However, although he never specifically embraced the idea of trying to incorporate his own consciousness into a digital circuit, he did the next best thing and made products that seemed to embody his singular philosophy. He was well aware that his own contribution to the fast-forward evolution of technology would necessarily be superseded by others. Not surprisingly for an advocate of the eternal upgrade, he believed death, nature’s built-in obsolescence, to be “life’s greatest invention”. Jobs was, throughout his life, restless for alternative truths. When he received the initial diagnosis of his cancer, he put off recommended surgery for nine months in his obsessive search for alternative cures on the internet, including contacting a psychic, by which time it was too late. Indeed, it seems the Apple co-founder’s stubborn hubris itself helped to dictate his last act. Much of the tragedy of Steve Jobs’s truncated life – he died in October 2011 at 56, eight years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – lies in the fact that for all his ungrammatical ability to “think different”, even he had no answer to the rogue cells that killed him. Old-fashioned myth and legend remain an option. Like moguls and megalomaniacs through the ages, they refuse to believe the timing and nature of their ending might be beyond their compass. Peter Thiel, PayPal’s founder, Larry Page of Google and Larry Ellison of Oracle have each poured some of their millions into projects that scour evolutionary history for the secrets of longevity, that aim to improve the DNA they were born with, or that explore ways to copy and save the circuits of a human brain – notably their own consciousness – to survive digitally long after their physical shutdown. Silicon Valley billionaires, with their boundless digital dreams, have lately turned their attention to the ultimate challenge: the disruption of death.
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