Too many fanbois on this sub. You have provided no evidence at all, you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Keep hoping, keep wishing. I'm done debating 14 year olds.

As I've read it (remember it), the singularity is the point where new discoveries are made so quickly that it no longer makes sense to try to predict the future. Yes, I believe we will get there if we don't destroy ourselves before it happens. I don't believe it will happen in the next 10-20 years though.

The only way I see to biological immortality soon is to invent some sort of scanning device that can record an entire human being at the atomic level, and then a machine that can emulate hundreds of millions of copies of that human at the atomic level, preferably sped up by a lot, so that many experiments can be run quickly and in parallel. Not sure if that would be ethical for the simulated human, but that's another question. Of course, the machine should be able to design the experiments and learn from them.

I don't think there's a golden bullet for aging, very much like there doesn't seem to be one for cancer. It's probably a lot of slow processes that are all intertwined with many side effects of upsetting the balance.

All this pseudo-philosophical nonsense about entropy isn't going to change the fact that there are major hurdles to be taken before we understand the full complexity of natural systems and have the ability to manipulate it in meaningful ways (escape velocity, immortality). These major hurdles are identification of the right targets / pathways, experimental verification, drug development and testing, and getting the money to finance all of this. None of these steps is currently on a exponential trajectory. Yes, we'll get there, eventually. Everyone in this thread will probably be long dead by then.

Also there's no law saying that there must be pockets of increased complexity to somehow counter balance entropy, that's just a consequence of self organization of molecules, you know the thing that eventually led to life itself.

Man, I have been hearing that same pitch for the last 30 years. Any day now.

Also, if it doesn't happen in the EU and US, it's not happening. There's nowhere near the same amount of biological research. Follow the money, that's all.

The delivery mechanism of the Moderna vaccine was in R&D for multiple decades. The only reason to go to market went that fast was because of the global pandemic, otherwise there would have been another decade of safety testing.

And what does a simple vaccination against a virus have to do with the complexity of life prolongation? They're not even on the same scale.

Drugs need to be safety tested on people and proven effective before anyone would be willing to use it. It's not like we would just scale up what Joseph Mengele did in the concentration camps during WWII. There's a reason clinical trials are expensive. You have to be very careful and very sure before you test things on the first person.

Please enlighten me on what the next steps are to get from a faster, a little bit more accurate simulation (protein fold prediction has been around for 30 years or more) to immortality. Tell me what has changed that is going to make it so much faster to get drugs tested and approved than it used to be.

The wishful thinking in this sub borders on delusion.

Read my comment. Going from a computer prediction to something that will prolong your life, isn't something that scales exponentially. All I said is that we had pretty accurate computer predictions decades ago, and look where that got us. Yes, it's helpful, yes it's better, but it's not game changing when it comes to immortality, and there isn't a clear next exponential step.

The wishful thinking in this sub borders on religion. I am going to unsubscribe since I had enough of this bullshit here.

Why, what does that have to do with anything? Non sequitur.

Good luck making your money back, not being able to sell in the US or Europe.

You know, the experts, people that got PhDs in the stuff, people that spent 30 years studying the field. Not, Reddit experts that watched a sketchy YouTube video and then formed an opinion based on wishful thinking.

A computer program that predicts protein structure a little bit better and faster than the stuff we were using 25 years ago, isn't going to change medicine in a meaningful way without changes in which animal experiments, clinical trials, and FDA approvals are done and financed.

As someone with a long history in the field that keeps current with scientific literature, I'd say "where's the damn progress, because I haven't seen it?". I would be very surprised if something meaningful happens before 2075.

Facts be damned in this sub.

It takes up to a billion dollars and often 10 years to get something from research through FDA approval. Tell me again how it's the same as solving the Go game a little bit early in the timeline.

The majority of R&D today, experimental verification of hypotheses, and overcoming political, economical, and financial challenges are not exponential. They are also not on the brink of being exponential. Therefore, the speed at which life-changing innovation becomes available is not going to go up fast, soon.

This has nothing to do with me underestimating exponential progress. Biological innovation going to the application stage is very much limited by things in which there's no exponential progress possible.

The amount of wishful thinking on this sub borders on that of religion. Everyone wants something from the singularity, whether it's immortality, not having to work, or escape existential dread by living in a VR.

While I have no doubt the singularity will come at some point, I don't think it will happen in the next 5 to 10 years.

Complexity in AI is hugely underestimated (by many, many exponential steps), and all reasons as to why some fields like biology will not grow exponentially, even with a fully functioning AI in place, (financial blocks, time for technology to be adapted, slow experimental verification of predictions, ...) are conveniently skipped over.

The way to prepare is to live your life as if it it's not going to happen, because that is what it's going to feel like for the next 10 years at least.

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.

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.

You go to college for life skills and to get the current state of your profession. After that, you adapt. You need to do that anyway, AI or not. Also, predictions in this sub could be off by 20 years. What are you going to do then?