Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)
I confess thoughts of my mortality have hit me pretty hard recently and this idea has given me some hope. It seems like it could be cope but there’s also huge amounts of money in this space (like Altos Labs) and it seems to have come a long way in terms of legitimacy and talent recruitment from a decade ago.
Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.
I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.
Hmm.. While I do expect that in a "business as usual" universe, without transformative AGI, we would still achieve LEV in about 15-30 years, we don't seem to exist in that universe.
I think aging needs to be tackled from a dozen different angles. The odds of dying from a myriad of causes that can loosely be lumped into "old age" rise exponentially with age, according to the Gompertz–Makeham law.
It's not just that things go wrong - it's that when things go wrong, they make other things go wrong faster. Your immune system falters, so you get more infections and malignant cells, which stress your body, which damages your immune system further. Your cells' repair mechanisms slow down, leading to more damage, leading to even slower repairs. It's a death spiral in the most literal sense.
I consider aging to be a very difficult problem to solve. Difficult is very much not the same thing as impossible, given that we have existence proofs of macroscopic organisms with negligible senescence, but I think you're looking at several hundred billions of dollars and a decade or two of research to achieve LEV, in the absence of AGI. We seem to have about an OOM less funding and close to an OOM more time IRL, which I naively would expect to be very roughly equivalent (once again, no AGI).
It would easier to simply replace the body wholesale. If the heart fails, install a cybernetic heart. If the lungs give out, transplant a new, artificially grown organ. The one place where we wouldn't even know where to begin making this work is the brain. I'm still less than totally pessimistic there, because we can regenerate some neuronal tissue, as has been demonstrated with healing damage to the spinal cord.
In the extreme case, we could do destructive brain-scanning, preferably post-mortem, but that would be extremely expensive and slow with current technology, and we can't read the equivalent of the 'weights' in our biological neural network while scanning them, just the connections. That's why we have neural connectomes for some small organisms like C. elegans, but can't truly emulate them yet.
Still, if the average person on this server is 35 years old, we're still looking at 50 years to solve this problem given a reasonable life expectancy today. That is a long time, and I would absolutely not bet against it happening even in the absence of AGI. If I were forced to put up odds, I'd say >70% for LEV in 50 years in the absence of AGI.
Fortunately, or not, we don't seem to live in a world where AGI isn't imminent. That makes me far more bullish on every bit of technology that isn't categorically forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them. At the bare minimum, even if AGI doesn't end up OOMs smarter than us, it still holds the potential to grossly accelerate cognitive and industrial output, giving us more money and resources to throw at the problem. I'm far less peeved these days about {The World} not spending said hundreds of billions at a minimum (I'd prefer trillions) on solving aging, because we are in fact spending comparable sums on achieving AGI, which should speed up the process considerably.
Not that we don't spend much more money on healthcare as a whole, but we go about it in an ass-backwards manner. The GM law tells us that trying to solve the diseases of aging after aging has taken place is closing the stable door after the horses have bolted. If you cure an 80 year old's cancer, then his heart is going to give out in a few more years. Cure that, and his brain will pickle, 'age-related atrophy' being the catch-all phrase when you can't point to a more specific disease like Alzheimer's. You would ideally do much more preventive maintenance, and not change the upholstery and engine oil in an old beater that's on its last legs.
TLDR: I don't worry about dying of old age all that much, even if AI doesn't go FOOM. Our current expenditure on SENS is grossly inadequate, but we would still have 50 years to figure it out for the modal Mottizen. And that's before accounting for us immanetizing the eschaton with superintelligence. Oh, and take ozempic, at this rate it'll probably turn out to cure aging too, and not just obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's and gambling addictions (this is only 75% a joke).
For a good overview of the state of anti-aging as it currently stands:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWAmkSqLE4YMQRuhj/a-primer-on-the-current-state-of-longevity-research
I have to disagree. All of this is ridiculous optimism. You can’t describe the mechanisms, the technology, the research routes. “AI will figure it out”. We’re yet to even figure out whether AI trained on human reasoning can get much smarter than us (collectively). AI could automate 95% of human labor and still not even come close to reasonably extending the lifespan of affluent people in rich countries (presumably automated abundance would have a larger impact on the global lifespan, but I’m not talking about that). This is a particularly strange form of AI hyperoptimism (which even I, someone pretty e/acc, balk at) wherein the technology is essentially magic and all we need is a sufficiently advanced LLM and it will literally be able to derive, deduct and synthesize the sum of human knowledge to suddenly find mountains of undiscovered low hanging fruit that no human being or team of researchers, scientists or capitalists ever even imagined, that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity.
First, the "we can't describe the mechanisms" argument is peculiar. We couldn't describe the mechanisms of most breakthrough technologies before they existed. In 1900, you couldn't have described how digital computers would work. In 1950, you couldn't have detailed how CRISPR gene editing would function. The inability to specify exact mechanisms in advance isn't evidence against feasibility.
