It may be a dumb reason to do it, but recently I've started to focus on my health a bit more because of news like this (more exercise and healthier food).
The thinking is, if we find a way to massively extend the human lifespan/reverse aging I want to live long enough for that.
I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that, not taking any chances.
I doubt that we will get there in my lifetime. Science is one thing, and maybe AI will super-charge some of it. But experiments will need to be made, and that needs brick and mortar labs, and labs need money, and at least right now, the absurd amounts of investments are not going in that direction. Oh, and did I mention regulators? They are very, very slow.
There could, however, be some promising signs down the road, like more capable in-silico methods, which will make it possible to bypass some/more of the brick and mortar labs. Another sign to watch for are orders of magnitude more companies and cartels of individuals doing advanced bioengineering outside of USA.
Actually aging research is probably really well funded in comparison. Loads of billionaires are investing. So at least money is not the issue. Morals and time. Sure, and then regulators.
One big thing with aging research is though that it just needs time. No shortcuts really. You don't know it works until the first people love another few years.
Given the massive investments billionaires (maybe even that trillionaire?) have done, and continue doing, in longevity, if a working treatment was discovered I'm sure it will be obscenely expensive.
Every old person with money will want to pay as much as they can, it will be biggest return on investment of history. If even common drugs that cost cents to manufacture are sold for hundreds of dollars, an age reversal drug would be invaluable.
Better stack your chips too. At this point I think there's a fair chance massive life extension will be available before I die, but I likely wont be able to afford it.
I reckon this would be self-correcting. If the average person could reach retirement in such a small fraction of their lifespan, then the vast majority of the population at any given time would be non-productive retirees. The economy would slow until your interest was zero and you'd be forced back to work. Eventually an equilibrium would be reached, wherein the average Joe could look forward to a rewarding and fulfilling career of, say, 450 years or so.
Or work 30 years on, 15 years off or similar. Build a career from scratch, fulfil what you want, then have a sabbatical, then return to a new career in a different field.
Crazy that we can think about immortality and singularity, but capitalism end is out of question. Humanity will probably be extincted in these scenarios and we are still talking about work. Hilarious
I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had about all the crazy, albeit possible, futures that may come. But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism. It must bind alongside their religious adherence receptors. Because it I SO damn entrenched. Like a neural block of sorts.
Pretty ironic to come in here and claim everyone is closed-minded because they were talking about something other than your preferred topic.
> But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism.
But nobody was trying to discuss that. We were discussing how our current systems might adapt to such a huge change as people suddenly living 500 years. You know, because it's a fun thought experiment. People do that. Not everyone lives their entire life on a soapbox.
1. Is that a serious question? Your entire comment embodies that sentiment. Read it again.
2. Your "shift from capitalism". Seriously? Do you not know what you wrote?
3. Buddy, there was no "utterance". If you want someone to consider your thought experiment, it helps to actually bring it up as a topic of conversation. Instead you showed up out of the blue to whine about how nobody spontaneously started talking about it in your absence. Why the hell would we be talking about it?? You weren't here to mention it! You could have said, "hey, consider this", and had a conversation about it, but instead you came out of the gate bitching about how everyone is talking about the wrong thing because we're a bunch of narrow-minded proles.
I can't imagine why your attempts to talk to people about this get shut down. Truly a mystery.
^ Precisely the kinds of folks that simply cannot even begin to begin to think about something alternative to capitalism.
Sorry, that in a thread about possible futures you got your jimmies rustled when some people mention moving away from your deity. Forgive my blasphemy. Please continue your wonderful day.
Show me one single word where anyone has objected to your topic. You are trying so hard to make this conversation about that, but you can't, because it is not your topic, but your shitty attitude that puts people off.
Refuse to acknowledge that all you want. You are doing it at your own expense.
Apersonally I can’t see doing the same thing for more than 40 years. Maybe I’d be an actor, then have a statically, then next time be a sculptor,
Or maybe dig into physics.
But I can also invest in companies? If the population keeps growing, because less people die, the economy might just keep growing. Also if you can get 500 you might want to get more kids. So it will be exponential growth. What could go possible wrong?
> Why? If you can live 500 years just focus 20 years on compound interest hard, then retire for 400 years?
The first version of this technology will only be available to billionaires. So if you reach 70 when it’s invented and are not a billionaire, you’ll never get to try the 500 years of compounding trick
We’re likely to see this stuff get invented in our lifetimes (I’m 38), maybe practical, but we’re def all too old to see it become widely available.
Then again, life extension will not be a singular technology. You could argue antibiotics and vaccines were the first big step and those became affordable within a few decades of invention
Seems like you are interested in living longer. One cool trick to doing that has always been to focus on your health. Are you saying that before recent developments the extension of life benefit wasn't worth it for you? By the way, when you die it's impossible to be "pissed".
