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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.
I think immortality is achievable and worth working on, but Kurzweil seems to have some unrealistic beliefs about our current progress. In one of his books, he made the tenuous argument that technology is always accelerating just because technology is used to develop technology, so as technology improves technological progress accelerates. That's the entire basis for his extrapolating all kinds of progress curves out in ways that aren't supported by anything else (other than a few empirical examples like Moore's law, which has slowed down and physically must end soon). He seems to be forcing his beliefs about the current progress on longevity onto these progress curves, despite evidence that the rate of progress is less than it is.
What he is not doing is hoping for a discrete jump in the rate of technological progress due to an artificiaal intelligence break through. He is saying that when we reach longevity escape velocity, it will be because the trend that we are currently seeing will have continued to that point. I think an honest assessment would say that the current trend is not good and something needs to change for us to reach our goal.
Moore's law has slowed down but his point is about a general trend of compute becoming cheaper per dollar, not a specific trend of transistors miniaturizing. He traces out a similar pattern of acceleration back to the dawn of life on Earth, long epochs of tiny creatures, followed by larger and more complex life. And then bang! It's the Anthropocene, goodbye to all the land mammal biomass that isn't us or ours. Even before transistors there was acceleration in compute capacity through electromechanical computing. Presumably acceleration will continue into photonics or some other method, perhaps with a delay period or sudden acceleration. You could argue that it's still accelerating, if you include the software and architectural improvements in the newest GPUs their effective compute/$ for AI tasks is rising faster than before.
I think his AI predictions turned out quite well - his original prediction was AGI by 2029 which looks conservative, if anything. Many today give a date of 2027, assuming all goes according to schedule. Singularity by 2045 is even more conservative. He was saying this back in the early 2000s, so clearly his reading of trend-lines has some merit to it.
His health practices however will probably not stand the test of time.
That stopped happening once Intel stopped being competitive. Compute now costs the same amount per dollar (unless you're Apple and are just buying TSMC the machines); that's why new AMD CPUs are twice the price of the old ones despite not being twice as fast and nVidia's products in particular have the same or worse price/performance ratios than they did 5 years ago.
If Nvidia's products have the same or worse price/performance ratio as 5 years ago then why are they the biggest company in the world today and a minnow five years ago? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
For some tasks, there's no difference. My favourite game Civ IV can run on 20-year old hardware. It runs a little faster on a modern CPU but that's about it.
The 4090 is not really for gaming, it's for mucking around with advanced image-generation, AI and training consumer-level LORAs. For some things the 4090 really is the cheapest way to run it, there is 0 performance per $ for anything below 24 GB of VRAM. Just like how there is 0 performance per $ on the Geforce 3 for most tasks. It doesn't even run modern OSes, you'd be better off with whatever comes with your CPU.
NVIDIA boasts 25x energy efficiency gains over the last generation for its flagship AI processors. OK, that's advertising - round that down to 10x or even 5x... That's still a huge improvement.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/data-center/gb200-nvl72/?ncid=no-ncid
Off topic but whats the best intro to Civ4 for someone who can't even parse the map? Aside from playing the game solo obviously that's the best.
There are beginners playthroughs on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CgBnpbaQFo4 or https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f-pwq6cKwk?list=PLs3acGYgI1-vw-A3LHOb_BDQxKNtv1tze
There's a text guide here (this would be the best IMO for getting started, in terms of efficient reading): https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/
There's a slightly more advanced tactic/strategy guide here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sisiutils-strategy-guide-for-beginners.165632/
The game manual is here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-4-manual.12753/
The map is pretty straightforward. It's all about getting three resources - food, commerce and production. There's a little button you can press on to show the per-tile yields, another one that highlights special resources.
You get the most value in making cities near food resources so they can quickly grow and get pops working other tiles: hills, mineral resources and forests for production or luxury resources/coast/rivers for commerce. Commerce is wealth, culture, espionage and most of all research, you control where exactly it goes with sliders.
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