But more importantly, we do know many of the mechanisms of aging. We have the Hallmarks of Aging framework. We understand telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and epigenetic alterations. What we lack isn't theoretical understanding - it's the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale.
If there's an AI winter around, it hasn't gotten particularly chilly yet. We can still get improved performance by throwing more compute and data at the problem. Most strikingly, the use of large amounts of synthetic data hasn't caused mode collapse, so we're already bootstrapping.
I think the economy hasn't even digested the full consequences of GPT-4, let alone more recent models. o1 and o3 might be remarkably expensive at the moment (which may not last given the OOMs of cost reductions each model to date seems to experience within its lifetime), but it also demonstrates performance that, for more taxing problems, is worth the expense.
Take a moment to consider deeply what it even means to be asking that question. Implicitly, you seem to acknowledge that a given model can outperform most individual humans, and often in their core domains to boot. So now the goal-post has moved, and is moving fast enough to achieve escape velocity itself.
15 years back, getting an AI model to identify a picture had a bird in it was stunning. (Insert relevant XKCD).
We're also in the middle of a Renaissance in industrial robotics, so it's not like our models are stuck as disembodied yogis either.
Even if AGI only improved modestly, what do you think the implications of having an entity capable of doing knowledge work for far less than minimum wage 24/7 are? Mass unemployment, and probably a lot of economic growth. At the bare minimum, the latter means more money and resources to throw at problems we care about, even the ones we don't seem to care about as much as we should.
Intelligence is powerful. We are still making AI more intelligent, and it's already at the point where it can solve PhD math problems and Terence Tao thinks it's a mediocre grad student (mediocre in the eyes of arguably the most accomplished modern mathematician), and that was a statement on an older model to boot.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We're landing skyscrapers on their tails after circling the globe, most accounts of magic pale in comparison. Even fiction acknowledges "hard" vs "soft" magic systems, with the former being bounded and limited by clearly acknowledged laws, and the latter doing whatever the author feels like today. I am positing, with reasonable confidence, that even ASI is limited by physics. The world today has more Witchcraft and Wizardry than dreamt by anyone burned at the stake or those doing the burning.
What unlocks more technology? Intelligence. What are we scaling up? Intelligence.
It would be more surprising if there were literally no low-hanging fruit. We make advancements every year that turn out to arise from the implications of research and data collected decades ago, but where nobody connected the dots till much later. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is not actually, literally true, and there is absolutely no analogue for the Marketplace of Ideas.
You're arguing with a strawman here. I make no such claims. It might well turn out that reversing aging is incredibly expensive and time consuming even with Singularity tech (even if I think that's unlikely, I can't rule it out). If you told Turing that instantiating the machine god required etching quadrillions of runes on a few inches of silicon, he might balk at that ever happening, not having the luxury of knowing that Moore's law was around the corner. Besides, things that might be disconcertingly expensive for us might well not be so to a much richer and more advanced society.
We could start work on a Dyson Swarm today. It's not particularly hard to build a solar panel and put it in solar orbit. We might even create replicators that speed up the process (humans are Von-Neumann replicators after all), but it doesn't take much of a leap in logic to think that AGI might let us do that far quicker than tens of thousands of years.
Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?
Sure, but this is exactly the issue with what you say when you say:
“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.
Expecting it if the Powers That Be are benevolent enough to want to maintain or improve the standard of living of the billions of people made obsolete? It seems like a necessity, since I consider it unlikely that baseline humans can be augmented to be be competitive with AGI without massive subsidies, and the end result will likely be indistinguishable (I don't necessarily consider this a bad outcome).
Probably true, but not reliably so, and there might well be a period of severe pain along the way. It's well worth preparing for the worst case scenario that isn't just instant death.
"Extremely difficult problems" encompasses a range of difficulties that extend all the way till literally impossible. I think solving aging is a $200 billion and twenty years problem (give or take a hundred billion or a decade) whereas terraforming Mars is, by most estimates, a $several trillion and a century problem.
I would be rather surprised if we didn't end up with anti-aging by 2050, and the majority of the probability mass I'd expect to assign would be in things like WW3, societal collapse or AI x-risk. In other words, I expect that dying from old age is unlikely for us, and if we do die, it's because something else got us first.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you google Bryan Johnson, you'll discover a very wealthy guy who turns his whole life into a mission. The goal of the mission is extending the mission. He eats seeds, berries, and protein compounds, all before like midday, then nothing, injects himself with various substances, sleeps a lot, takes various supplements (until he stops taking them), has weird waxy skin, and declares that he isn't going to die. I'd rather be me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wishful thinking. All of it.
More options
Context Copy link
I am very bearish on this ever happening.