Maybe they mean the compromises they're making didn't weigh out enough to be motivating over the thought of just a few more years, but if those few years might make the difference to catching an opportunity for double or more the years it's suddenly motivating enough.
If what you're doing doesn't allow you to see an affordable miracle youth treatment, but it allows you to live your natural life with more quality, it's not dumb.
Well, we aren't purely stochastic machines passively subject to entropy. We also have some DNA repair mechanisms, which work better when we are younger, and maybe could be restored to their youthful function. Plus, if a cell is beyond repair, other mechanisms can simply whack it and it will later be replaced by a new cell grown from the stem cell population (of course with some limits). But that again means having a youthful stem cell population.
This is an uninformed suggestion, but is it possible to take a large collection of cells from across the body and work out which ones carry the untainted DNA by statistical methods?
Sounds like the immortal jellyfish solution. We squeeze entropy out of our DNA by creating a new fresh cell (ovum) that’s very sensitive to genetic defects, meaning if it survives it’s probably good. The jellyfish just shrinks back to a single cell (presumably with some mechanism for keeping the ‘best’ cell) to reset the damage. This is doing the same thing, but piece by piece.
Edit: And wow, that abstract appears to have eaten an entire thesaurus.
Are professionals in that field looking at that abstract and thinking its a good one? My scholarly background was in Geology and I remember a lot of messaging on making the abstract as simple as possible for the reader to grok the paper from that alone. Then, if they wanted to, they could read the rest in detail, where the prose may be more complicated (where necessary)
Because this is the worst timeline, we're getting cell reprogramming used to grow artificial brains to run AI workloads before functional aging remediation... let alone GTA VI.
An individual pancreas cell discovering the secret to immortality is a triumph for that cell, and a real bad thing for the body. This is like that, but for the entire human population.
Even if medical science one day eliminates aging and disease, nobody is going to live forever—eventually you’ll succumb to an accident, or war, or homicide.
I feel like AI has opened a door of plausibility to Black Mirror or Twilight Zone concepts more than any other novel technology in my lifetime.
What if living 300 years meant the entire tempo of human living changes. That we all just slow right down because having control over our aging and when it happens. To be able to decide to extend your 20s… or not. To spend decades in your 30s. How would that change what’s important to us?
I think it's much more likely that those who were first to 200-300 years old will use those years to build resources and deny them to others, especially those not yet modified. It would be a permanent over class. Less Issac Asimov, more Richard K. Morgan.
They cannot survive the next 300 years unless we all survive the next 300 years. A dictator is motivated by having power over others, not being some lone survivalist fending for himself in nature.
If you're listening just covered this the other day, they did a good job, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQFE_3Mr4yQ (If you're listening is generally pretty good)
It turns out that if you trigger all four Yamanaka factors—yeah, turbo cancer. But if you trigger only three of the four, you can trigger a reversion to the stem cell state without the increased cancer risk.
Walk me through it: in order to get dictators killed, because they defend themselves very effectively, we should put everybody on the planet under a biological death sentence, which will get the dictators too.
We should kill the dictators deliberately, improve our biology deliberately, and get stuffy old people like me to change their minds deliberately. No stupid use of death as a proxy, it's a horribly blunt instrument. "Let your ideas die in your place".
Besides, maybe it's the young people who are the most dogmatic. Studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle#Rebuttal If we're going to go around killing people for having rigid ideas, perhaps concentrate on the young ones, for statistical reasons.
That's a perception. Do they, though? If so, why? "I hope I die before I get old", sang The Who. Roger Daltrey is 82. Trump (slightly younger) was one of His Generation, although I expect he probably wasn't a mod. But what I mean is, the coercive oppression visited upon you by your elders is coming from the youth of yesterday, who had it lurking in them latently, waiting to gain status and money and influence. Those things arrive gradually (if at all) along with age, and I guess they make a person complacently comfortable, but the driving cause is that the person is a coercive dogmatist with a drive to oppress inferiors, and always was in most cases, because we don't usually learn to be wronger,* only how to express our terrible attitudes. So age isn't doing this, it's just revealing it.
* Undoubtedly sometimes the spark of malevolence develops into more coherent and sophisticated badness, I have to admit, so an old person has had more time to mature into being truly terrible. But this is against the pressure of rationality.
Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.
I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death.
Moreover, why would you want immortality?
Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.
Here are a few:
The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges (1947)
A man discovers a source of immortality, but eternity eventually destroys the significance of individual experiences. When everything can happen infinitely, nothing feels particularly important.
The Mortal Immortal — Mary Shelley (1833) - also wrote Frankenstein
A man drinks an elixir and lives for centuries without substantially aging. He watches his wife grow old and die, and becomes increasingly alienated from humanity. Shelley focuses on loneliness and the psychological weight of endless time.
