Aleks Krotoski

I know, biology.

And given that they have over the last, I would say, well, 20 years, become essentially brokers of data and our bodies have become much more interpreted through data.

They are thrilled and excited by the reduction of the human experience into ones and zeros.

through smartwatches, apps, trackers, whatever, then they're like, great, all we need to do is reverse engineer the human and we've got this.

So for them, there's a lot of, well, we already know how to do this.

So let's just throw extra data at it and crunch some extra numbers, not to mention AI, which will come up with the solution as well.

But with regards to the first question, why is it that people throughout history have sought to avoid the end is because they cannot imagine what it's like.

This conversation comes out of philosophy, ultimately.

And my deep dive into that was through a really fantastic book that was called Immortality by a philosopher named Stephen Cave.

And Cave's argument is that the experience of mortality is something that we can understand conceptually, but we cannot understand it

truly.

Even if you close your eyes and you imagine yourself not being right now, you're still at the center of that comprehension, still kind of cosplaying not being.

And so this is what he describes as the mortality paradox.

And he says that the mortality paradox, the idea that at some point we simply will not be, and we know it will happen, despite the fact that we live every day pretending that it

will not happen.

He says, this is the thing that's driven civilization.

And it's a really, really compelling argument.

I recommend reading that book.

It's at this point that I truly feel like I need to put my aluminium hat on.

The thing is, is that as like the more I talk about this and the more I see stuff coming in from newspaper articles about this whole space in general, I'm like, no, I'm actually not a crazy conspiracy theorist.