Autocrats and tech bros want to live for ever. Here’s how bleak that future could be | Hanna Thomas Uose

I was in bed scrolling on my phone when I read the title: Hot Mic catheter XI and Putin discussing organ transplants and immortality. It took me a long time to fall asleep after that. Not yetI thought. I am proud of my foreknowledge, but I was not ready for the future that I had imagined arriving so early.

Since 2017, I think of the implications of research on longevity, sketching possible future – society changes, complications and subcultures. This year, I published the result of my thought experience, which wants to live forever, a speculative literary novel. He follows Yuki and Sam, a couple at a crossroads at the same time as a new drug, called Yareta – which extends the 200 -year human life and preserves young people – becomes available. Sam takes it, Yuki does not do it, and the novel follows the fallout while the world changes around them. The story ends in 2039. Naively, given that the billions are paid into research on longevity by Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Bryan Johnson (subject of the Netflix documentary of this year Don Die), I thought it was the duration of my fiction to become reality.

But bros and tech autocrats evolve much faster, which makes the question of the prolonged lifespan more urgent. As the science fiction writer William Gibson said: “The future is already there – it is simply distributed.”

I am not immune to the siren call of a longer life. An elder millennium, I am obsessed with my LED mask and my Trello board, and the relentless march of time always in my mind. My novel is told from the point of view of five characters who have contrasting opinions on immortality, and I feel for everyone. But with regard to authoritarian leaders who live forever, I am unequivocal: this is a nightmarish perspective. Especially when one of them – Vladimir Putin – would have bathed in the blood of Siberian deer woods for his alleged anti -aging properties. There is something horrible about these leaders wishing to accumulate time, to train life, when their regimes shorte the lives of those in Ukraine and myanmar by military action and intervention. Our political leaders should be those who regulate this new technology, without rushing to participate. Has one of them think about societal consequences? Fortunately, I have it.

This technology, upon its arrival, will not be available for everyone. Inevitably, it will be prohibitive for all except the richest. We are looking at which are currently taking place with drugs like Ozempic: those who have the money and the inclination fall from the hundreds per month while others turn to the black market, often finding themselves in A & e, vomiting of blood.

Statistically, in the United Kingdom, the richest are older white men who live in London and Southeast. What will be the consequences of training such a demography to remain disproportionately, so to speak, blocking opportunities for others around them and for the young generations to come? In my novel, a character called Maya feels pushed to take Yareta to advance in her career – without the overtime, she could never be promoted. Even Elon Musk, who in 2022 claimed to have downloaded his brain towards the cloud, could see this, saying: “If you live forever, we could become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.” (Last year, he announced that he prefers to be dead that living at 100 – a relief for all of us.)

This disparity is of course nothing new. In England, there is already a gap of 19 years in the healthy life expectancy between the most and less rich areas. A drug like Yareta would only expand it more. In my fiction, this division leads to a new emerging employment sector with a subclass of aiders who take “risky” work that those on Yareta no longer want to do, like driving, manipulating knives and climbing ladders. Given that no drug can eliminate the risk of accidental death, an intensive health and safety culture sets in, leading to rich “keys” with helmets and neck hobbies during their lifetime, wrapped like ming vases while aid serves as a renewable source of work, each a living butterfly for a brief period of time.

It’s just work. The social order itself will be shaken. Dating applications that filter for users on medication. Parents the same age as their children. Overpopulation or child allowance. Tented relationships as a partner is aging while the other does not do it (as with Peter Pan and Wendy Darling, or Buffy and Angel, this dynamic is difficult to maintain). Romance has always worn a tacit time limit: “forever” is only significant because our lives are not. In my imagined world, marriage gives way to the seven ceremony: renewed wishes or thrown every seven years.

Personally, I can’t wait to age – to meet my elderly face and accumulate more wisdom than I hope to transmit. And then if I am very lucky and I lived until ripe old age, I can’t wait to let everything go. Who would like to be Jeff Bezos, presiding over an empire of cardboard boxes for eternity? I prefer to be a butterfly that gives way to those who do not come.

The words of the poet Joseph Fasano continue to sound around my head with a recently published poem: “Rurling, the children will survive you.” Hopefully he is right.