All Men Are Mortal — Simone de Beauvoir (1946)
An immortal man lives through centuries of history, relationships, and political upheaval. Gradually he discovers that even extraordinary achievements seem meaningless when time is unlimited.
The Makropulos Affair — Karel Čapek (1922)
A woman lives more than 300 years through an elixir. She retains her youth but becomes emotionally exhausted, cynical, and incapable of finding pleasure.
—
There are more. Sure, these are fiction. But use your imagination. Why would you want immortality, even if you could retain perfect health indefinitely?
Or perhaps these authors could not imagine what being 100+ years of healthspan person would actually be like.
Imagine a civilization where death from biological aging would've happened at the age of 12. Would authors from such civilization be able to predict how a 45 year old would function? Or just extrapolate their (maximum 12) years old experience and come to the conclusion that being past 40 is so psychologically damaging that it would've been better to keep things the default way?
Note that I have just used my imagination, and came to different conclusions, so we are on the equal terms with said authors.
Yes, you used your imagination. But only 45/12 =3.75 times. That puts our projectiok at approximately 100*3.75=375 years. That’s quite different than living several million years or indefinitely.
I just demonstrated the principle. Equating something novel that neither us nor said authors could realistically imagine with something unquestionably bad is a logical fallacy (appeal to ignorance).
> Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.
The context was if biological aging and age-related death can be stopped / prevented / reversed, and I don't see in what you wrote an argument against that. Those are a set of biochemical processes, and if there exist a scientific principle which would prevent modulating them successfully, you didn't name it.
> Moreover, why would you want immortality?
First, this is an orthogonal question. Whether I don't want something to happen, doesn't mean it can't, or won't: I never wanted to be replaced by LLMs, but those got invented anyway. Anyhow, the immortality we're talking about isn't of the kind where you are unable to die no matter what, it's just you don't age. You are permanently 22 - but so is everyone around you. I don't know, maybe it gets boring after 300 years, maybe after 300.000 - but I'd rather try and take myself out when I feel like it than die feeling there's so much more to experience (which is almost certainly going to be the case).
I like Alan Watt's view on death: "it's absurd to worry about death because when you're dead, you've got nothing to worry about, so you'll be alright".
And Neil deGrasse Tyson, I think in reference to life after death: "it's the same as before you were born". Kind of mindblowing perspective - you've already experienced the state of not existing, it's the same as before you were born.
This brings it home that really it's the now you should learn to live and appreciate to the fullest instead, not some future you have no control over. Still struggling how that translates into worrying about my future health, but I suppose there is still the now of the future to worry about.
> Kind of mindblowing perspective - you've already experienced the state of not existing, it's the same as before you were born.
Your consciousness might have existed before, in another body, and it might do so again after your death.
The fact is you don't know what happens after you die. Maybe you'll cease to exist and will never again come into existence, even over all the hundreds of trillions of years yet to come in this universe, and even in any of the who-knows-how-many other universes that will ever exist.
Or maybe the physical requirements to create your specific consciousness will reoccur again and again and again.
You just don't know. Nor does Neil deGrass Tyson. Nor does, for that matter, the pope or the Dalai Lama.
You may want certainty. You may crave it, even need it. But that's too bad, as you'll never have it.
What's interesting to me here is what consciousess even means. I experience it in the moment, that I am sure of. But what about the past consciousness I only have memories of, or a future consciousness I care about to preserve? Lets admit the rules of physics in so far as they explain our observations, how does consciousness fit into this? Take away the meat of my brain (i.e. death), does consciousness still exist? Is there only one consciousness in the universe, except it's experienced only by entities that have chemical processes that translate into things like memory and feeling? What about AI, is there a consciousness in the matrix multiplications? Does a stone have a consciousness?
Wild things to ponder, I wonder if we will ever get a handle on this question.
That's how I've long viewed it. As a practical matter we live "forever." Still makes me a tad nervous if I find myself thinking about it in the dark at 2am, but during the day it is a satisfactory explanation.
Because one lifetime is not enough to experience everything the world has to offer.
If one doesn't have to watch ones spouse, friends and family grow old and die, because it is available widely, that removes some of your objections.
Personally I don't subscribe to the idea that things lose meaning in a longer life, I find it a 'just so' story of self comfort in the face of the inevitable.
> don't know about immortality, but I'd definitely like more than 80 years
You’re changing the subject; this is about immortality. I’d also like to live more than 80 years, and no book can convince me otherwise. But forever? No thanks.
Why would someone want to live 100 years? 80? 60? 40? 20? Were ultimately just saying we like living and would like to keep living until we decide we don’t want to anymore. The thought that people might like living longer than they get is pretty well supported by every dying person who doesn’t want to die rather than just some speculative fiction.
That is a really wanky, lazy, cliched, annoying trope - to a longevity advocate, of course. For the many people who inexplicably think death is friendly and wonderful, these tired old storylines are utterly insightful. (see also: Doctor Who, they did stories about immortality-seeking villains a few times.)
It's a feature of every species that evolves. You can't evolve if you're striving to outcompete your offspring. You quickly game out that not having offspring is the winning chess move there. Now you're not having offspring, and thus you're not evolving. Then the environment changes and you, being unable to adapt in any way, go extinct.
Cheating senescence is kind of the ultimate adaptation. If we can crack this then I'd expect designing other artificial adaptations to be quite tractable in the future.
So it's things like: some people died because there was a famine and they didn't have lactose tolerance (and thus didn't have any cows, or they'd just eat the cows, a detail). Some people died due to having unnecessarily large and sturdy jaws in the era of cooked food. (Not sure how this would cause death, perhaps due to greater surface area for tooth trouble? It's always the teeth.) Then, their offspring - wait, I mean other people's offspring - are more adapted and less vulnerable.
Well sure, we should become less vulnerable, including biologically. But there are better ways to accomplish this than having people killed.
Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.
and the bourgeoisie, a temporary regulation would be needed in those areas of the world to separate the upper class from the capability of the rulers
in western nations where that’s not possible, I could see national bans, but one weak link globally and everyone wealthy will get their treatment there
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It may be a dumb reason to do it, but recently I've started to focus on my health a bit more because of news like this (more exercise and healthier food).
The thinking is, if we find a way to massively extend the human lifespan/reverse aging I want to live long enough for that.
I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that, not taking any chances.
I doubt that we will get there in my lifetime. Science is one thing, and maybe AI will super-charge some of it. But experiments will need to be made, and that needs brick and mortar labs, and labs need money, and at least right now, the absurd amounts of investments are not going in that direction. Oh, and did I mention regulators? They are very, very slow.
There could, however, be some promising signs down the road, like more capable in-silico methods, which will make it possible to bypass some/more of the brick and mortar labs. Another sign to watch for are orders of magnitude more companies and cartels of individuals doing advanced bioengineering outside of USA.
Actually aging research is probably really well funded in comparison. Loads of billionaires are investing. So at least money is not the issue. Morals and time. Sure, and then regulators.
One big thing with aging research is though that it just needs time. No shortcuts really. You don't know it works until the first people love another few years.
I'd be surprised if we don't get close to longevity escape velocity this century, given the rate of AI progress.
Given the massive investments billionaires (maybe even that trillionaire?) have done, and continue doing, in longevity, if a working treatment was discovered I'm sure it will be obscenely expensive.
Every old person with money will want to pay as much as they can, it will be biggest return on investment of history. If even common drugs that cost cents to manufacture are sold for hundreds of dollars, an age reversal drug would be invaluable.
> It may be a dumb reason to do it, but recently I've started to focus on my health a bit more because of news like this
A healthy mind and body leads an organism to want/be able to survive and thrive. Glad to hear you're there now.
> I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that
No, you wouldn't :)
I’d be pissed as I was dying if it seemed like we were on the cusp!
Better stack your chips too. At this point I think there's a fair chance massive life extension will be available before I die, but I likely wont be able to afford it.
Why? If you can live 500 years just focus 20 years on compound interest hard, then retire for 400 years?
I reckon this would be self-correcting. If the average person could reach retirement in such a small fraction of their lifespan, then the vast majority of the population at any given time would be non-productive retirees. The economy would slow until your interest was zero and you'd be forced back to work. Eventually an equilibrium would be reached, wherein the average Joe could look forward to a rewarding and fulfilling career of, say, 450 years or so.
Or work 30 years on, 15 years off or similar. Build a career from scratch, fulfil what you want, then have a sabbatical, then return to a new career in a different field.
Crazy that we can think about immortality and singularity, but capitalism end is out of question. Humanity will probably be extincted in these scenarios and we are still talking about work. Hilarious
Every.single.time.
I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had about all the crazy, albeit possible, futures that may come. But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism. It must bind alongside their religious adherence receptors. Because it I SO damn entrenched. Like a neural block of sorts.
Pretty ironic to come in here and claim everyone is closed-minded because they were talking about something other than your preferred topic.
> But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism.
But nobody was trying to discuss that. We were discussing how our current systems might adapt to such a huge change as people suddenly living 500 years. You know, because it's a fun thought experiment. People do that. Not everyone lives their entire life on a soapbox.
