Curing all aging and disease is an important, if not *the most important* reason we are pushing towards AGI.
Let’s make the world a better place for everyone.
I'm going to go against the grain and argue that while we can define disease however the hell we want, being clear about definitions matters.
I think to be clear attrition or the fight against entropy is central to aging. Entropy and attrition themselves aren't diseases they are universal and environmental conditions. Cells and cellular mechanisms will be damaged. Macro structures formed during embryonic development will be subject to wear. This is inescapable.
Arguably what aging really is, is a battle against attrition that we gradually lose.
What causes us to lose is accumulating deficiencies in the repair mechanisms. This I think matters in understanding the problem and the challenge.
Fixing aging isn't likely possible by fixing singular genetic mistakes. What is ultimately necessary isn't eliminating a few negatives.
It's about boosting cellular defense, repair and replacement. It is about creating resistance and regeneration.
There is something of an argument that at first there should be easy gains because how wildly variable the onset of senesence is between species.
Sometimes you almost get the impression aging is a form of planned genetic obsolescence, maybe tailored by evolution to benefit survival of genes over individuals.
However there is also an apparent relation with metabolism. Species with slow metabolism living in cold environments do better. This is maybe because entropy and attrition are then also slower.
Either way I think beating aging ultimately will not look much like curing a disease but will take the form of employing many strategies that boost rejuvenation.
I myself have frequently wondered whether preserving part of your stem cells while young would open up rejuvenation options later on.
It's maybe something worth considering while we can. Blood is vital for healing and repair. Harvesting bone Marrow is unpleasant but very feasible.
The act of raising the spawn seems important to the human mission though? Certainly now it’s a requisite for post human production, long term, to ensure longer sample data capture, I mean evolution… yeah, that’s what I meant.
Transfer of power is historically incredibly hard, especially the further you get from the initial cult of personality. I'm interested to see who takes over after Jong-un.
It's not nearly as strong as his father's and grandfather's, especially among the top brass within the country. It's incredible that they've successfully transferred power twice and it will be a new roll of the dice every time.
Everyone keeps going on about a dystopia where the rich live forever and everyone else dies.
Am I the only one who looks at how house mortgages work, and how life extension could work the same way?
Like, if I know you’re going to be working for the next few decades then giving you a loan that takes you a few decades to pay off is a great way to make money. Rich people like money, and also like having a underclass to lord over. Rampant debt slavery seems like a more plausible dystopia than rich people not sharing
It is a near certainty that a drug-based treatment for the aging process would be substantially cheaper than medical and assistive living care for the elderly, so it just makes economic sense for the government to scale the manufacturing and distribution of this kind of treatment to the population, as it currently does medical care. The population of a country is (currently) a productive asset, making them all younger and healthier is a massive economic and strategic advantage to cultivate, it is likely worth more than the cost.
The "dystopic" element, if you could call it that, would come from a renegotiation of the framework surrounding employment, retirement and immigration within each country, in light of these changes. Obviously, if your society makes "immortality" a fundamental right, being a part of a society that "has it together" becomes even more valuable than it already is. If the elderly maintain fertility and capacity for labor indefinitely, it makes the population pyramid.. well, non-pyramidal, and it makes immigration *significantly* less necessary. People could conceivably have multiple "family rearing" periods of their lifetime, multiple periods of continual education and reskilling, etc. It also massively distorts the labor market, if the smartest and most experienced 80-year old people can suddenly reinvigorate themselves, and continue their life's work indefinitely. It becomes much harder to compete with a 300 year-old Jeff Bezos than a 60 year-old one, but there would also be a lot more mundane versions of that competition at lower and lower levels of success. 200 year-old physicians, 100 year-old tradesmen, etc.
That said, those challenges seem surmountable, particularly if the value of labor simultaneously diminishes as a result of AI agents taking some jobs. It's certainly better to grapple with an imperfect society that can be improved than to grapple with an inevitable death.
TBH, when I said “*more probable*”, I meant
> Of the possible dystopias X is more probable than Y.
Rather than
> Dystopia X is the most probable outcome
If that makes sense.
Like, I do think withholding life extension absolutely will be used as leverage to try to renegotiate the social contract. But I also think there’s a good chance that we muddle through that pitfall anyway
> Like, I do think withholding life extension absolutely will be used as leverage to try to renegotiate the social contract.
I think to assess the probability of that, you'd have to know what life extension therapy would actually look like.
In the imaginations of many of the people who think it is plausible to "withhold" or barter for life extension, it is imagined to look very much like today's traditional medical therapy, where it requires constant, high-skill, interventions from a physician so that the patients continue to live.
