From Phoebus to witches to death clocks. Why we are taking predictive technologies to the extreme

In the following article, I shall focus on emerging technologies that increasingly try to predict our death, i.e. when we will die and from what cause. More precisely, I shall focus on the possible answer to the following philosophical question: why are we taking predictive technologies to the extreme? First, I shall reflect upon the results of recent empirical research. Second, I shall address the issue of taking predictive technologies to the extreme, i.e. predicting one’s death, through philosophical tools, from thought experiments to a philosophical perspective on the possible key reason why we are using emerging technologies’ unprecedented power of prediction to improve more and more our knowledge of when we will die and from what cause. The philosophical answer I propose is the following: even death clocks, together with other kinds of emerging technologies that gain an unprecedented power of prediction, may somehow save us by reactivating our sensemaking whenever our life is uncertain and demanding to the point that we cannot face our open future by planning and acting by ourselves. If it is true that the price we pay, i.e. a kind of automation of our own future, is extremely high, it is also true that, in our unprecedentedly uncertain and demanding time, autonomous sensemaking seems to scare us even more.