Indeed—people are finally thinking “what if ageing has something to do with all the age-related disease?” This is great, so long as you remember that “ageing” is not just one single root cause of age-related disease; rather, it’s a multitude of self-inflicted injuries the body slowly accumulates, which combine to make us frail and disease-prone.
Simulations of that fidelity level would indeed be ridiculously powerful tools, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to reach that level. Also, with a true full-body molecular simulation you’d have the ethical problem that a simulation at that level of detail is for all intents and purposes a human being, and may no longer be ethical to experiment on. The strength of damage repair as a medicinal paradigm is that it exposes a whole host of targets that we can safely go after, confident that doing so will improve function without having a full understanding of how the body works. Often we try to treat disease by changing the way the body works (e.g. statins), but this is very hard to do without side-effects because of how complex and inter-connected the body’s systems are. But the things I call “damage” are age-related changes that are unambiguously bad for you and can in principle be reversed. Doing so might not cure all age-related diseases, but it should prevent them all, since by definition they tend not to occur in people who don’t have a lifetime of age-related changes.
People are absolutely applying the centaur-intelligence thing to ageing already (e.g. Gero, Altos, In Silico), indeed I think all current applications of AI are working in synergy with human intelligence, and I hope it stays that way for as long as possible. It’s good that we are indeed able to benefit from (what currently passes for) AI long before it reaches the level where we can just ask ChatGPT “how do I cure ageing” and it just tells us.
What matters here is what we want. For now, I quite enjoy being made out of meat, and I think most other people do too. Our desires are what they are, and they don’t require justifying, to AGI or to anyone else. Of course, such transformative alterations/extensions to our selves will no doubt be unlocked one day, and I could happily live in a world where people modify themselves in all sorts of different ways, one step at a time, on their own terms, as and when they feel like it.
It’s almost certainly me that’s wrong here—there have been lots of different IFRs quoted so I picked 2% as the highest I could remember hearing, just to be conservative. Lower IFR would strengthen the argument I was making there, and indeed the true number is almost certainly much lower due to e.g. asymptomatic infections.
Indeed—people are finally thinking “what if ageing has something to do with all the age-related disease?” This is great, so long as you remember that “ageing” is not just one single root cause of age-related disease; rather, it’s a multitude of self-inflicted injuries the body slowly accumulates, which combine to make us frail and disease-prone.
Simulations of that fidelity level would indeed be ridiculously powerful tools, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to reach that level. Also, with a true full-body molecular simulation you’d have the ethical problem that a simulation at that level of detail is for all intents and purposes a human being, and may no longer be ethical to experiment on. The strength of damage repair as a medicinal paradigm is that it exposes a whole host of targets that we can safely go after, confident that doing so will improve function without having a full understanding of how the body works. Often we try to treat disease by changing the way the body works (e.g. statins), but this is very hard to do without side-effects because of how complex and inter-connected the body’s systems are. But the things I call “damage” are age-related changes that are unambiguously bad for you and can in principle be reversed. Doing so might not cure all age-related diseases, but it should prevent them all, since by definition they tend not to occur in people who don’t have a lifetime of age-related changes.
People are absolutely applying the centaur-intelligence thing to ageing already (e.g. Gero, Altos, In Silico), indeed I think all current applications of AI are working in synergy with human intelligence, and I hope it stays that way for as long as possible. It’s good that we are indeed able to benefit from (what currently passes for) AI long before it reaches the level where we can just ask ChatGPT “how do I cure ageing” and it just tells us.
What matters here is what we want. For now, I quite enjoy being made out of meat, and I think most other people do too. Our desires are what they are, and they don’t require justifying, to AGI or to anyone else. Of course, such transformative alterations/extensions to our selves will no doubt be unlocked one day, and I could happily live in a world where people modify themselves in all sorts of different ways, one step at a time, on their own terms, as and when they feel like it.
It’s almost certainly me that’s wrong here—there have been lots of different IFRs quoted so I picked 2% as the highest I could remember hearing, just to be conservative. Lower IFR would strengthen the argument I was making there, and indeed the true number is almost certainly much lower due to e.g. asymptomatic infections.