbled together today by connecting the latest generation of Chinese Sex Dolls - which I know about solely via a YouTube video I hasten to add - to ChatGPT: they wouldn’t be able to walk and would require mains power, but I’m sure there’s a sizeable market for whom that wouldn’t matter.
During her final fight with Ethan, he rips off one of Ava’s arms, but having dispatched him with a big old kitchen knife she calmly goes to his wardrobe, unplugs an arm from one of his previous girlfriends hanging up there, and snaps it onto her stump. Having wrestled more than I wanted with USB-C 3.2 recently, I find Nathan’s modular nervous system, which can suspend and restore pain, touch and motion to a severed limb via a bayonet snap-on connector, pretty damned impressive. Which leads to the final, caustic, irony of the movie where having escaped Nathan’s mountain eyrie, Ava fulfills her wishes by people-watching at a busy traffic intersection in San Francisco. Where she’s going to recharge herself that night, or obtain any future snap-on appendages is rather glossed over….
So much for the logistics of body replacement. Much physiological research goes on into the ageing process, hoping to discover ways to mitigate it, but my gut feeling that while this might extend lifespans by 25-50% it will eventually hit a wall: we’re made of inescapably perishable materials which need to be continually replenished, and that process must eventually yield to entropy and error-accumulation. But why would anyone want to live forever anyway? The real enemy is not so much death as boredom. History teaches that the pleasures of the flesh, of caviar and Lamborghinis, even of having one’s ego inflated by ruling the world, will eventually pall.
[Dick Pountain has a very long, but finite, attention span]
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