I’m pretty bullish on hypothetical capabilities of AGI, but on first thought decided a 40% chance of “solving aging” and stopping the aging process completely seemed optimistic. Then reconsidered and thought maybe it’s too pessimistic. Leading me to the conclusion that it’s hard to approximate this likelihood. Don’t know what I don’t know. Would be curious to see a (conditional) prediction market for this.
I don’t think it’s necessary to assume ‘stopping the aging process entirely’. I think you can say something like ’slow down the aging process enough that people the age of the author of this post don’t die of old age before the next level of tech comes along (e.g. gradually replacement of failing body parts with cybernetic ones, and eventually uploading to an immortal digital version.)
The 43% in the post are not “chance of solving aging”, it bakes in survival to see it done. And anyway the feasibility of solving aging seems inevitable, there is nothing mysterious about the problem, it just needs enough cognition and possibly experiments over technical details thrown at it, which superintelligence will have many, many orders of magnitude more than enough capability for carrying out. The only issue might be deciding to do something else and leaving humans to die, and the first few months to years when new industry might still be too weak to undertake such projects casually, not technical feasibility.
I’m pretty bullish on hypothetical capabilities of AGI, but on first thought decided a 40% chance of “solving aging” and stopping the aging process completely seemed optimistic. Then reconsidered and thought maybe it’s too pessimistic. Leading me to the conclusion that it’s hard to approximate this likelihood. Don’t know what I don’t know. Would be curious to see a (conditional) prediction market for this.
I don’t think it’s necessary to assume ‘stopping the aging process entirely’. I think you can say something like ’slow down the aging process enough that people the age of the author of this post don’t die of old age before the next level of tech comes along (e.g. gradually replacement of failing body parts with cybernetic ones, and eventually uploading to an immortal digital version.)
The 43% in the post are not “chance of solving aging”, it bakes in survival to see it done. And anyway the feasibility of solving aging seems inevitable, there is nothing mysterious about the problem, it just needs enough cognition and possibly experiments over technical details thrown at it, which superintelligence will have many, many orders of magnitude more than enough capability for carrying out. The only issue might be deciding to do something else and leaving humans to die, and the first few months to years when new industry might still be too weak to undertake such projects casually, not technical feasibility.