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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.

As a medical professional:

This is an accurate statement. Or close enough to not need any hairs split.

That being said, I still expect LEV because:

1)ASI.

  1. Even in the absence of ASI, we're finally making good progress on things like cybernetics, replacement organs and the like. The only organ we can't currently replace, in any meaningful sense, is the brain. For obvious reasons, a transplant wouldn't work. But we are at/close to the point of being able to replace other organs. We've also made progress in applied genetherapy, even if rudimentary. More importantly, enough real money (i.e billions of dollars) is being invested in SENS or regenerative medicine that we can hope to see a difference.

I weakly expect us to achieve LEV in my nominal life expectancy, and probably yours, without ASI. With ASI, that becomes a far stronger expectation, only balanced by the risk of it killing us all.

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