There are islands of longevity where people live for 100+ years very frequently, but everyone with a documented age follows the Bible’s rule that no one lives longer than 120. Bodies just don’t last, even with no sickness people aren’t going to live more than a decade or too longer than the current oldest people.
I believe it actually says 120.
You’re right, edited.
Tangent:
Let's say we get the MacGuffin that extends everyone to 130+ with ease. Does the Pope-At-The-Time allow for suicide after 120?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where? The Blue Zones thing is fake. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-blue-zone-distraction
Probably we could find some real ones somewhere. Monaco seems like a good candidate with a lifespan nearing 90 years old. Chinese-American women live to nearly 92 on average.
But yeah, maximum life span hasn't increased. The worldwide gains in life expectancy are just the result of a higher percentage of people reaching their genetic potential. We'll never have a life expectancy over 100 years old unless we can fix aging itself.
Fair, and I suppose probably unsurprising.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Cancer immunotherapy is great, but it's not going to move the needle on deaths from cancer. You get maybe 30-40% cure rates in advanced melanoma (very difficult to give you exact numbers based on how you slice up your patient population), much lower cure rate in lung cancer and a statistically significant but depressingly small boost in survival for a bunch of other cancers. Typically those with high TMB. Then you have CARs which work wonders for two leukemias, but haven't been made to work in any meaningful way for solid tumors.
if you want to actually move the needle on cancer deaths, you need something with meaningful cure rates for lung cancer (vast majority is NSCLC), pancreatic cancer, prostate/breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Melanoma and ALL/multiple myeloma (leukemias that respond to CARs) don't even make the list.
AI has been great for lit review and protein design but otherwise hasn't really impact bio research yet. Even if they build autonomous agents that can run experiments, I fear they'll be trained on the same dogshit qualitative cartoon literature and it will be largely impossible for them to make the kind of progress singularitarians imagine.
Very bearish, for reasons I've outlined before and don't really have time to get into now. If you want the redux:
Look at Calico. Launched in 2013, raised 2.5 billion, and here's their pipeline. If you aren't used to looking at drug pipelines, theirs is pathetic for the age and funding of the company and...nothing is related to aging?
Aubrey de Grey is a hack. The internal research program at his institute was absolute garbage, and whenever he claimed credit for a significant paper it was because they gave grants to some traditional academic labs.
The vast majority of the drugs right now are small molecules or biologics (mostly antibodies) inhibiting single genes. Maybe you'll find something that can modestly extend lifespan, but aging is complex and poorly understood so the odds of something significant coming out of this approach is unlikely. But it will nevertheless be where most of the money goes.
Books like this seem more promising to me, but have plenty of problems of their own to overcome.
I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years. One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible. There are of course plenty of people who respond poorly to it, but these are usually people in their 80s who were probably close to death anyway. Some of these cases are surprisingly sad, though, beyond the fact that any cancer case is sad. One that I'm working on now involved an 87 year old man who was walking miles every day over challenging terrain without any problem and slipped on ice when out on one of his walks. He hurt his ribs and went to the hospital for a CT scan, which uncovered pleural effusions and was suspicious for meso, which a biopsy confirmed. I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.
I don't know mesothelioma because it's relatively rare, and I don't see patients - just lines on a graph. That being said, it seems like a pretty similar story with 2 year survival rates of 41% versus 27%. Don't get me wrong, if I get cancer I'll take the pembro, but we're laughably far from curing cancer or LEV.
If you get diagnosed with a solid tumor (i.e. not a leukemia), basically you're either lucky and we caught it early enough to remove it entirely by surgery or you're going to die from it with vanishingly rare exceptions.
I imagine that's bad for your bottom line. Or she lived long enough for you to collect?
Yeah. That's the choice to be made. Hopefully he was of sound mind and deciding for himself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I once had a nightmare that eternal longevity tech arrived when I was old. Everyone was frozen where they were, so the young people were 18 forever, but the old people were just old forever. Even excellent cosmetic surgery can't change your age, and with ever growing numbers of billions of people young and hot forever, those who were older - the last generations to ever be old - were discriminated against, ignored, and treated awfully. I'm sure many people have written science fiction stores with this exact plot, but I found it sad anyway.
It's also one of the more likely scenarios, since arresting senescence is likely a more achievable task than reversal.
It is a rather unlikely scenario, I'd go so far as to say ridiculously unlikely. It would mean that even with effectively unbounded amounts of time to tackle the problem we'd make no progress.
Being stuck with the cognition of an 85 year old for another twenty years is far more likely than being stuck that way for a number of years that could extend to Heat Death, or at the very least thousands of years.
More options
Context Copy link
It would make sense. There would be this period of discrimination and living horror that old people would have to endure (100 years as a fragile elder?) before reversal technologies were developed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link