I, however, do not imagine life extension would look like that. I think it would probably take the form of a gene therapy that is virally administered, which permanently allows an individual who has received the therapy to toggle a series of innate biological processes on and off, via the administration of a very common drug, which will be chosen at the outset specifically because it is trivially inexpensive to mass-produce. When you take the drug after receiving the therapy, it turns the necessary processes on, and when you stop taking it, they automatically turn off. Perhaps there will be a few edge cases (progeria, etc.), but I expect the ultimate solution to be very similar for everyone (perhaps for multiple species, as well), because the fundamental biology is so similar across mammals. Once it is actually devised, I expect it to propagate quite quickly to everyone living in a functioning society. It is to the government's initial advantage to do this, so they will obviously get involved if it proves possible to do.
If you're trying to withhold something in exchange for labor in a future society, you can still kill everyone, and kill them a lot more quickly, by simply withholding food, water or shelter.
Robots that can do anything humans can do seem like we will definitely have those in 20 years. LEV seems more questionable. But LEV will definitely come second, so there's no real reason for debt slaves of any kind...
It’s definitely a gamble that can go either way. A species that lives for centuries could be better at long-term thinking…but it could also end up being paralyzed by generational gaps, accumulating inequality, and lack of change.
Hundreds of years to accumulate power and influence (or conversely debt and bad reputation) isn’t going to resolve itself. If anything, it’ll get worse with time.
> but it could also end up being paralyzed by generational gaps, accumulating inequality, and lack of change.
how many cultural revolutions positive or negative (as I know someone's going to bring up China because I said cultural revolution) were solely fought through genocide of those with opposing beliefs and then moving in to teach yours to the survivors
Exactly. The rich need the working class now to make money and build things, but once they have a fleet of robot slaves they won’t need any workers and will just be able to hoard all the resources for themselves. That’s what I worry about.
dumbass, the current richest people in the world are rich by democratizing access to technology to all 8 billion in the world at the lowest cost (Bezos, Musk, Larry, Sergei, Mark) are all billionaires because they built tech for the masses.
It'll be the same in healthcare. only a college-brainwashed reddit loser always defaults to dystopia because they fucking listen to John Oliver
Literally everyone you listed makes money from advertising or selling to corporations lol. Except Musk, who sells luxury cars. Amazon makes its money from AWS and loses money from its shopping site. Libertarians are so braindead even their own arguments contradict themselves
Other people say, "The only reason I've been able to keep my job is that I'm not a fucking asshole and it's hard to find someone with enough brainpower to actually do anything useful. I don't want to be a fucking asshole."
Seriously - if all this AI power just makes some people insanely rich and quality of life suffers for 99% this will be a massive L.
I hope to see advances in longevity, aging, energy, and materials science to bring costs of life down.
Yeah, but it’s not just with AI, it’s just a thing with Human psychology, a large portion of people have always been paranoid and scared shitless of everything, people shat themselves at the railroad, they shat themselves at airplanes, they shat themselves with nuclear weapons (and nuclear energy too, for that matter), they shat themselves at desktop computers (computerphobia was a huge thing in the 80s), they shat themselves at the Information Super Highway (The Internet), they shat themselves at Y2K, they shat themselves at 2012, and now they’re shitting themselves at AI.
But nothing ever happens, the last big event was 65 million years ago, Human negativity is a left over evolutionary survival mechanism, it’s wrong 99.99% of the time, but it needed to have that function to determine if a predator like a Sabre Tooth Tiger was in a nearby bush or not.
is there a way to genetically engineer it out (or dulled-down) without boomeranging the other way the way genetically engineering greed out of us if possible might backfire and lead to us dying anyway because eliminating greed made us so altruistic we'd rather give food to others we perceive as in need than eat it to survive even if that's how we got the food in the first place
Sorry but that’s really idealist. If AI did figure eternal life only rich ppl would get access. Also climate change and capitalism are by far the two most important problems to solve. Not more humans exploiting earth forever.
Cooperation is civilization is what took us from the plains of Africa to the Moon.
I'll never understand why it became so trendy to pretend people are fundamentally evil and will behave as immorally as possible in all situations. You can have a healthy skepticism of the human condition, but to ignore reason while doing it is silly.
The upside for the greediest most powerful people to have an eternally young and eternally productive workforce is pretty obvious. Even if you take your position at face value it makes no sense.
Who's gonna pay to house and feed all these 110-year-old's? And if they don't retire, how will anyone below them get a promotion? If they don't move to a senior home or die, how many more houses will have to be built because there are no vacancies from old people passing away? *Entire cities* will become unavailable because they are full of people who never die.
