Eternal youth is a tempting goal, and I hate hate hate getting old and eventually dying probably more that anything, but… There is almost nothing I can do about it personally, and in my estimation the chance of any meaningful progress in the next couple of decades (i.e. reaching anything close to escape velocity) is negligible. Cryonics is a hail Mary option, and I am not sure if it’s worth spending a sizable chunk of my savings (or income) on that. The evaluation of the situation might be similar for others. So, what may look like “not being concerned” is in reality giving up on a hopeless if tempting cause.
I find this viewpoint at odds with the evidence. People who are really attacking this issue, like the SENS research foundation, seem to think that longevity escape velocity is achievable within our lifetimes.
Robert Freitas, who knows more than anyone else alive about the medical applications of nanotechnology, believes that our limitations are due to tooling, and if we had atomically precise manufacturing then all diseases of the body (including aging) would be trivial to solve. He and his partner Ralph Merkle believe that APM could be achieved in 10 years time with proper funding.
Ray Kurzweil, for all his faults, plots some pretty accurate graphs. Those graphs show us achieving the necessary process technology to manipulate matter at the sub-nanometer scale within 20 years, max.
Are you pushing 80 years old? That’s the only reason I can imagine you’d think this beyond your lifetime. Both the SENS and nanotech approaches are constrained by lack of resources, including people working on the problem. This is an area where you could make a difference, if you put in a lot of effort.
I’ve briefly looked into SENS and it comes across as cultish and not very credible. Nanotech would be neat, but getting it working and usable as nanobots swarming human body without extreme adverse effects seems like something achievable but with a timeline of half a century or so. Kurzwell has not had a great track record in forecasting. I think the best chance of extending human lifespan of someone alive today until the aging kinks are worked out is figuring out hibernation: slowing down metabolism 10-20 times and keeping the body in the fridge. But I don’t see anyone working on that, though there is some discussion of it in the context of months-long interplanetary travel.
Kurzwell is completely inept at making predictions from his graphs. He is usually quite wrong in a very naive way. For example, one of his core predictions is when we will achieve human-level AI based on (IIRC) nothing more than when a computer with a number of transistors equal to neurons in the human brain could be bought off-the-shelf for $1000. As if that line in the sand had anything at all to do with making AGI.
But his exponential chart about transistors/$ is simply raw data, and the extrapolation is a straightforward prediction that has held true. He has another chart on the topic of manipulatable feature sizes using various approaches, and that also shows convergence on nanometer-resolution in the 2035-2045 timeframe. I trust this in the same way that I trust his charts about Moore’s law: it’s not a law of nature, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.
Cryonics is around 20 bucks a month if you get it through insurance, plus 120 to sign up.
With that out of the way, I think there is substantial difference between “no LEV in 20 years” and “nothing can be done”. For one thing, known interventions—diet, exercise, very likely some chemicals—can most likely increase your life expectancy by 10-30 years depending on how right you get it, age, health and other factors. For another thing, even if working on the cause, donating to it or advocating for it won’t help yourself, it can still help many people you know and love, not to mention everyone else. Finally, the whole point of epistemic rationality (arguably) is to work correctly with probabilities. How certain you are that there will be no LEV in 20 years? If there’s a 10% chance, isn’t it’s worth giving a try and increasing it a bit? If you ~100% certain, where do you get this information?
Eternal youth is a tempting goal, and I hate hate hate getting old and eventually dying probably more that anything, but… There is almost nothing I can do about it personally, and in my estimation the chance of any meaningful progress in the next couple of decades (i.e. reaching anything close to escape velocity) is negligible. Cryonics is a hail Mary option, and I am not sure if it’s worth spending a sizable chunk of my savings (or income) on that. The evaluation of the situation might be similar for others. So, what may look like “not being concerned” is in reality giving up on a hopeless if tempting cause.
I find this viewpoint at odds with the evidence. People who are really attacking this issue, like the SENS research foundation, seem to think that longevity escape velocity is achievable within our lifetimes.
Robert Freitas, who knows more than anyone else alive about the medical applications of nanotechnology, believes that our limitations are due to tooling, and if we had atomically precise manufacturing then all diseases of the body (including aging) would be trivial to solve. He and his partner Ralph Merkle believe that APM could be achieved in 10 years time with proper funding.
Ray Kurzweil, for all his faults, plots some pretty accurate graphs. Those graphs show us achieving the necessary process technology to manipulate matter at the sub-nanometer scale within 20 years, max.
Are you pushing 80 years old? That’s the only reason I can imagine you’d think this beyond your lifetime. Both the SENS and nanotech approaches are constrained by lack of resources, including people working on the problem. This is an area where you could make a difference, if you put in a lot of effort.
I’ve briefly looked into SENS and it comes across as cultish and not very credible. Nanotech would be neat, but getting it working and usable as nanobots swarming human body without extreme adverse effects seems like something achievable but with a timeline of half a century or so. Kurzwell has not had a great track record in forecasting. I think the best chance of extending human lifespan of someone alive today until the aging kinks are worked out is figuring out hibernation: slowing down metabolism 10-20 times and keeping the body in the fridge. But I don’t see anyone working on that, though there is some discussion of it in the context of months-long interplanetary travel.
Kurzwell is completely inept at making predictions from his graphs. He is usually quite wrong in a very naive way. For example, one of his core predictions is when we will achieve human-level AI based on (IIRC) nothing more than when a computer with a number of transistors equal to neurons in the human brain could be bought off-the-shelf for $1000. As if that line in the sand had anything at all to do with making AGI.
But his exponential chart about transistors/$ is simply raw data, and the extrapolation is a straightforward prediction that has held true. He has another chart on the topic of manipulatable feature sizes using various approaches, and that also shows convergence on nanometer-resolution in the 2035-2045 timeframe. I trust this in the same way that I trust his charts about Moore’s law: it’s not a law of nature, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.
Cryonics is around 20 bucks a month if you get it through insurance, plus 120 to sign up.
With that out of the way, I think there is substantial difference between “no LEV in 20 years” and “nothing can be done”. For one thing, known interventions—diet, exercise, very likely some chemicals—can most likely increase your life expectancy by 10-30 years depending on how right you get it, age, health and other factors. For another thing, even if working on the cause, donating to it or advocating for it won’t help yourself, it can still help many people you know and love, not to mention everyone else. Finally, the whole point of epistemic rationality (arguably) is to work correctly with probabilities. How certain you are that there will be no LEV in 20 years? If there’s a 10% chance, isn’t it’s worth giving a try and increasing it a bit? If you ~100% certain, where do you get this information?