Submitted by TheHamsterSandwich t3_xz1d6t in singularity
Ray Kurzweil's Longevity Escape Velocity Prediction
Kurzweil predicts that longevity escape velocity will be reached before humanity will realize it. According to him, as of 2018, it will be reached in 10-12 years.
Nice post, this is all really good to have in one place
About Dr. Aubrey de Grey predictions and others who work in longevity field, do they also take into consideration how computers and AI will develop in future? What i have noticed in generally with people who work in different fields they don't usually consider how AI progress would affect their field. They usually think linearly.
Aubrey de Grey himself is also a computer scientist, who worked on AI before he switched to geroscience, so I would assume, that he is aware of the progress and the implications of the field of AI on research in general and longevity in particular. Whether other scientists in the longevity field are aware of the exponential progress in AI is hard to tell, but I doubt many are, when even a significant number of AI researchers themselves believe, that AGI is many, many decades away.
I personally don't think, that AI will be a necessity for the first generation of rejuvenation therapies, but will probably be essential in the development of next generation therapeutics afterwards. LEV is a long steady process, that will prolong our lifes with each generation by a decade or two, until we reach generation x, that will finally turn our bodies back into healthy, pristine twenty year old ones.
I don't believe too that AI is necessity at all but AI will speed things up.
>when even a significant number of AI researchers themselves believe, that AGI is many, many decades away.
Is the link you provided your proof of this statement? I'm asking because the Metaculus community prediction is 18 years (less than two decades) from now so I was just wondering if you based your statement on this prediction or on something else/other things. Or both.
When you scroll down on the Metaculus-site, you can see the distribution of predictions.
Here is another source, that shows the division among ai researchers. I group them roughly into two camps; one camp believes AGI is imminent (arrives before 2040) and the other believes, that the current deep learning systems are a dead end and human-level AI is far away.
Oh I see. Thanks for providing me another source!
I personally believe the LEV will be reached by 2050 at the latest, but we'll definitely make significant progress up until that point.
Even if we're not at the LEV, we'll have significantly advanced our understanding of aging and will be able to slow it down a good bit.
If I was a betting man, which I am, I'd wager anyone under the age of 65 has a good chance of making it.
Unless they have health problems.
That goes for everyone to be fair.
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Got to live long enough to get them
Is getting cryogenically frozen a good option? I'm considering it for my parents. Will it even be possible to revive them?
Not right not, last I heard anything over 6 months and your brains are mashed potatoes. Granted it’s been a while since I looked into it.
I feel like the “I have no idea” option should have WAY more votes.
We’re all just hopeful 😂
hopium
It’s a helluva drug
I know, I experienced it in crypto and lost a couple of 100k bucks.
A couple of 100K? Mind if I ask what you do for a living?
Software engineer. who got lucky buying ether in 2016 when it came out. Got insomnia due to stress times in crypto. Again, now having mentioned that, funny thing is how we've been trying to find a cure for sleep for a long time and you guys are announcing LEV in 10 years, you gotta be kidding me right...
Haha I’m not announcing anything! I’m purely hopeful that LEV comes quick enough for me, just like everyone!
Congrats on timing ETH like that. Big enough fortune from it to deal with 100k+ in losses or was it up and down by the same amount of 100k+?
I mean I earned quite a lot of money in the end, but when you loose ca 300k USD in 2-3 days (May 2021) you do not feel really well in your head, your ego plunges to the very absolute bottoms. A friend of mine earns that amount in a year (Oncologist) so he kind of said that it's not that big and you can quickly re-earn that but still...
Yeah I can imagine it has a massive psychological impact. And the turn around in 2021 after the hype was pretty sudden iirc.
You still in the crypto space or did you take you stacks and run?
I ran away. My mental health cannot deal with that anymore. I mean I have to keep myself alive and you cannot really be in IT and do trading unless you are a fucking psychopath resilient to every loss out there.
I've made and lost millions over the years in crypto. Markets are brutal, trading is a lifetime career that must really be focused on with one hundred percent focus, which I now do.
I know, that's why I stick to programming.
My 'cautiously optimistic' ballpark is to pay attention to De Grey's 2035 claim and expect it sometime in that decade. This is partially however due to how long adoption takes in this area due to regulations/testing.
I always feel that De Grey’s predictions are a little optimistic due to his desire to be here for LEV…
But fuck, I hope he’s right! Bring on LEV for everyone!
And his desire to get funding as well. As someone with an academic background in molecular biology, human genetics, and scientific computing, I can say that not a lot of my fellow colleagues take his roadmap seriously (neither do I).