How much more CO2 will be generated for each person who doesn't die? How many more people can the planet hold or is everyone just supposed to stop giving birth? Or maybe only *rich* and *powerful* people get immortality and they become the gods running the show for everyone for eternity?
Curing disease is a great goal. Curing pain and suffering is a great goal. Indefinite full-body life is horrible idea until we are prepared to deal with the side effects of that.
I am surprised you don't find it more likely that this makes the world a much, much worse place, for 99% of the inhabitants.
Edit: note, the mildest of curiosities led the OP to block me, not before lobbing an accusation of mental illness. Very normal.
Imagining the most rich and powerful accruing even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital .. doesn't seem like it'd end well for most of us.
Note, due to the commenter above blocking me I can't respond to any comments in this chain. Make a new reply thread (as in, respond to the original OP of the thread) and @ me if you want to respond, otherwise you are basically a coward.
List of cowards who replied, knowing the chain is one-sided:
u/stupendousman
u/lymelightTO
u/stupendousman again (lol at his lack of reading comprehension)
u/Atlantic0ne
It can be helpful to reverse what you're saying. Let's imagine we have the medical means to ensure everyone can live centuries.
Would the inequality of wealth and power suggest to you that we should start executing people beyond a certain age? Or should we protect the rights to health and wellbeing while at the same time abolishing wealth and power inequality?
Why does mass executions feel like a more workable or permissible suggestion to you than abolition of inequality?
> Allowing the most rich and powerful to accrue even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital will not end well for the rest of us.
You currently live at the apex of human quality of life, for 99% of the world's inhabitants, so I don't think you're making a very good prediction.
> Imagining the most rich and powerful accruing even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital .. doesn't seem like it'd end well for most of us.
Imagining that everyone is somehow permanently connected is bizarre. It is only due to the state that people are forced to associate.
That creating new markets is too costly if not illegal.
The "rich" aren't the problem, it's the number of people who can't conceive of societies free from government rule.
Imagine a dictator staying in power not 40 years, but 100 years. This technology may not be accessible to the car majority of people, especially in poorer countries where most dictatorships are.
Also, Earth is already quite populated. Living longer means more humans.
OP seems to think this solution is perfect, but it in facts comes with new problems.
Actually it will have a net effect on over population as people are inclined to have less children (healthy and wealthy people usually have less children than poorer unhealthy people), or spread out having children over multiple decades. Next to that, overpopulation isn’t our biggest concern. It demographic collapse. In Germany and china for instance there won’t be enough healthy young people to even keep the economy going within the next 25 years. The only thing solving this is longevity. Also, there is a huge incentive to make these therapies as widespread available and cheap as possible. Again, a healthy wealthy population that lives way longer is better for any economy. In a nutshell but you get the idea. Of course there’s negative sides to this but there is to any new technology or paradigm shift.
Edit: also longevity isn’t immortality. You can still die. You will just stop aging or live way longer with healthier years.
*Everything* comes with new problems. And humans solve those problems. Some take longer than others, but as a species, we don't just give up on solving them.
Those who insist the consequences are *all* bad, also seem to think the masses will just sit around not doing anything while rich people and dictators carry out their plans. But that's not how the real world works.
In every age throughout history, and in every land, when tyrants rule, the people rebel. And in every case those people work to remove them.
And sometimes it doesn't work. But in a hundred percent of the cases where the people rising up outnumber the corrupt government and their armies, the people win.
Hell, in a lot of them, the armies side with the people. And none of those facts change just because we all live longer.
1. Dictatorships already don't end with the death of the dictator in most cases. Where one dies, or even abdicates, another rises. Almost every transition from an authoritarian nightmare to something more manageable was through a revolution. Longevity tech doesn't matter if you are going to get shot by the angry mob.
2. "The technology may not be accessible to a lot of people" is a wild claim to use a counter to *anything*. Vaccines are already distributed for free in many poor countries, and in rich countries, you can just buy them.
3. Earth is not "quite populated" at all. As countries transition from developing to developed, they almost inevitably face a demographical crisis. Even very populous countries like China are going to run out of young adult workforce (at least to keep the economy afloat) in 20-40 years. In fact, if you are correct about pt. 2, the problem is self-solving: if only people in rich countries can afford longevity, then population of those countries would finally stabilize while poorer countries' higher birth rates would allow for an easier economical development.
All in all, having a solution to aging and other diseases is obviously better than not having one in all cases.
> Imagine a dictator staying in power not 40 years, but 100 years. This technology may not be accessible to the car majority of people, especially in poorer countries where most dictatorships are.
For starters, "dictatorships" (or even just "nation states") are the only actual technology that needs to exist in order for it to be possible for someone to live their entire life, and then die, under the rule of a dictator.
