If You Could Live Forever, Would you?

​Peter Diamandis is a futurist with degrees from both MIT and Harvard, and he has spent the past two decades telling us that AI is going to help us live forever.

Well—maybe not forever—but certainly for much longer than we live now.

Diamandis recently declared that it's never been more critical to stay alive for ten more years. If you can survive the next ten years, he suggests, then it's possible you'll gain an extra 50 years of life expectancy.

Upon hearing that, I quickly did the math. So, if I can somehow make it to 72, I'll have a pretty good chance of making it to 122?

I suppose some might do that math and celebrate. But honestly, celebration wasn't my initial response.

I found myself wondering, if given the choice between living to 72 or 122, which would I choose? Maybe because I've already lived long enough to know that one's age is a relatively poor measure of a life.

AI, and technology in general, is already turning the world into a something that is unrecognizable to me compared to the days of my youth when I actually assumed I'd live forever. Now that I'm here, forever looks much different.

I wonder, is it even possible to imagine what the year 2086 will look like? Will 2086 just be a place of deeper longing for 1986?

If I lived an extra fifty years, would my life have more meaning—more purpose—or would the work I do and love be swallowed whole by the algorithms and robots?

And suffering. The last decade I have navigated the burdens of divorce, family estrangements, and other deep losses. Would extended life mean deeper and more extended burdens? Would the joys and sorrows of life simply fall into an even greater imbalance?

The last several years, I've come to accept the finish line of my life is well in view. And—I've committed to finishing well. Finding a late sprint of sorts. But if the finish line moves fifty years into the unknown, does that change what finishing well looks like? Does it change the nature of the race?

I also wonder, this extended life, will everyone have access to it? Or will this longevity escape velocity accelerate the velocity of inequalities that already exist around the world when it comes to matters of life and death?

I don't know the answer to any of the questions above. Much of my writing is wrestling out loud with questions more than it is answering them.

I guess I am just grateful that I have reached a point in my life where I don't see death as an enemy. I have reached a point where I am far more concerned with how my story ends more than I am with when it ends.

I have reached a point where a promise of more birthdays isn't a promise that gets me excited. Don't get me wrong, the possibility of extended life isn't in and of itself a bad thing. But, I have seen people get so excited about the idea of living longer that they forget to get excited about the things well worth living for today.

Dreaming of more tomorrows can be a hurdle to making dreams come true today.

Age is a number. And that number is rarely the whole story.

In fact, when we try to make age the main character in our story, that is often when our story fails to come alive.

Maybe even when it starts to become robotic.