There's a lot of complexity in organisms that we haven't got a clue about. A lot of our molecular biology tools are still rough (even though they're getting much better, there's still a lot of hype). Even if there were an AI to help speed up biology, we still need experiments to confirm existing and to form new hypotheses. Even though lots of automation and high-throughput experiments are being done, there are physical and financial limits that do not confirm to exponential growth.
On top of that, we can't even be sure it's possible at all to live forever. I like to think it is (most likely is my guess), but we may run into a roadblock that can't be overcome.
We fully sequenced the human genome around 2000, and we still don't really understand what all of the genes do, and how they interact. Yes, we know a lot more, but we're only starting to understand all the complexity that comes with epigenetics (turning regions of the genome on/off) and higher-level genome organization. There are going to be more discoveries.
I remember that when the genome came out, the end of all diseases was predicted. It took over 20 years before I got the feeling that we may be on the path to curing some of the first diseases using genome information. Note that sequencing the genome was the low hanging fruit.
I want to be optimistic, but I see the pharmaceutical industry working on the same cash-cow diseases they were 20 years ago (to combat the symptoms, not to cure the disease itself, where's the money in that?). Most of them focus on extending the lifespan of their patents instead of extending our lifespan (so they can keep making money from it).
I have the feeling I was born 100 years too early.
This was a brilliant read, I appreciate you putting the time into the response.
I agree for the most part, but I also cling onto the idea that we literally can’t predict how AI and automation is going to impact things. It’s like an unaccounted for variable that can’t be added to our models of prediction (I think there’s a term for that, like an ‘unpredictable externality’ or something, but I can’t remember what the term is!).
So whilst I agree, let’s just see what happens as AI develops and is integrated into molecular sciences more and more!
Here is what John Carmack says, on why even experts underestimate the progress in their own field of expertise.
He's a programmer, he manipulates bits, things that are subject to the kind of improvements in the digital realm (Moores law, rapid experimentation and prototyping, easy and fast to build upon work done by others, relatively cheap and accessible).
Biology is a whole other animal, because of the experimental part, and the enormous complexity of life. A limitless number of things interacting with lots of other things, with backups and alternative routes, optimizations we don't understand, etc. Just look at how a relatively simple virus like HIV has been studied, how many ways it has to evade the immune system. I think it has been more than 40 years, and we barely made AIDS into a chronic disease that can be managed. That is a virus, something billions times less complex than a mammal.
When I compare the progress made in computing versus biology over the last 20 years, it's not even close. Everyone outside of my field of expertise seem to think biology is something that can be hacked like computers can be. It would require an accurate simulation of an entire human at the molecular level to go as fast as computer science does.
I am not even talking about the costs of doing molecular biology at scale, or putting things on the market. That is prohibitive, holding things back right now. Very few serious players want to cure aging. They're all working on things like Alzheimers, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Don't want to be a party pooper, and I hope to have to eat my words, but I am not holding my breath.
You're right, progress in biology and medicine is much slower and much more expensive, but those fields are turning slowly into information technologies. Narrow AI systems like Alphafold2 are just the beginning and Alphafold came as a big surprise for most structural biologists. So there is hope.
His predictions were always based on massive public funding based on some early progress sparking public outcry.
What does that mean?
Some early progress showing extending life is possible would fuel public demand for funding. Without large scale funding, his estimated time horizon will not happen.
So longevity escape velocity is defined as adding more than one year of life expectancy per year that goes by. That is on a population level. That doesn't necessarily mean every individual in a population is biologically immortal.
Take Ray Kurzweil for example. He's already 74. Even if we add more than 1 year per year for the population in 2030, that doesn't mean Ray personally will achieve LEV. He'd be in his 80s at that point, and will have a much higher per year risk for developing cancer or dementia than someone who is 25. Someone who is 25 may have reached LEV, but someone who is 80 perhaps hasn't.
It's complex maths to solve for the actual risks and probabilities, but you can just use logic to reason thru this.
I like to think about the journey along the way, though. Meaning: it’s not just about the start and end point, many many benefits will come from the parts in between, and that will increase quality of life for many people no matter their age.
Thank goodness the tech billionaires of the world are around 10-30 years older than me. I'll let the billionaires be the alpha testers lol.
probably only with advanced ai. biology is a bitch. we are still using antipsychotics developed in 50s for example
Biology will be our bitch eventually.
Indeed and whole spectrum of STEM fields.