1. Who, where, wherein, whence was that claim made?
2. To which "preferred topic"?
3. Sorry the very utterance of shifting from capitalism is a thought experiment that is simply untenable in your mind.
1. Is that a serious question? Your entire comment embodies that sentiment. Read it again.
2. Your "shift from capitalism". Seriously? Do you not know what you wrote?
3. Buddy, there was no "utterance". If you want someone to consider your thought experiment, it helps to actually bring it up as a topic of conversation. Instead you showed up out of the blue to whine about how nobody spontaneously started talking about it in your absence. Why the hell would we be talking about it?? You weren't here to mention it! You could have said, "hey, consider this", and had a conversation about it, but instead you came out of the gate bitching about how everyone is talking about the wrong thing because we're a bunch of narrow-minded proles.
I can't imagine why your attempts to talk to people about this get shut down. Truly a mystery.
Thank you for proving my point.
^ Precisely the kinds of folks that simply cannot even begin to begin to think about something alternative to capitalism.
Sorry, that in a thread about possible futures you got your jimmies rustled when some people mention moving away from your deity. Forgive my blasphemy. Please continue your wonderful day.
Show me one single word where anyone has objected to your topic. You are trying so hard to make this conversation about that, but you can't, because it is not your topic, but your shitty attitude that puts people off.
Refuse to acknowledge that all you want. You are doing it at your own expense.
Apersonally I can’t see doing the same thing for more than 40 years. Maybe I’d be an actor, then have a statically, then next time be a sculptor, Or maybe dig into physics.
What has capitalism got to do with anything?
But I can also invest in companies? If the population keeps growing, because less people die, the economy might just keep growing. Also if you can get 500 you might want to get more kids. So it will be exponential growth. What could go possible wrong?
How do you image the world will work if everyone is living on "compound interest".
The economy is imploding because a tiny fraction of population is living on "compound interest" even now.
> Why? If you can live 500 years just focus 20 years on compound interest hard, then retire for 400 years?
The first version of this technology will only be available to billionaires. So if you reach 70 when it’s invented and are not a billionaire, you’ll never get to try the 500 years of compounding trick
We’re likely to see this stuff get invented in our lifetimes (I’m 38), maybe practical, but we’re def all too old to see it become widely available.
Then again, life extension will not be a singular technology. You could argue antibiotics and vaccines were the first big step and those became affordable within a few decades of invention
Make a loan and pay for the life extension treatment over your extended lifetime.
If you're late on the monthly payment, they send a guy to repo the life extension.
They'll probably give us 300 years for the low-low price of total serfdom
If most/all human work is replaced by AI, serfdom loses any economic sense.
It'll be like collecting pokemon
How like collecting pokemon? (not familiar with pokemon)
Seems like you are interested in living longer. One cool trick to doing that has always been to focus on your health. Are you saying that before recent developments the extension of life benefit wasn't worth it for you? By the way, when you die it's impossible to be "pissed".
Maybe they mean the compromises they're making didn't weigh out enough to be motivating over the thought of just a few more years, but if those few years might make the difference to catching an opportunity for double or more the years it's suddenly motivating enough.
The difference between a healthy lifestyle and a bad one can be much more than that though, decades or even more if we consider habits like smoking.
Maybe. But that's contingent on serious life extension possibilities only becoming apparent recently.
> I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that, not taking any chances.
You wouldn't be pissed. You'd be dead.
lol, I am kind of in the same mode of thought but just kind of expect it not to happen.
There was a really shitty movie starring Jared Leto I think about the same problem. Being the last guy to miss out on being immortal
Mr. Nobody is not a bad movie!
If what you're doing doesn't allow you to see an affordable miracle youth treatment, but it allows you to live your natural life with more quality, it's not dumb.
There is a rumor that some employees at Anthropic have started smoking to prove their conviction that ASI will be here soon and that it will fix them.
Only something I have seen online, I cannot vouch for its validity
I'm not so sure humanity will be around that long
massive calorie deficit seems to be the best. But then you need to be on the edge of starvation the whole time
More like we solve aging but then we get smacked down by our new AI overlords
But what about cancer? The cell still has the same DNA, so it will keep accumulating mutations over its extended lifetime, right?
Well, we aren't purely stochastic machines passively subject to entropy. We also have some DNA repair mechanisms, which work better when we are younger, and maybe could be restored to their youthful function. Plus, if a cell is beyond repair, other mechanisms can simply whack it and it will later be replaced by a new cell grown from the stem cell population (of course with some limits). But that again means having a youthful stem cell population.
This is an uninformed suggestion, but is it possible to take a large collection of cells from across the body and work out which ones carry the untainted DNA by statistical methods?
Sounds like the immortal jellyfish solution. We squeeze entropy out of our DNA by creating a new fresh cell (ovum) that’s very sensitive to genetic defects, meaning if it survives it’s probably good. The jellyfish just shrinks back to a single cell (presumably with some mechanism for keeping the ‘best’ cell) to reset the damage. This is doing the same thing, but piece by piece.
