one is straightforwardly true. Aging is going to kill every living creature. Aging is caused by complex interactions between biological systems and bad evolved code. An agent able to analyze thousands of simultaneous interactions, cross millions of patients, and essentially decompile the bad code (by modeling all proteins/ all binding sites in a living human) is likely required to shut it off, but it is highly likely with such an agent and with such tools you can in fact save most patients from aging. A system with enough capabilities to consider all binding sites and higher level system interactions at the same (this is how a superintelligence could perform medicine without unexpected side effects) is obviously far above human level.
There are alternative mitigations to the problem:
Anti aging research
Cryonics
I agree that it’s bad that most people currently alive are apparently going to die. However I think that since mitigations like that are much less risky we should pursue them rather than try to rush AGI.
I think the odds of success (epistemic status: I went to medical school but dropped out) are low if you mean “humans without help from any system more capable than current software” are researching aging and cryonics alone.
They are both extremely difficult problems.
So the tradeoff is “everyone currently alive and probably their children” vs “future people who might exist”.
I obviously lean one way but this is what the choice is between. Certain death for everyone alive (by not improving AGI capabilities) in exchange for preventing possible death for everyone alive sooner and preventing the existence of future people who may never exist no matter the timeline.
There are alternative mitigations to the problem:
Anti aging research
Cryonics
I agree that it’s bad that most people currently alive are apparently going to die. However I think that since mitigations like that are much less risky we should pursue them rather than try to rush AGI.
I think the odds of success (epistemic status: I went to medical school but dropped out) are low if you mean “humans without help from any system more capable than current software” are researching aging and cryonics alone.
They are both extremely difficult problems.
So the tradeoff is “everyone currently alive and probably their children” vs “future people who might exist”.
I obviously lean one way but this is what the choice is between. Certain death for everyone alive (by not improving AGI capabilities) in exchange for preventing possible death for everyone alive sooner and preventing the existence of future people who may never exist no matter the timeline.