With research that spans the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger to modern mythologies in which time reversal plays a crucial role — such as failed time machines, speed of light travel, and occult practices involving speech — Stracke combines science and philosophy in an attempt to defy death through cinema and the notion of time reversal.
Within the coming decades we will be able to create AIs with greater than human intelligence, bio-engineer our species and re-design matter through nanotechnology. How will these technologies change what it means to be human? Director Doug Wolens speaks with leading futurists, computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts, and philosophers who turn over the question like a Rubik’s Cube. Ultimately, if we become more machine-like, and machines more like us, will we sacrifice our humanity to gain something greater? Or will we engineer our own demise? THE SINGULARITY is a comprehensive and insightful documentary film that examines technology’s accelerating rate, and deftly addresses the resulting moral questions.
Life Extended continues Bigert & Bergström’s exploration of the human endeavor to control life and death. In the film, we meet the gerontologist who believes we will be immortal within a near future, the architects who constructs spaces to slow down the aging process, the monk who runs for 1,000 days in order to strengthen his spirit for its immortal journey, the street kids who lives in the moment, and many more. “Today aging is subject to control,” as one biochemist puts it. And the speed with which this biotechnological development is moving indicates that coming generations will live very long lives. Opposing the static image of the stairway of life, the film is constructed as a relay race where people move towards the viewer. Initiated as a work of art, the film envisions a contemporary memento mori for death itself, when death has become nothing but a memory.
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (born 20 April 1963) is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage. An article about SENS published in the viewpoint section of EMBO Reports by 28 scientists concluded that none of de Grey's therapies "has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans". The SENS Foundation, of which de Grey was a co-founder, seems to agree with the EMBO Report as it states, "If you want to reverse the damage of aging right now I'm afraid the simple answer is, you can't." Nonetheless, De Grey argues that this reveals a serious gap in understanding between basic scientists and technologists and between biologists studying aging and those studying regenerative medicine. The 15-member Research Advisory Board of his own SENS Foundation have signed an endorsement of the plausibility of the SENS approach. De Grey is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and an adviser to the Singularity Institute. He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, The Colbert Report, Time, and the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
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