Edit: And wow, that abstract appears to have eaten an entire thesaurus.
Are professionals in that field looking at that abstract and thinking its a good one? My scholarly background was in Geology and I remember a lot of messaging on making the abstract as simple as possible for the reader to grok the paper from that alone. Then, if they wanted to, they could read the rest in detail, where the prose may be more complicated (where necessary)
Slightly tangential: Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity and cell reprogramming is pretty interesting in context of emergent behaviors in groups of cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)
Because this is the worst timeline, we're getting cell reprogramming used to grow artificial brains to run AI workloads before functional aging remediation... let alone GTA VI.
As a reminder re: aging, SENS Foundation, as well as LEVF (and its ongoing RMR2 experiment) exist.
If something like this ever becomes a practical application on the organismal level, the octogenarian dictators of the world will rejoice.
An individual pancreas cell discovering the secret to immortality is a triumph for that cell, and a real bad thing for the body. This is like that, but for the entire human population.
Even if medical science one day eliminates aging and disease, nobody is going to live forever—eventually you’ll succumb to an accident, or war, or homicide.
I'd say famine is equally as likely if not more at scale.
Eh, we might see some benefit to leaders having a reason to care about stuff 10+ years from now.
I feel like AI has opened a door of plausibility to Black Mirror or Twilight Zone concepts more than any other novel technology in my lifetime.
What if living 300 years meant the entire tempo of human living changes. That we all just slow right down because having control over our aging and when it happens. To be able to decide to extend your 20s… or not. To spend decades in your 30s. How would that change what’s important to us?
I think it's much more likely that those who were first to 200-300 years old will use those years to build resources and deny them to others, especially those not yet modified. It would be a permanent over class. Less Issac Asimov, more Richard K. Morgan.
That'll be the commoners' problem; they'll be planning out how to survive the next 300 years.
They cannot survive the next 300 years unless we all survive the next 300 years. A dictator is motivated by having power over others, not being some lone survivalist fending for himself in nature.
Playing along here, they don’t need /all/ of us to survive, just the desirable ones.
Putin keeps talking about living forever, which makes his nuclear threats a bit less worrisome.
If you're listening just covered this the other day, they did a good job, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQFE_3Mr4yQ (If you're listening is generally pretty good)
I’d be far more worried about this causing turbo cancer than immortality in dictators.
It might be beneficial if it gives turbo cancer to the dictators, of course.
It turns out that if you trigger all four Yamanaka factors—yeah, turbo cancer. But if you trigger only three of the four, you can trigger a reversion to the stem cell state without the increased cancer risk.
Dubious. Do you have a reference or two? In general biological systems are not this simple.
What if we cure cancer with AI very soon? Give it 10 years.
Remind me of the chance some same AI kills us all before 10 years?
Funny you mention that, I guess this is a new cult maxim for the faithful?
https://fixvx.com/Kalshi/status/2109791302674235656?s=20
Save us all from people like this.
To expand, we might find out the hard way that having an expiration date was a feature of our species, not a flaw.
Walk me through it: in order to get dictators killed, because they defend themselves very effectively, we should put everybody on the planet under a biological death sentence, which will get the dictators too.
No, I cannot endorse this.
Science moves forward one death at a time
So at least two systems run better with the implicit time limit.
We should kill the dictators deliberately, improve our biology deliberately, and get stuffy old people like me to change their minds deliberately. No stupid use of death as a proxy, it's a horribly blunt instrument. "Let your ideas die in your place".
Besides, maybe it's the young people who are the most dogmatic. Studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle#Rebuttal If we're going to go around killing people for having rigid ideas, perhaps concentrate on the young ones, for statistical reasons.
Humans who get old and comfortable often become quite terrible people.
That's a perception. Do they, though? If so, why? "I hope I die before I get old", sang The Who. Roger Daltrey is 82. Trump (slightly younger) was one of His Generation, although I expect he probably wasn't a mod. But what I mean is, the coercive oppression visited upon you by your elders is coming from the youth of yesterday, who had it lurking in them latently, waiting to gain status and money and influence. Those things arrive gradually (if at all) along with age, and I guess they make a person complacently comfortable, but the driving cause is that the person is a coercive dogmatist with a drive to oppress inferiors, and always was in most cases, because we don't usually learn to be wronger,* only how to express our terrible attitudes. So age isn't doing this, it's just revealing it.
* Undoubtedly sometimes the spark of malevolence develops into more coherent and sophisticated badness, I have to admit, so an old person has had more time to mature into being truly terrible. But this is against the pressure of rationality.
Of course it's a feature; it still doesn't mean it cannot be stopped or considerably postponed.
I’m always fascinated by people who think death can be “stopped” (not postponed, but eliminated). Fascinating.
Is there a reason why it can't possibly be stopped?
Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.
I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death.
Moreover, why would you want immortality?
Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.
Here are a few:
The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges (1947)
A man discovers a source of immortality, but eternity eventually destroys the significance of individual experiences. When everything can happen infinitely, nothing feels particularly important.
The Mortal Immortal — Mary Shelley (1833) - also wrote Frankenstein
A man drinks an elixir and lives for centuries without substantially aging. He watches his wife grow old and die, and becomes increasingly alienated from humanity. Shelley focuses on loneliness and the psychological weight of endless time.
All Men Are Mortal — Simone de Beauvoir (1946)
An immortal man lives through centuries of history, relationships, and political upheaval. Gradually he discovers that even extraordinary achievements seem meaningless when time is unlimited.
The Makropulos Affair — Karel Čapek (1922)
A woman lives more than 300 years through an elixir. She retains her youth but becomes emotionally exhausted, cynical, and incapable of finding pleasure.
—
There are more. Sure, these are fiction. But use your imagination. Why would you want immortality, even if you could retain perfect health indefinitely?
Or perhaps these authors could not imagine what being 100+ years of healthspan person would actually be like.
Imagine a civilization where death from biological aging would've happened at the age of 12. Would authors from such civilization be able to predict how a 45 year old would function? Or just extrapolate their (maximum 12) years old experience and come to the conclusion that being past 40 is so psychologically damaging that it would've been better to keep things the default way?
Note that I have just used my imagination, and came to different conclusions, so we are on the equal terms with said authors.
Yes, you used your imagination. But only 45/12 =3.75 times. That puts our projectiok at approximately 100*3.75=375 years. That’s quite different than living several million years or indefinitely.
I just demonstrated the principle. Equating something novel that neither us nor said authors could realistically imagine with something unquestionably bad is a logical fallacy (appeal to ignorance).
> Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.
The context was if biological aging and age-related death can be stopped / prevented / reversed, and I don't see in what you wrote an argument against that. Those are a set of biochemical processes, and if there exist a scientific principle which would prevent modulating them successfully, you didn't name it.
> Moreover, why would you want immortality?
First, this is an orthogonal question. Whether I don't want something to happen, doesn't mean it can't, or won't: I never wanted to be replaced by LLMs, but those got invented anyway. Anyhow, the immortality we're talking about isn't of the kind where you are unable to die no matter what, it's just you don't age. You are permanently 22 - but so is everyone around you. I don't know, maybe it gets boring after 300 years, maybe after 300.000 - but I'd rather try and take myself out when I feel like it than die feeling there's so much more to experience (which is almost certainly going to be the case).
> if there exist a scientific principle which would prevent modulating them successfully, you didn't name it.
Why does such a “ scientific principle “ need to exist? So that you could finally point to a clear reason that it’s impossible?
Did Newton’s laws of motion exist before they were described by Newton?
Great list. Also, Anne Rice's Vampire stories.
I like Alan Watt's view on death: "it's absurd to worry about death because when you're dead, you've got nothing to worry about, so you'll be alright".
And Neil deGrasse Tyson, I think in reference to life after death: "it's the same as before you were born". Kind of mindblowing perspective - you've already experienced the state of not existing, it's the same as before you were born.
This brings it home that really it's the now you should learn to live and appreciate to the fullest instead, not some future you have no control over. Still struggling how that translates into worrying about my future health, but I suppose there is still the now of the future to worry about.
> Kind of mindblowing perspective - you've already experienced the state of not existing, it's the same as before you were born.
Your consciousness might have existed before, in another body, and it might do so again after your death.
The fact is you don't know what happens after you die. Maybe you'll cease to exist and will never again come into existence, even over all the hundreds of trillions of years yet to come in this universe, and even in any of the who-knows-how-many other universes that will ever exist.
Or maybe the physical requirements to create your specific consciousness will reoccur again and again and again.
You just don't know. Nor does Neil deGrass Tyson. Nor does, for that matter, the pope or the Dalai Lama.
You may want certainty. You may crave it, even need it. But that's too bad, as you'll never have it.
What's interesting to me here is what consciousess even means. I experience it in the moment, that I am sure of. But what about the past consciousness I only have memories of, or a future consciousness I care about to preserve? Lets admit the rules of physics in so far as they explain our observations, how does consciousness fit into this? Take away the meat of my brain (i.e. death), does consciousness still exist? Is there only one consciousness in the universe, except it's experienced only by entities that have chemical processes that translate into things like memory and feeling? What about AI, is there a consciousness in the matrix multiplications? Does a stone have a consciousness?
Wild things to ponder, I wonder if we will ever get a handle on this question.
