Life extension as Bryan Johnson lays it out is mostly pseudoscience. He is optimizing for biomarkers, instead of the actual issue. It remains to be proven if these proxies remain useful proxies when optimized for.
The key problem is it seems difficult to iterate over anti aging tech without potentially failing to extend life over many generations. Bryan Johnson’s ideas may work (although if I had to bet on it, I’d put it at no chance at all), but we won’t find out for sure until he has irreversibly aged. AI can theoretically let us predict the effects of life extension drugs without having to wait for the drugs to fail on people.
Don’t see why we necessarily need AGI for this but AlphaFold-7 or something of the likes probably helps a lot.
I see a similar trend in other points like genetic screening and space travel. There’s a rose tinted view of current efforts succeeding in doing anything or having any substantial progress in any category.
SpaceX itself isn’t even economically viable without government subsidies. Substantial space exploration is probably nowhere in sight. We still can’t guarantee rockets won’t explode on launch. (Space flight is hard, and our progress is nowhere near enough for something like space tourism)
Similarly, the state of genetic screening broadly seems there is weak evidence you can reduce the odds of rare diseases by some amount (with large error bars). A far cry from selecting for higher IQ or stronger children.
The default view for most of these fields seems hopeless without much progress in our lifetimes.
We also probably need lots of new ideas to solve climate change, and new ideas will become scarce in the world as populations decline and society collectively shifts to serve the needs of old people. AGI helps us solve this.
SpaceX itself isn’t even economically viable without government subsidies
I’m pretty sure that’s false. Starlink is a money printer and SpaceX dominates the commercial market.
And not only false, but completely backwards. The government has been much more favorable to SpaceX’s competitors than to SpaceX, and on an objective scale I think if SpaceX didn’t have to delay so much to get approval from FAA and Fish & Wildlife, they’d be significantly farther ahead right now.
It’s probably true that SpaceX wouldn’t have gotten off the ground early on without some help (mostly in the form of contracts) from the govt, but that’s not what you said—you said “isn’t even economically viable,” not “would have needed more VC investment to get started but would have easily paid it back by now”
As for guaranteeing rockets won’t explode on launch… SpaceX is getting there. Give them another decade & they’ll be there I think. They key, as they always say, is to do it so freaking many times that every possible way things can go wrong has in fact gone wrong in the past and been fixed. Like with commercial flights.
Starlink may be, but space flight is not. This is an important distinction because that means it will be hard to scale space flight without scaling up StarLink to cover losses in space flight first.
SpaceX got 2.3B in government funding in the last year [1] which is not an insignificant amount. (For reference, “In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million, the WSJ reported.”) If you separate space flight from StarLink revenue, the government is probably a proportionally larger source of funding.
The government is willing to take a loss on contracts to fund activities like space exploration because it’s not constrained by the need for profit. There is no good commercial reason to do these flights, so I would imagine it would be difficult to raise VC money if it would take decades to potentially recoup investments.
As for guaranteeing rockets won’t explode on launch… SpaceX is getting there. Give them another decade & they’ll be there I think. They key, as they always say, is to do it so freaking many times that every possible way things can go wrong has in fact gone wrong in the past and been fixed. Like with commercial flights.
The bar for interesting space travel is more colonization of planets that are far away. I don’t doubt we will eventually fix this problem in the future, but this is probably a lot more limited than what people are imagining or hoping.
“With commercial entities like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin set to be joined by new players in the coming years, experts in the field are predicting that affordable suborbital travel will be available to most of us within a couple of decades.” [2]
Assuming no AGI, this is the likely trajectory. Maybe in decades we can take these suborbital flights without needing to be a billionaire, but I’d imagine most people are thinking of going to Mars or somewhere farther, rather than just leaving Earth momentarily then dipping back.
I think if we wanted something like commercial flights to Mars or Europa in our lifetimes, I’d assume we would have the suborbital flights commercialized already and have semi-frequent non-commercial flights to those destinations.
“X got its start with government subsidies and contracts” is a veeeeerrry different claim from “X is not even economically viable without government subsidies.” The distinction between subsidies and contracts is important, and the distinction between getting started and long-term viability is important.
I don’t think if almost half their revenue is still coming from the government, and probably more of their space flight revenue, you can say SpaceX only got its start with government subsidies and contracts.
I also find the comparison with plane flights strange. There is a lot of value for consumers to go between countries. Business flights and tourism means many flights produce more value than they cost, giving us reasons to fund them. In comparison there aren’t many ways for a space tourist flight to produce more value than they consume.
So plane flights should not be the parallel drawn. Maybe deep-sea submarine rides are a more accurate comparison, which are still very expensive and dangerous. The primary customer of deep-sea submarine rides is still the government and government funded researchers.