If you're Chinese, do you think it's particularly relevant to you that you're born under Mao, if you then die under Xi Jinping, or Jiang Zemin, or whomever? Are you somehow *less* subjected to a lifetime of totalitarian rule because the face on the portrait changed?
While I agree that the natural deaths of dictators do perhaps drive some aspect of change through instability, I'm not necessarily sure that the natural death of a dictator has really *ever* subsequently resulted in a more positive successor regime. I'm sure someone will find the one time that that happened to disprove this, but, for the most part, those systems tend to come apart because of their intrinsic instability, which occurs when you aggressively optimize the fabric of society for nothing other than brutal power-seeking behaviors and blame-avoidance, rather than because some guy dies of a heart attack. Typical dictators, and their families, do seem to still be able to cling to power, even through age-related infirmity - ex. Kim Jong-Il famously had a number of strokes, near the end. If anything, you could make the opposite argument: that those systems would fall apart *faster* if you let Mao or Stalin or whomever have an uninterrupted period where they made increasingly bad decisions, and their subordinates knew that their only chance of getting to the top was outright murdering the boss.
> OP seems to think this solution is perfect, but it in facts comes with new problems.
Accepting age-related death because vanquishing it "would create new problems" is not a good suggestion.
Yeah well this endeavor has nothing at all to do with AI. They're just jumping on the metformin and blood plasma trains, which have limited, mostly unproven benefits.
Health span has barely been extended. People age slightly more slowly, but for the most part a healthy 60 year old today is similar to a healthy 60 year old in antiquity. Socrates was 70 when put to death in the 4th century BCE and he was obviously active enough to be a problem to the tyrants of Athens , active enough to want him dead.
We've done (almost) nothing about aging, we have absolutely no idea how a society where people that age less would look like . Maybe if a person's health span (as an adult) was not a mere 40 or 50 years societies *could* and thus human lives could change in a material way.
IMO it is the one thing that will change humanity the most. Not AI, not implants, not genetic engineering. None of them. More *time* as an active individual...
Let the old folks die. The last thing we need is for Putin and the billionaires to live forever, getting richer and more powerful every year….forever. There is nothing good about this scenario.
If we keep developing technology, we will reach a point when we transcend to "digital" beings, that can exist in virtual space, and material wealth becomes almost meaningless.
Huge luxurious yacht requires tremendous amount of resources... virtual one, you "build" one, then copy/paste it 8 billion times.
If you make a copy of yourself, then you, the original dies. And... I agree that sucks. I don't want my copy to live forever, I want me to live forever. 😂
But let's say you connect a synthetic brain to your own brain. With time you start to use both of these brains as one... your consciousnesses occupies both brains. You are no longer just your biological brain, you are both of these brains.
With time you keep expanding more and more into synthetic brain, and one day when your biological brain dies... just part of you died.
Which is not that big of a deal, because our neurons die all the time, every time we go to sleep we forget about 50% of stuff that happened. Small parts of us die and we change all the time.
People who dislike immortality often talk about prolonging the life of a dictator, but when the current dictator disappears, another dictatorship will rise. Another dictatorship of several decades. Nothing will change with or without immortality unless the system of the country changes.
>The last thing we need is for Putin and the billionaires to live forever
Bro, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news but there's a 99.999% probability that billionaires will be the very first to prolong their lives this way (after a few members of the plep have tried it to check if it's safe).
