We defend choice everywhere except here
Allison Duettmann runs the Foresight Institute, which she found online while writing a thesis on AI and philosophy in the UK, and which was founded in 1986 — before she was born. What struck her about it then is what she runs it on now: a rare mix of people genuinely ambitious about the long-term future while staying grounded in science and technology.
Foresight was an early gathering point for thinking about the long-term implications of nanotechnology, biotechnology, neurotechnology, AI and space — and, crucially, not only for thinking. The work is figuring out what a positive path through each of them looks like, then funding it, supporting it and helping build it. Based in the Bay Area, with fellows and grantees across Europe, the US east coast and growing cohorts in sub-Saharan Africa.
Her own motivation is unusually direct, and she gives it without hedging. What she wants to avoid is death. She places herself at the radical end — indefinitely increasing health, which she is careful to distinguish from immortality. The point is not living forever. The point is being the one who calls the shots on when you are done.
She traces it to a specific childhood memory: not wanting to sleep, because sleep reminded her of dying — and being unable to understand why nobody else seemed worried. Out of that comes the argument that gives this page its title. We treat freedom of choice as near-sacred in every domain of life, and then decline to apply it to the one condition that makes choice possible at all.
She is equally interested in why people stay quiet about it. She describes a dynamic of falsified preferences: if nobody says it, saying it makes you the odd one out. It is deeply uncomfortable to admit to yourself that you don’t want to die while you still believe you must. Which means the work is two-sided — change the public conversation, and change the medical reality, so that admitting it is not simply painful.