I hope to drive the point home that no one should expect much progress in space tourism by default without AI advancements. We landed on the moon 53 years ago and despite the overwhelming scientific progress since, you still can’t take a flight there by choice.
Look, I’m not here to argue about the long-term trajectory of space flight with you, I’m here to object to your false and misleading claim about SpaceX. If you concede that point then I’ll go away.
Climate change is exactly the kind of problem that a functional civilization should be able to solve on its own, without AGI as a crutch.
Until a few years ago, we were doing a bunch of geoengineering by accident, and the technology required to stop emitting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the first place (nuclear power) has been mature for decades.
I guess you could have an AGI help with lobbying or public persuasion / education. But that seems like a very “everything looks like a nail” approach to problem solving, before you even have the supposed tool (AGI) to actually use.
We use fossil fuels for a lot more than energy and there’s more to climate change than fossil fuel emissions. Energy usage is roughly 75% of emissions. 25% of oil is used for manufacturing. My impression is we are way over targets for fossil fuel usage that would result in reasonable global warming. Furthermore, a lot of green energy will be a hard sell to developing nations.
Maybe replacing as much oil with nuclear as politically feasible reduces it but does it reduce it enough? Current models[1] assume we invent carbon capture technology somewhere down the line, so things are looking dire.
It’s clear we have this idea that we will partially solve this issue in time with engineering, and it does seem that way if you look at history. However, recent history has the advantage that there was constant population growth with an emphasis on new ideas and entrepreneurship. If you look at what happened to a country like Japan, when age pyramids shifted, you can see that the country gets stuck in backward tech as society restructures itself to take care of the elderly.
So I think any assumptions that we will have exponential technological progress are “trend chasing” per se. A lot of our growth curves almost require mass automation or AGI to work. Without that you probably get stagnation. Economists have projected this in 2015 and it seems not much has changed since. [2]. Now [3].
I think it’s fine to have the opinion that AGI risk of failure could be higher than the risks from stagnation and other existential risks, but I also think having an unnecessarily rose tinted view of progress isn’t accurate. For example, you may be overestimating AGI risk relative to other risks in that case.
Life extension as Bryan Johnson lays it out is mostly pseudoscience. He is optimizing for biomarkers, instead of the actual issue. It remains to be proven if these proxies remain useful proxies when optimized for.
The key problem is it seems difficult to iterate over anti aging tech without potentially failing to extend life over many generations. Bryan Johnson’s ideas may work (although if I had to bet on it, I’d put it at no chance at all), but we won’t find out for sure until he has irreversibly aged. AI can theoretically let us predict the effects of life extension drugs without having to wait for the drugs to fail on people.
Don’t see why we necessarily need AGI for this but AlphaFold-7 or something of the likes probably helps a lot.
I see a similar trend in other points like genetic screening and space travel. There’s a rose tinted view of current efforts succeeding in doing anything or having any substantial progress in any category.
SpaceX itself isn’t even economically viable without government subsidies. Substantial space exploration is probably nowhere in sight. We still can’t guarantee rockets won’t explode on launch. (Space flight is hard, and our progress is nowhere near enough for something like space tourism)
Similarly, the state of genetic screening broadly seems there is weak evidence you can reduce the odds of rare diseases by some amount (with large error bars). A far cry from selecting for higher IQ or stronger children.
The default view for most of these fields seems hopeless without much progress in our lifetimes.
We also probably need lots of new ideas to solve climate change, and new ideas will become scarce in the world as populations decline and society collectively shifts to serve the needs of old people. AGI helps us solve this.
I’m pretty sure that’s false. Starlink is a money printer and SpaceX dominates the commercial market.
And not only false, but completely backwards. The government has been much more favorable to SpaceX’s competitors than to SpaceX, and on an objective scale I think if SpaceX didn’t have to delay so much to get approval from FAA and Fish & Wildlife, they’d be significantly farther ahead right now.
It’s probably true that SpaceX wouldn’t have gotten off the ground early on without some help (mostly in the form of contracts) from the govt, but that’s not what you said—you said “isn’t even economically viable,” not “would have needed more VC investment to get started but would have easily paid it back by now”
As for guaranteeing rockets won’t explode on launch… SpaceX is getting there. Give them another decade & they’ll be there I think. They key, as they always say, is to do it so freaking many times that every possible way things can go wrong has in fact gone wrong in the past and been fixed. Like with commercial flights.
Starlink may be, but space flight is not. This is an important distinction because that means it will be hard to scale space flight without scaling up StarLink to cover losses in space flight first.
SpaceX got 2.3B in government funding in the last year [1] which is not an insignificant amount. (For reference, “In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million, the WSJ reported.”) If you separate space flight from StarLink revenue, the government is probably a proportionally larger source of funding.