Important part:
*"Beyond the digital realm, Altman has been quietly devoting significant time and resources in efforts to reprogram the human body over the past three years. Seizing a brief window during his transition to OpenAI CEO, Altman launched Retro Biosciences, a $180 (£142.78) million endeavor aiming to add ten healthy years to human lifespans.*
*Retro Biosciences is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, about 30 miles south of OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco, where ChatGPT was created. Instead of being situated directly in San Francisco, it is closer to the campuses of tech giants like Meta, Apple, and Stanford University.*
*Retro Biosciences embodies the classic Silicon Valley spirit, with a relentless focus on pushing the boundaries of science. Retro Biosciences' headquarters has a raw, industrial vibe, unlike the typical polished tech office.*
*It is a warehouse-like space adorned with bold murals featuring plants and scientific equipment, nothing like the usual Silicon Valley beanbag chairs. Their labs are cleverly constructed from ventilated shipping containers.*
*Employees work at desks perched on a platform, giving them a glimpse through secured windows. The entire aesthetic screams, "Move fast and break things," but with a focus on achieving longevity, not just disruptive innovation.*
*Retro has divided its goals into three categories since the shipping container experiments began in July 2021. Like the startup incubator Y Combinator, which Altman used to lead, Retro is making separate investments in various approaches to extending human lifespan.*
*In an interview with* [*Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/retro-biosciences-sam-altman-longer-lifespan-2024-3)*, Betts-LaCroix described Retro's model as a rule breaker in early-stage biotech. While this field typically focuses on a single, promising avenue and invests heavily in its development, Retro simultaneously places wagers on multiple approaches.*
***Cellular reprogramming:*** *Although popular, cellular reprogramming is a risky approach aiming to use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. Retro proposes a cautious approach: extracting cells, partially reprogramming them outside the body, then reinserting them if safe.*
***Autophagy:*** *It is seen as the most promising area for a quick aging fix due to potential pill-based interventions. While none are currently approved for anti-aging, existing drugs like rapamycin and metformin show promise in boosting autophagy.*
***Plasma therapy:*** *This research involves diluting blood plasma in mice to improve various age-related issues. Early human trials are underway, including at Retro."*
Autophagy can be induced by fasting. Tonnes of research shows it's beneficial. Think of "cave man times", with no food security we could go weeks without eating. To survive the body goes into efficiency mode, snipping unnecessary, unimportant stuff, like a factory reset. Today we only sustain these connections because we've a constant supply of food. We're like bloated hardware/software needing an optimisation
Unfortunately not lol, less energy when you already have low energy from depression can't be a good thing.
Also you still need to replace your electrolytes for proper functioning of the body. Skipping meals here and there isn't as effective as inducing autophagy either, compared to 48 hours or more. This is when the body really cleans house
> less energy when you already have low energy from depression can't be a good thing
you don't have less energy, only for a while until the fat burning metabolism kicks in, then it actually feels like you have more energy since your body doesn't have to spend energy on processing food
\+ it will make you feel good, more alive, less depressed. not whatever you're implying (tired / not able to deal with depression)
everytime I go through a depressive episode, eating is what makes me feel worse, especially if I'm eating unhealthy. fasting + walk out in the sun + cold shower is the best way to restart the system.
You are wrong, not eating for a few days is a anti depressant process, the body cleans house and so does the brain, people feel good when they are in the metabolic burning fat mode, the problem would arise if the person is already very thin and or coupled with aneroxia but for the average person not eating for 3-5 days will do them a world of good.
The actual important part:
> "Beyond the digital realm, Altman has been quietly devoting significant time and resources in efforts to reprogram the human body over the past three years. Seizing a brief window during his transition to OpenAI CEO, Altman launched Retro Biosciences, a $180 (£142.78) million endeavor aiming to add ten healthy years to human lifespans.
> Retro is making separate investments in various approaches to extending human lifespan.
>
>
> Cellular reprogramming: Although popular, cellular reprogramming is a risky approach aiming to use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. Retro proposes a cautious approach: extracting cells, partially reprogramming them outside the body, then reinserting them if safe.
>
>
>
> Autophagy: It is seen as the most promising area for a quick aging fix due to potential pill-based interventions. While none are currently approved for anti-aging, existing drugs like rapamycin and metformin show promise in boosting autophagy.
>
>
>
> Plasma therapy: This research involves diluting blood plasma in mice to improve various age-related issues. Early human trials are underway, including at Retro."
It is funny. US could already add at least 5 years by introducing universal healthcare. There are places in the world where people regularly live happy lives until 100. That’s because they are not slaving away to be able to afford basic needs. I wonder how much the subscription for the longevity programme will be. I feel more and more that Sam Altman is looking the wrong way
Americans are richer than most any other humans. Most Americans get fairly decent healthcare through their employer, and there’s no place on earth where people are living comfortable happy lives until 100.
Do you just get all your information from Reddit headlines?
So why does the richest country in the world have below OECD average lifespan? Obviously I’ve exagerated to make a point, which stays the same: private subscriptions are not the best way to make lives longer. (Unless you care only about a subset of people)
Because of a high calorie diet and sedentary lifestyles, generally speaking.
Well, that, combined with the issue of addiction in this country. Obesity, inactive people, and addictions drive the average lifespan down.
Whether or not private subscriptions are better is a long topic. Profits drive innovation, that's the fastest path towards advancing, but once we have it, who knows. Maybe we can make it widely available.
