You know how in prospera, Honduras you can get gene therapy for myostatin inhibitors? (Supposed to help with aging, definitely makes people buff)
I am imagining a future where things go well, in say 2035 a biotech company starts working on aging with a licensed ASI. By 2045-2065 they finally have a viable solution (by a lot of bootstrapping and developing living models), but the FDA obstructs and you can get early access somewhere like Honduras. Just need a few mil cash (ironically third world residents get the first treatments for testing, then billionaires, then hundred millionaires, then...)
Sure 10 years later it gets approved in the USA after much protest and violence, but do you want “died 2 years before the cure” on your tombstone?
That sounds like a knife’s-edge sort of scenario. The treatment arrives neither much earlier nor later but just a year or two before you die (inclusive of all interim medical/longevity improvements, which presumably are nontrivial if some new treatment is curing aging outright) and costs not vastly too much nor vastly below your net worth but just enough that, even in a Christiano-esque slow takeoff where global GDP is doubling every decade & also the treatment will soon be shipped out to so many people that it will drop massively in price each year, that you still just can’t afford it—but you could if only you had been socking away an avocado-toast a month in your 401k way back in 2020?
Yep. And given how short human lifespans are, and how long medical research has historically taken, the ‘blade of the knife’ is 10 years across. With the glacial speed of current medical research it’s more like 20-30.
It’s not fundamentally different from the backyard bunker boom in the past. That’s a knife blade—you’re far enough from the blast not to be killed immediately, but not so far your house doesn’t burn to the ground from the blast wave and followup firestorm. And then your crude bunker doesn’t accumulate enough radioactive fallout for the dose to be fatal, and you don’t run out of supplies before it’s cool enough to survive the wasteland above long enough to escape on foot.
Do you think it’s realistic to assume that we won’t have an ASI by the time you reach old age, or that it won’t render all this aging stuff irrelevant? In my own model, it’s a 5% scenario. Most likely in my model is that we get an unaligned AGI that kills us all or a nuclear war that prevents any progress in my lifetime or even AI to be regulated into oblivion after a large-scale disaster such as a model that can hack into just about anything connected to the Internet bringing down the entire digital infrastructure.
Gwern I have one very specific scenario in mind.
You know how in prospera, Honduras you can get gene therapy for myostatin inhibitors? (Supposed to help with aging, definitely makes people buff)
I am imagining a future where things go well, in say 2035 a biotech company starts working on aging with a licensed ASI. By 2045-2065 they finally have a viable solution (by a lot of bootstrapping and developing living models), but the FDA obstructs and you can get early access somewhere like Honduras. Just need a few mil cash (ironically third world residents get the first treatments for testing, then billionaires, then hundred millionaires, then...)
Sure 10 years later it gets approved in the USA after much protest and violence, but do you want “died 2 years before the cure” on your tombstone?
Does this sound like a plausible scenario?
That sounds like a knife’s-edge sort of scenario. The treatment arrives neither much earlier nor later but just a year or two before you die (inclusive of all interim medical/longevity improvements, which presumably are nontrivial if some new treatment is curing aging outright) and costs not vastly too much nor vastly below your net worth but just enough that, even in a Christiano-esque slow takeoff where global GDP is doubling every decade & also the treatment will soon be shipped out to so many people that it will drop massively in price each year, that you still just can’t afford it—but you could if only you had been socking away an avocado-toast a month in your 401k way back in 2020?
Yep. And given how short human lifespans are, and how long medical research has historically taken, the ‘blade of the knife’ is 10 years across. With the glacial speed of current medical research it’s more like 20-30.
It’s not fundamentally different from the backyard bunker boom in the past. That’s a knife blade—you’re far enough from the blast not to be killed immediately, but not so far your house doesn’t burn to the ground from the blast wave and followup firestorm. And then your crude bunker doesn’t accumulate enough radioactive fallout for the dose to be fatal, and you don’t run out of supplies before it’s cool enough to survive the wasteland above long enough to escape on foot.
Do you think it’s realistic to assume that we won’t have an ASI by the time you reach old age, or that it won’t render all this aging stuff irrelevant? In my own model, it’s a 5% scenario. Most likely in my model is that we get an unaligned AGI that kills us all or a nuclear war that prevents any progress in my lifetime or even AI to be regulated into oblivion after a large-scale disaster such as a model that can hack into just about anything connected to the Internet bringing down the entire digital infrastructure.