Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)
I confess thoughts of my mortality have hit me pretty hard recently and this idea has given me some hope. It seems like it could be cope but there’s also huge amounts of money in this space (like Altos Labs) and it seems to have come a long way in terms of legitimacy and talent recruitment from a decade ago.
Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.
I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.
Hmm.. While I do expect that in a "business as usual" universe, without transformative AGI, we would still achieve LEV in about 15-30 years, we don't seem to exist in that universe.
I think aging needs to be tackled from a dozen different angles. The odds of dying from a myriad of causes that can loosely be lumped into "old age" rise exponentially with age, according to the Gompertz–Makeham law.
It's not just that things go wrong - it's that when things go wrong, they make other things go wrong faster. Your immune system falters, so you get more infections and malignant cells, which stress your body, which damages your immune system further. Your cells' repair mechanisms slow down, leading to more damage, leading to even slower repairs. It's a death spiral in the most literal sense.
I consider aging to be a very difficult problem to solve. Difficult is very much not the same thing as impossible, given that we have existence proofs of macroscopic organisms with negligible senescence, but I think you're looking at several hundred billions of dollars and a decade or two of research to achieve LEV, in the absence of AGI. We seem to have about an OOM less funding and close to an OOM more time IRL, which I naively would expect to be very roughly equivalent (once again, no AGI).
It would easier to simply replace the body wholesale. If the heart fails, install a cybernetic heart. If the lungs give out, transplant a new, artificially grown organ. The one place where we wouldn't even know where to begin making this work is the brain. I'm still less than totally pessimistic there, because we can regenerate some neuronal tissue, as has been demonstrated with healing damage to the spinal cord.
In the extreme case, we could do destructive brain-scanning, preferably post-mortem, but that would be extremely expensive and slow with current technology, and we can't read the equivalent of the 'weights' in our biological neural network while scanning them, just the connections. That's why we have neural connectomes for some small organisms like C. elegans, but can't truly emulate them yet.
Still, if the average person on this server is 35 years old, we're still looking at 50 years to solve this problem given a reasonable life expectancy today. That is a long time, and I would absolutely not bet against it happening even in the absence of AGI. If I were forced to put up odds, I'd say >70% for LEV in 50 years in the absence of AGI.
Fortunately, or not, we don't seem to live in a world where AGI isn't imminent. That makes me far more bullish on every bit of technology that isn't categorically forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them. At the bare minimum, even if AGI doesn't end up OOMs smarter than us, it still holds the potential to grossly accelerate cognitive and industrial output, giving us more money and resources to throw at the problem. I'm far less peeved these days about {The World} not spending said hundreds of billions at a minimum (I'd prefer trillions) on solving aging, because we are in fact spending comparable sums on achieving AGI, which should speed up the process considerably.
Not that we don't spend much more money on healthcare as a whole, but we go about it in an ass-backwards manner. The GM law tells us that trying to solve the diseases of aging after aging has taken place is closing the stable door after the horses have bolted. If you cure an 80 year old's cancer, then his heart is going to give out in a few more years. Cure that, and his brain will pickle, 'age-related atrophy' being the catch-all phrase when you can't point to a more specific disease like Alzheimer's. You would ideally do much more preventive maintenance, and not change the upholstery and engine oil in an old beater that's on its last legs.
TLDR: I don't worry about dying of old age all that much, even if AI doesn't go FOOM. Our current expenditure on SENS is grossly inadequate, but we would still have 50 years to figure it out for the modal Mottizen. And that's before accounting for us immanetizing the eschaton with superintelligence. Oh, and take ozempic, at this rate it'll probably turn out to cure aging too, and not just obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's and gambling addictions (this is only 75% a joke).
For a good overview of the state of anti-aging as it currently stands:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWAmkSqLE4YMQRuhj/a-primer-on-the-current-state-of-longevity-research
I have to disagree. All of this is ridiculous optimism. You can’t describe the mechanisms, the technology, the research routes. “AI will figure it out”. We’re yet to even figure out whether AI trained on human reasoning can get much smarter than us (collectively). AI could automate 95% of human labor and still not even come close to reasonably extending the lifespan of affluent people in rich countries (presumably automated abundance would have a larger impact on the global lifespan, but I’m not talking about that). This is a particularly strange form of AI hyperoptimism (which even I, someone pretty e/acc, balk at) wherein the technology is essentially magic and all we need is a sufficiently advanced LLM and it will literally be able to derive, deduct and synthesize the sum of human knowledge to suddenly find mountains of undiscovered low hanging fruit that no human being or team of researchers, scientists or capitalists ever even imagined, that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity.
If you google Bryan Johnson, you'll discover a very wealthy guy who turns his whole life into a mission. The goal of the mission is extending the mission. He eats seeds, berries, and protein compounds, all before like midday, then nothing, injects himself with various substances, sleeps a lot, takes various supplements (until he stops taking them), has weird waxy skin, and declares that he isn't going to die. I'd rather be me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link