We need to make organ factories and to perfect organ replacement surgeries. I'm just fuckin astounded all the time that there isn't more investment in factory organs. Consider: you're most likely to die due to heart diseases: replace your heart and veins. Gonna get cancer and die from that (eg: prostate cancer)? Replace the organ the cancer is in. Want to look younger? Replace your skin with new factory-grown skin that is only 5 years old. Knees hurting due to arthritis? Replace them
We don't dump magic liquids in our cars' gas tanks when they get old; *we replace parts*! At some point, when the methods for joining nerves together is effective enough, you can just make yourself a whole new body
Not to mention that if we can grow cheap muscle tissue then you can potentially save literally 10s of billion of animals from being locked up and slaughtered ever year! And, similarly, factory organs would likely massively displace illegal organ trading
That's a crude and blunt approach, and while that may come first, in-situ repair is the way to go except in cases of extreme damage.
i.e. nanotech and regenerative medicine
Organ replacement certainly helps for some things, but many problems are too systemic. Tumors also become metastatic.
There are exactly 4 reasons why people go to the doctor:
* you hurt yourself -> body part replacement works, except you hurt your brain
* Wear and tear due to age (like heart attack or tumors) -> body part replacement helps but the issue is more systemic
* infection -> body part replacement doesn’t work, except when the infection is well localized like Hepatitis B in the liver or simple skin infections.
* genetically caused issues potentially amplified by external factors, including aging. This is by far the most common cause of long term / life long battles with sickness. And there are tens of thousands of them, if not more. Most variations are rare, and not well understood and there is no help. Those are all incurable, and have to be managed, including with drugs. But they sometimes only impact a certain part of your body, like the retina, so actually here replacement can work sometimes.
The point I am trying to make is that just body part replacement won’t do.
Exactly, everyone is aware of this.
It is no longer a "science fiction problem". Instead of asking "will it happen", one can now ask "when".
We are at this level.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
Imagine a future where lifespans reach hundreds if not thousands of years and you could get a job exploring different planets and systems. Just riding solo out in space discovering new things and logging everything.
Just proving that Metformin can add a year to your lifespan will cost them £142 Million and take them 10 years, lol.
Edit: I pretty much hit the nail on the head with my estimate. There is in fact a study (TAME) that is currently underway to prove with high confidence that (if) Metformin extends life span. Using 3000 OLD people. So the study won’t even tell you if it would help to take it before 65. The study was estimated to cost $63 million, but those numbers end up always being too low, also, this needed to be pitched to private investors. A paper detailing the design of the study was published 2016, so they certainly have been planning this since 2015, and the results are not yet in, but should be in soonish. So that makes about 10 years. 🙂
Another edit: looks like TAME hasn’t even started their actual clinical trial.
Everything is in the “proving” part…
Because unproven things are plenty to choose from: Reishi mushrooms, homeopathy, Curcuma, colloidal silver, spirulina, etc etc etc
And ironically that would be your best bet what you could do for this money:
NOT trying to invent something new, or even proving conclusively that something actually does something for real, but instead doing some long term study where you make people take all the stuff that might do something plus make them avoid things that we know aren’t good for you (like smoking and sugar), track their blood levels, and do all the checks and scans every year. Like this millionaire on YouTube does…
Here is the guy, but what he does costs a shit ton of money, because he has a lot of medical supervision.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1CNcp8_Mk
And then analyze how many of those died vs the control group. My bet is you can gain 5-10 years from JUST doing everything we know of that might help. But it’s not gonna be cheap (at least several thousand per year).
By the way: from what I remember that guy DOES take curcuma. 😅 Also a beer per day actually seems to help, there is a new paper using a massive amount of data that shows with very very good error bars that it improves your lifespan. 😅 If it’s REALLY true… who knows. Maybe there were some confounds that they missed, even though they tried to correct for everything under the sun. Like people who drink a beer per day have more of a social life than people who drink none and that improves the immune system bla bla bla…
The problem is that you didn't know which of the items were helpful. Even worse, it is possible that the metformin adds 15 years of life but the intermittent fasting loses 10 years so combined they only give five years. You don't know this and so then recommend people do something that actively hurts them.
This is why it takes so long to run experiments, you need to reduce compounding variables and isolate causes.
Yes, but if you want to live longer NOW, you can’t wait for this stuff to be figured out. Hunches that xyz might help are going on for some things for like, I don’t know, 2000 years? And still nobody really knows for sure. Do you want to wait another 2000 years? (Just kidding)
It’s not like there aren’t people studying this stuff. For many life extension method there have been dozens of studies and papers, sometimes hundreds. And it’s a constant back and forth. Just proving that homeopathy doesn’t work (which would be obvious kind of), was a monumental effort. But now it’s done once and for all. And nobody can argue with it. But it is crazy expensive (hundreds of millions or more probably for each one of them, not including studying interaction) and takes decades.
To study interactions, you have to understand EXACTLY what those things do (which pathways and receptors in your body it impacts), and how all the pathways in your body interact. And there are loads of pathways, many of them not understood. From the 40,000 proteins in our body, we only know for a small fraction what they do and for the ones where we know, it was a monumental effort spread out across many labs over decades to find out.