And then we'll be our own bitches
50s were only 70 years ago, with pace of innovation being magnitudes slower, meaning even that fact (that we use antipsychotics that only started in 1950s ) does not imply extremely slow speeds of progress ahead, if we were basing all our practices out of the work made 2 thousand years ago, I would agree it would be a good indicator that few decades would not help us.
people who signed up for cryonics and died all those years back were very, very smart. I wouldn't be surprised if they did end up being revived by ASI in a few decades.
Nonsense. Those cells are fucked
If you listened to any of Aubrey's talks about the topic then you'll know that the man knows A LOT about this. And I think despite having very likely been the victim of a coup and character assassination attempt his new foundation will flourish since some of the deep pocketed donors have already sued most of their money back and invested that in the new foundation.
If anybody in this list got a clue on this, it's him.
I'd guess that many people that are healthy and functional now have a good chance of making it, if they take care of their health and keep up with the latest research.
There's so much new information and science coming out every year, that help us make educated guesses on the best supplements and life habits to slow down aging greatly. And this is all pre-agi. For example, the evidence is currently very strong that regularly donating plasma is likely to greatly slow down aging because it helps detoxify the blood. Then you have senolytics, MTOR inhibitors, etc.
One thing that's important to note, is that LEV for those who keep up with the research and know enough about the field to weed out most pseudoscience/bad products, is not the same LEV for those who wait for things to be proven beyond a doubt, which is not the same as LEV for those who wait until all the treatments are popular enough that most people are doing them, and know about them.
LEV may even be different depending on your biological age. If you've biologically aged too much, then interventions may have a smaller effect than say if you started when you're 20 because damage to one system causes damage to other systems that are interconnected to it, so the less damage/information loss/junk you let build up inside you, the better.
Interesting how none of them predict it will happen outside the cusp of their own lifetime. 🤔
It's already here?
I hope it is soon. I only have 30 years left.
no idea, but reducing agign doesn't mean lev, maybe we will reverse 20 years and then make no progress for 100, maybe lev will happen or will not, who know
>ll reverse 20 years and then make no progress for 100, maybe lev will happen or will not, who know
This hypothesis goes against all current trends in science ... not saying its completely impossible but probability wise - in the age most densely packed with discoveries and advances to be projecting a sudden 100 year freeze of innovation is counter intuitive.
I kind of feel like this is exactly what automobiles did.
You mean they stopped innovating? Modern S class type of a car is technically a very sophisticated robot with hundreds of sensors that only looks similar to a car from 1990s (metal, 4 wheels).
Would be nice if same happened to humans- u would look like a normal human but inside are magnitudes of innovation, edited genes, nano bots etc just how a modern car knows if you fall asleep, knows outdoor weather knows tire pressure, sees impact happen seconds in advance to move your seat and tighten your beld... none of it was in a car even in 2000 I think.
Similarly you can take a look at a modern smartphone, looks similar to say Nokia N97 from what 15 years ago ? But a modern phone has a dedicated AI hardware, does absolute miracles with pixel videon and photography in terms of recognition of objects, extrapolation etc, computationally equal to a server work station from 15 Years ago,again nothing wrong with it looking simular or even behaving similar, it's fundamentally a very different device.
May the odds be ever in your favor!
If only the speed of the GPUs, it's already played, we must see beyond the Ukrainian crisis
I say closer to 20 years
My prediction is the first countries will reach it in the 2040s at the earliest. More likely to be in the 2050s.
There’s a big difference between your 3rd and 4th options. I’d be inclined to say the answer is in between them. Maybe not this century, but I believe it’s achievable.
Voted "Longevity Escape Velocity Will Be Achieved Later This Century". LEV is very speculative idea. We don't know if it is attainable. What I think (or hope) is that by mid-century life expectancy will reach the maximum human life span of ~120 years but in better health than those who reach this age today.
For Kurzweil, I think he is biased toward predicting things to happen during his lifetime. There are no known therapies in clinical trials today that will extend significantly lifespan in the foreseeable future. Such therapies should be in the news, if LEV is going to happen in 10 years' time. Even epigenetic reprogramming, the most advanced concept, is further in the future and its impact, if any, on aging is still unknown.
I think Ray Kurzweil is a bit optimistic because he wants to fall into LEV.
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Sorry guys, but we still don' have a way to cure any chronic illness out there and you're expecting LEV? Less hopium would be welcome
"Age reversal is within reach. Will be gene therapies or molecules that reset the epigenome. AI and CRISPR will help. Labs around the world are doing it safely in mice and even in primates. Unless you’re a pessimist, there’s no reason to think humans are fundamentally different" - David Sinclair
I'm not, but I wanna see that being advertised so that people can try it out, I don't se it yet, hopefully I will soon.
rationalkat t1_irkc624 wrote
Some predictions for LEV: