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Life Extension is Mostly Fake (So Far)
With modern technology, humans are very limited in being able to control how long we live. Beyond avoiding obvious own goals such as smoking or becoming obese, there's really not much one can do to dramatically increase his lifespan. Only about 2% of people will live to 100, and it's mostly down to genetics.
One naive belief that some life extension advocates have is that life expectancy will increase linearly over time. This has not been happening. From 1900–2000, life expectancy in the U.S. increased from roughly 50 to 78. But since then, the number has barely budged. Most of the dramatic increase in life expectancy starting in 1900 was due to better public sanitation that eliminated a handful of deadly infectious diseases. But now the low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not much more we can do by treating disease. For example, if we completely cured skin cancer, it would only increase life expectancy by a few days. And if we somehow cured ALL cancer it would only increase life expectancy by 3.2 years.
People's bodies simply break down over time. We are not machines that have interchangeable parts. We're more like a piece of metal that rusts until it is so fragile the merest touch will shatter it. Until we can address the root cause of death (aging), no amount of medical care can keep a person alive indefinitely.
And we've made very little progress.
Some people had hoped that by eating a near-starvation diet they could slow the course of aging. Unfortunately, as more data has come in it turns out that caloric restriction tends to work really well for worms, less well for mice, and maybe not much at all for larger animals.
In more online places, a man named Bryan Johnson has become famous for his anti-aging "Blueprint" that includes hundreds of daily supplements and other quirky behaviour such as not eating after 11:30am. Johnson insists that, in his mid-40s, he has the mind and body of a man in his 20s. But looking at pictures, it's obvious that this isn't true. Rather than looking like a young man, he looks like an uncanny middle-aged man.
When we look at centarians, we don't see any obvious traits that led to their long life spans except for having long-lived relatives. High IQ is a positive, as is having lots of social connections. But there's no silver bullet and father time comes for everyone. By age 120, it's inevitable you will die, unless we can arrest the aging process. Perhaps a breakthrough is right around the corner. But there haven't been any incremental steps in that direction.
In response to @Glassnoser in particular, I would point out that Kurzweil, as one of the original singularitarians, is likely banking on ASI to bail us out here.
Is aging an incredibly difficult problem? I would be the last to deny it. But is it fundamentally intractable, such that there is no hope at all of an end to it? I can't see a justification. It's an engineering problem, a brutal one, but solutions aren't ruled out by the laws of physics. We have existence proofs that there are organisms with negligible senescence around, and even large animals like sharks that live centuries if they're lucky. It's not a property restricted to jellyfish, and even a mere 50-100 years added to healthy human lifespan would be amazing.
Frankly speaking, I think it's a damning indictment of general rationality that we don't devote an appreciable fraction of GDP to solving it. If I was a billionaire, especially one staring death in the face, I'm not sure how much good my money would do me if I wasn't around to spend it. What good is anything if you're dead?
I think your evaluation of the current situation is quite accurate. There are pretty much no current interventions that would provide a guaranteed century of healthy life. That being said, we're not spending multiple percentages of GDP on the problem (or at least not productively, most medical therapy can be described as ad-hoc patches and sprays of WD-40 on a rusty old beater, when what we need is a full engine replacement and transmission overhaul). And with the potential of creating artificial entities much smarter than us, and soon? I wouldn't bet against it happening in the average remaining life expectancy of us Mottizens.
Yeah about that...
On the other hand, we have both Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Altman from OAI extolling the virtues of test-time compute in the vein of o1 (as the article acknowledges).
Personally, while I find the recent relative stagnation in LLMs to be annoying, it's only been what, two years since GPT-4? There are open source models that beat the OG GPT-4 while being much smaller (Llama 405B versus likely a trillion for 4), and models like Sonnet 3.5 are a small but appreciable improvement. I'm not going to call scaling out until we've spent either another year or a hundred billion USD on it, and we'll have to see how test time compute pans out.
Besides, even Ilya says they're working on their own secret sauce solution. We'll see when we see, it's far far too early to call AGI out of the cards.
Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.
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He's saying that we'll have to scale up something else - inference time is the most obvious choice. Synthetic data is also widely used. Ilya wouldn't be founding his own 'making superintelligence' company if he thought it wasn't possible.
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