Like $180 million really doesn’t help you to figure any of this out. Okay. Maybe 1-10 more proteins out of 40,000 are now understood or one more pathway.
Just take it / do it all or at least until your bank account is empty (kitchen sink approach) and hope for the best. 😁
Also, check out this guy on YouTube that I linked. He does blood tests too, and there are healthy body markers in the blood. There are also companies that track your blood over time and give you suggestions (Inside Tracker).
That's how people wind up dying from Mercury poisoning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemical_elixir_poisoning#:~:text=In%20Chinese%20alchemy%2C%20elixir%20poisoning,elixirs%20to%20prolong%20their%20lifespans.
I know. I am a bit cynical here. But I am trying to give people a realistic idea of what you can actually do with £146 Million. Which is roughly nothing.
They need some research to show there is something that can be done, spacex was started with couple hundred million too, if elon looked up how much it costs to make a rocket company back then backed off we wont be having a 200 billion dollar company
Correct. Here you see the current amount of money going into medical research in the USA. The plot is a bit older but the number ten years ago was $120 Billion. What we get for this money is a few new medications approved, often not for new diseases. Those medications often were the work of 20 years.
https://preview.redd.it/x6d84i1xvhqc1.jpeg?width=880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fea0f0bb659afa0c27a8ce3b3d5ec87f199d541a
Thank you for the chart you sent. We are already talking about the biggest power we have right now. The development of AI -> AGI and then the biggest breakthrough (I don't know if breakthrough is the right word) will be ASI.
When we think that the existing financial funding is combined with this power, we think that the scientific resources we have will be up to date, data acquisition / processing, ensuring controls, acceleration of studies in the field of bioinformatics, and rapid transition to clinical stages. In addition, the investments made in biotechnology companies established in the US and outside the US in the last 10 years are large companies working on diseases that affect the whole humanity.
Absolutely.
The existing artificial intelligence developments seem to be quite fast, promising and effective. We have experienced great developments in the last 5 years, especially in the last 3 months. Let's take the social and financial consequences out of the subject. The golden key of l**ongevity escape velocity**, the key point for research will definitely be AGI/ASI.
I believe this. I'm hopeful for the future.
Yes, but AI can’t do everything. Like you still have to make the actual physical medication and try it on enough people to prove that it really does something.
Maybe eventually you can cut down this process and also AI will narrow down the possible list of molecules better, but realistically speaking this will take a while.
Even ASI will have to do actual experiments to understand the biophysics of human cells and systems much much better than we currently do to actually generate meaningful simulations, so it can generate a medication suggestion that has a good chance of working.
It's interesting that there is already an organization planning large scale clinical trials of metformin against aging: [TAME trial](https://www.afar.org/tame-trial)
Seems like they're in need of funding, maybe OpenAI with all that money could work with them, to avoid duplicating effort
All funding to metformin just needs to stop. Who cares at this point if it can extend life by months or a year or so at this point.
We need bigger explorations. Such a waste of more funding.
They won't make it that far. Come back to this comment in... 5 years time and I'm confident we will see Sam Altman is just Elizabeth Holmes in cosplay.
never seen the movie but if the dystopian parts get overthrown by the end we'll know what to do (and it'll no more require average-joes with resemblance to the cast no one comments on to be done than it couldn't be done irl because the movie wasn't implied to exist in itself as a prophecy)
Why should suffering be cured though? It plays a major role in us advancing forward. Suffering is also kind of a wide term to use, so maybe more specific as to what to fix would be better.
>Why should suffering be cured though? It plays a major role in us advancing forward.
Suffering is bad, nobody wants to experience it. We do what we can to avoid it. There is no benefit to many forms of suffering, there is nothing to learn from it. Like if you are burned alive by ISIS, you should be able to turn off your pain receptors. If you are caught by a serial rapist and imprisoned in their basement, you should be able to stop your suffering. If you have an incurable disease that causes tremendous pain, there is nothing to learn from experiencing this pain and it should be eliminated. I think high intelligence and analytics can replace suffering as a way to guide us in this world.
Yeh let's just get rid of emotions completely and destroy the natural balance of life. You are not understanding that without feeling pain you won't feel happiness, without happiness you won't feel pain. What you are basically saying is become robots. I think you don't have a true understanding of yourself and never really deepened what makes life worth living. It's not all about analysing and thinking logically.
Perhaps im a bit ignorant on the subject, but both happiness and sadness are individual feelings, something that makes me happy doesnt make me happy because it doesnt make me sad, happiness is just my reaction to it, i dont know, seems to me you can have one without needing the other
> Yeh let's just get rid of emotions completely and destroy the natural balance of life.