> it's the same as before you were born.
That's how I've long viewed it. As a practical matter we live "forever." Still makes me a tad nervous if I find myself thinking about it in the dark at 2am, but during the day it is a satisfactory explanation.
Not everything; only 93% of humans have died, for example. Past != future.
...existing...
Because one lifetime is not enough to experience everything the world has to offer.
If one doesn't have to watch ones spouse, friends and family grow old and die, because it is available widely, that removes some of your objections.
Personally I don't subscribe to the idea that things lose meaning in a longer life, I find it a 'just so' story of self comfort in the face of the inevitable.
I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death.
And if we were meant to fly we'd have wings, and diseases are the gods punishing us for our sins.
Moreover, why would you want immortality?
I don't know about immortality, but I'd definitely like more than 80 years, and I'd like to be in good health for as long as I am alive.
Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.
Yes, and those are almost entirely cope.
> don't know about immortality, but I'd definitely like more than 80 years
You’re changing the subject; this is about immortality. I’d also like to live more than 80 years, and no book can convince me otherwise. But forever? No thanks.
Why would someone want to live 100 years? 80? 60? 40? 20? Were ultimately just saying we like living and would like to keep living until we decide we don’t want to anymore. The thought that people might like living longer than they get is pretty well supported by every dying person who doesn’t want to die rather than just some speculative fiction.
Well if one can live to the heat death of the universe I'll count it as prevented, not postponed, death.
That is a really wanky, lazy, cliched, annoying trope - to a longevity advocate, of course. For the many people who inexplicably think death is friendly and wonderful, these tired old storylines are utterly insightful. (see also: Doctor Who, they did stories about immortality-seeking villains a few times.)
> Doctor Who
This is a bit ironic, considering the lifespan of Time Lords in that universe.
Well, accidents. Inconveniently close supernovas. Something is likely to get you eventually, some few millennia later.
I'm alway fascinated by people who think 80 years of life is the same thing as 1,000 years of life. Fascinating.
It's a feature of every species that evolves. You can't evolve if you're striving to outcompete your offspring. You quickly game out that not having offspring is the winning chess move there. Now you're not having offspring, and thus you're not evolving. Then the environment changes and you, being unable to adapt in any way, go extinct.
Cheating senescence is kind of the ultimate adaptation. If we can crack this then I'd expect designing other artificial adaptations to be quite tractable in the future.
Definitely a feature: Disposable soma theory of Kirkwood. Your germline is the real “you”.
Neurogenesis slows for a similar reason
That’s a coping mechanism because we can’t change it.
Wasn't death a requirement for us to reach this current stage of human evolution? I don't think it is a good idea to stop it entirely.
Evolution of humans by natural selection is already over with - or at least proceeding at time scales irrelevant to our civilization.
"Contrary to popular belief," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
I don't think it matters, mind you.
If it doesn't matter then it is not evolution, right?
So it's things like: some people died because there was a famine and they didn't have lactose tolerance (and thus didn't have any cows, or they'd just eat the cows, a detail). Some people died due to having unnecessarily large and sturdy jaws in the era of cooked food. (Not sure how this would cause death, perhaps due to greater surface area for tooth trouble? It's always the teeth.) Then, their offspring - wait, I mean other people's offspring - are more adapted and less vulnerable.
Well sure, we should become less vulnerable, including biologically. But there are better ways to accomplish this than having people killed.
that's plain wrong... selection continues to this day through ability to reproduce, not longevity
Not sure about death being required. It's more that life after reproductive success is not required.
…that longer life after reproductive exhaustion is not under selection.”
Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.
All it would take would be one billionaire who invested in long term bonds, à la Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…
Indeed; the biggest reason is surely cancer.
Not to mention the two leading septuagenarian dictators: Putin and Xi.
and the bourgeoisie, a temporary regulation would be needed in those areas of the world to separate the upper class from the capability of the rulers
in western nations where that’s not possible, I could see national bans, but one weak link globally and everyone wealthy will get their treatment there
The world of Altered Carbon seems more and more possible every day.
My goodness, what a show that was.-
I heard they based a book on it.
Co-produced by David Ellison and James Vanderbilt.
An undying trillionaire class definitely sounds like a possible future. Not an ideal one, mind you, but definitely in the realm of possibilities.
I'm calling it now, Qatar will be the place that allows these treatments once they're a real thing.
I have to imagine the Uber wealthy are pouring money into youthful longevity science.
The democratization of drones capable of carrying a spicy payload would put a check to that, I imagine.
The Island of Dr. Ellison
Is his name Dracula ? It fits the description. /s
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13634082/
awesome, thanks!
I’m on a ton of lists and I still have tsa pre and global entry
Interesting flex, is that a metric or an American tonne?
there’s enough context to guess