'To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed': how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about living for ever, it seemed straight out of a sci-fi fantasy. You have everything you could want at your disposal: power, influence, money. But, the problem is, your time at the top is fleeting. In early September, China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about strategies to stay young. "With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality," Putin said via an interpreter to Xi. "There's a chance," he continued, "of also living to 150 [years old]." But is this even possible, and what would it mean for the world if the people with power were able to live for ever? Over the centuries, we have used ever more sophisticated technology to heal ourselves into unprecedented longevity. In the 20th century, it was innovations in public health and medicine that effected this transformation, allowing today's children to live longer, healthier lives than at any time in history.

"These days at 70 years old you are still a child," China's Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying. "With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality," Russia's Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied. In reality, rounds of organ transplantation surgery aren't likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon. And it's a simplistic way to think about aging--a process so complicated that researchers can't agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone "treat" it. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter.

What if you could live forever, staying healthy and young for centuries? Scientists and tech pioneers now believe this dream could become reality. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson follow intense routines, like his'Blueprint' plan, to slow or reverse aging, and companies like Altos Labs are testing treatments that have already extended the lives of mice. Experts say we're on the cusp of technologies that could make immortality possible, and they've even set dates for when this future might arrive. Three visionaries stand out in this quest: futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, Google's Ray Kurzweil, and biomedical researcher Aubrey de Grey.

A tech expert with a track record of predicting sea changes in the industry has made several eye-popping new forecasts in a new book. Google's Ray Kurzweil famously predicted the iPhone era and the fact that a computer would beat someone at chess by 1998. In his new book, 'The Singularity is Nearer', Kurzweil predicts that humans fully merge with AI, becoming immortal cyborgs, by 2045. He also predicts that advancements in AI will make it possible to resurrect loved ones and connect our brains to cloud technology, in what he calls the'fifth epoch' of human intelligence. Google's Ray Kurzweil believes immortality is around the corner (Getty) The singularity is the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually surpass human intelligence, fundamentally changing human existence.

The first few steps on the path toward living forever alongside the longevity enthusiast Bryan Johnson are straightforward: "Go to bed on time, eat healthy food, and exercise," he told a crowd in Brooklyn on Saturday morning. "But to start, you guys are now going to do a breathing exercise." He directed the 100-plus people gathered around him to put their hands on the shoulders of their neighbors, forming a series of concentric circles; he then counted as we inhaled and exhaled in unison. I had arrived at a bouldering gym for the first in a series of events held that day by Johnson, a 46-year-old centimillionaire who made his fortune in Silicon Valley but is best known for waging a war on death that he claims to be winning. His ambitions are somehow greater, and more science-fictional, than those of other biohackers and life-extension fanatics--a group that includes Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

The modern classic mystery game Immortality is finally coming to PS5 on January 23 and it'll cost 20, which is in line with the price on other platforms. It already exists on PC, Xbox Series X/S, Android and iOS. The game was originally released back in 2022. For the uninitiated, Immortality is more of an interactive film trilogy than a video game, recalling full-motion titles from the 1990s. The surreal narrative tasks you with solving the disappearance of an actress named Marissa Marcel.

Johnson spends millions every year in order to find a way to make his organs similar to that of an 18-year-old male. A tech billionaire on a quest to reverse the aging process believes that it is unlikely humanity will survive without the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). Bryan Johnson, a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur, spends millions yearly on a team of experts monitoring his health and conducting experiments. The goal: Get his organs to look and act like that of an 18-year-old. Some of his regiments include a strict bedtime of 8:30 p.m., taking 111 pills daily, collecting his stool samples, and having a small device attached to his penis to monitor nighttime erections.

Tamara Kneese studies how people experience technology. She is a senior researcher at New York-based nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute. Her new book, Death Glitch, examines what happens to our digital belongings when we die, and argues that tech companies need to improve how they deal with death on their platforms for the sake of all our digital posterity. The posthumous fate of our digital belongings seems a morbid topic. Not many people think about their digital legacy, but our digital belongings are accumulating.

Given enough data, one can feel like it's possible to keep dead loved ones alive. With ChatGPT and other powerful large language models, it is feasible to create a more convincing chatbot of a dead person. But doing so, especially in the face of scarce resources and inevitable decay, ignores the massive amounts of labor that go into keeping the dead alive online. Someone always has to do the hard work of maintaining automated systems, as demonstrated by the overworked and underpaid annotators and content moderators behind generative AI, and this is also true where replicas of the dead are concerned. From managing a digital estate after gathering passwords and account information, to navigating a slowly-decaying inherited smart home, digital death care practices require significant upkeep.

In the 1990 fantasy drama - Truly, Madly, Deeply, lead character Nina, (Juliet Stevenson), is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend Jamie (Alan Rickman). Sensing her profound sadness, Jamie returns as a ghost to help her process her loss. If you've seen the film, you'll know that his reappearance forces her to question her memory of him and, in turn, accept that maybe he wasn't as perfect as she'd remembered. Here in 2023, a new wave of AI-based "grief tech" offers us all the chance to spend time with loved ones after their death -- in varying forms. But unlike Jamie (who benevolently misleads Nina), we're being asked to let artificial intelligence serve up a version of those we survive.