Salvation by Compute: The Promise of Defeating Aging
Techno-optimist discourse no longer promises tools. It promises deliverance: the end of disease, and then of aging itself. This essay does not try to say whether that promise will hold, but examines its shape, which borrows the grammar of religious eschatology. Noting the resemblance is not enough to discredit a claim, on pain of committing the genetic fallacy. What separates science from belief here is not the content of the promise but its relationship to evidence: what result, what failure, would make you give it up? One of the great forms of faith of our era is taking shape in front of us, and it is being written entirely elsewhere.