The government is willing to take a loss on contracts to fund activities like space exploration because it’s not constrained by the need for profit. There is no good commercial reason to do these flights, so I would imagine it would be difficult to raise VC money if it would take decades to potentially recoup investments.
The bar for interesting space travel is more colonization of planets that are far away. I don’t doubt we will eventually fix this problem in the future, but this is probably a lot more limited than what people are imagining or hoping.
“With commercial entities like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin set to be joined by new players in the coming years, experts in the field are predicting that affordable suborbital travel will be available to most of us within a couple of decades.” [2]
Assuming no AGI, this is the likely trajectory. Maybe in decades we can take these suborbital flights without needing to be a billionaire, but I’d imagine most people are thinking of going to Mars or somewhere farther, rather than just leaving Earth momentarily then dipping back.
I think if we wanted something like commercial flights to Mars or Europa in our lifetimes, I’d assume we would have the suborbital flights commercialized already and have semi-frequent non-commercial flights to those destinations.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tesla-government-money-npr
https://www.space.com/not-far-out-can-games-predict-the-future-of-commercial-space-travel#:~:text=With%20commercial%20entities%20like%20Virgin,within%20a%20couple%20of%20decades.
So, you retract your claim that SpaceX is not economically viable without government subsidies?
What would SpaceX look like without government subsidies or contracts?
“X got its start with government subsidies and contracts” is a veeeeerrry different claim from “X is not even economically viable without government subsidies.” The distinction between subsidies and contracts is important, and the distinction between getting started and long-term viability is important.
I don’t think if almost half their revenue is still coming from the government, and probably more of their space flight revenue, you can say SpaceX only got its start with government subsidies and contracts.
I also find the comparison with plane flights strange. There is a lot of value for consumers to go between countries. Business flights and tourism means many flights produce more value than they cost, giving us reasons to fund them. In comparison there aren’t many ways for a space tourist flight to produce more value than they consume.
So plane flights should not be the parallel drawn. Maybe deep-sea submarine rides are a more accurate comparison, which are still very expensive and dangerous. The primary customer of deep-sea submarine rides is still the government and government funded researchers.
I hope to drive the point home that no one should expect much progress in space tourism by default without AI advancements. We landed on the moon 53 years ago and despite the overwhelming scientific progress since, you still can’t take a flight there by choice.
Look, I’m not here to argue about the long-term trajectory of space flight with you, I’m here to object to your false and misleading claim about SpaceX. If you concede that point then I’ll go away.
Spacex would exist but it would look very different.
Climate change is exactly the kind of problem that a functional civilization should be able to solve on its own, without AGI as a crutch.
Until a few years ago, we were doing a bunch of geoengineering by accident, and the technology required to stop emitting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the first place (nuclear power) has been mature for decades.
I guess you could have an AGI help with lobbying or public persuasion / education. But that seems like a very “everything looks like a nail” approach to problem solving, before you even have the supposed tool (AGI) to actually use.
We use fossil fuels for a lot more than energy and there’s more to climate change than fossil fuel emissions. Energy usage is roughly 75% of emissions. 25% of oil is used for manufacturing. My impression is we are way over targets for fossil fuel usage that would result in reasonable global warming. Furthermore, a lot of green energy will be a hard sell to developing nations.
Maybe replacing as much oil with nuclear as politically feasible reduces it but does it reduce it enough? Current models[1] assume we invent carbon capture technology somewhere down the line, so things are looking dire.
It’s clear we have this idea that we will partially solve this issue in time with engineering, and it does seem that way if you look at history. However, recent history has the advantage that there was constant population growth with an emphasis on new ideas and entrepreneurship. If you look at what happened to a country like Japan, when age pyramids shifted, you can see that the country gets stuck in backward tech as society restructures itself to take care of the elderly.
So I think any assumptions that we will have exponential technological progress are “trend chasing” per se. A lot of our growth curves almost require mass automation or AGI to work. Without that you probably get stagnation. Economists have projected this in 2015 and it seems not much has changed since. [2]. Now [3].
I think it’s fine to have the opinion that AGI risk of failure could be higher than the risks from stagnation and other existential risks, but I also think having an unnecessarily rose tinted view of progress isn’t accurate. For example, you may be overestimating AGI risk relative to other risks in that case.
https://newrepublic.com/article/165996/carbon-removal-cdr-ipcc-climate-change
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/can-long-term-global-growth-be-saved
https://www.conference-board.org/topics/global-economic-outlook#:~:text=Real GDP growth%2C 2023 (%25 change)&text=Global real GDP is forecasted,to 2.5 percent in 2024.