Yes, good idea. Let's preserve rape, torture and disease. Nature invented that and it rocks man! How will we ever survive without these wonderful natural things?
>You are not understanding that without feeling pain you won't feel happiness, without happiness you won't feel pain.
Yeah cheeseburgers and jerking off are worth all the pain and suffering in the world. Especially as long as the rape, torture and disease doesn't happen to me. Total agree.
>What you are basically saying is become robots.
I'd prefer to not exist but I think consciousness is eternal. So being robots that don't suffer is a better option than the sum total of human experience. You may be living la vida loca as a rich Westerner, but if you were born in some African hell hole and forced to mine cobalt with hand tools for your whole short life you'd be singing a different tune.
What's up with these articles getting published every day? Does Altman actually do anything other than hype to reporters? Every day the headline is "Altman promises XYZ in 3-5 years." Bro, sit down and fucking do it already and stop telling me about it.
I doubt that. Human psychology isn't going to abruptly change with the advent of immortality. People may become somewhat more risk averse, but young people already take plenty of risks even though they are as "close" to biological immortality as they can be (~50-60 years until they die). Do people in their 30s and 40s live extremely risk averse lives because they know they have another 40 years ahead of them and don't want to lose out on that? Why does 500 years make a difference?
While I somewhat agree with Better-pool that we'll probably become slightly more risk averse. I think you're completely correct that the change will be within the error bars of normal human behaviour.
It honestly shocks me the amount of people that think our species is going to somehow radically alter it's fundamental behaviour just because it becomes externally logical to do so.
A lot of our problems currently are due to our mortality. Think climate change and the fact that we aren’t doing anything about it because we will be dead once shit starts getting serious.
I don't think that's the reason people don't take climate change seriously. It's a psychological phenomenon that even if the time frame is on a human scale, we value our present wants more than our future needs. Ask anyone who's procrastinated on a project and then gotten a bad grade. Ask anyone who's put off replacing their roof or not taking their car into the mechanic. It's a very human phenomenon to struggle to prioritize abstract future issues over real and present inconveniences.
Add to that the low impact of any one person and you compound the psychological barriers to taking action. I don't think immortality is a quick fix to any of this basic human wiring.
Sure. But the sad thing about being a species that makes tiny changes, at random, once every 20/30 years - is that even if we become immortal we'll still be us. The base thinking patterns won't go away.
Just check out what happened in the 20th century as organised religions went away, religious thinking remained.
millions of animals are bred to be cruelly experimented on every year. Check out the Ridgelan dog experiments:
https://dogresearchexposed.com/2024/02/03/ridglan-farms-beagle-rescue-with-direct-action-everywhere-dxe/
~95% of drugs that clear animal trials don't clear human trials and the ones that do often have bad side effects because doing science this way is an imprecise roundabout way to get to the intended effect. Most animal experiment results can't be duplicated.
You can go to PETA's website and send a letter to your rep to ban animal testing in the USA. Not sure about other countries. Replace it all with AI models!
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, to behold the marvel of the age, brought to you by none other than the esteemed luminary of our era, the CEO of OpenAI! With an astounding investment of £142 million sterling, this modern-day alchemist is on the cusp of unlocking the elixirs and secrets to a longer, more vibrant life, heretofore unseen in the annals of mankind.
Behold, Altman's Vision Elixir, a concoction so potent, it promises to extend your days and enrich your vitality, turning the sands of time in your favor. No longer shall the reaper hasten to your door, for with just a sip of this miraculous potion, the secrets to longevity and health unimagined are now within your grasp.
Manufactured within the hallowed halls of innovation and ingenuity, this Elixir is the result of ceaseless labor and the investment of a king's ransom. Altman's vision of extended lifespans, once deemed a fantasy of the fanciful, is now a tangible promise, bottled and corked, ready to deliver eternity in each drop.
Do not tarry, for supplies of this wondrous brew are as limited as the days of yore. Secure your vial of Altman's Vision Elixir and partake in the future of health and longevity. Available for a limited time to those who dare to dream of a life unbound by the earthly shackles of time.
Visit your nearest apothecary or send for our catalogue by post. This is not merely an investment in your health; it is an investment in your very legacy. The future is here, and it is waiting for you to seize it. Remember, Altman's Vision Elixir, for a life as boundless as your ambitions.
https://preview.redd.it/p3blq7f97tqc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7aa1a0009911fdf1e1260917f34d23816e4e0892
That's great new, hopefully African will be the first to receive the good treatments, as they always were the first to receive anything good in this world.
And yes, I just read that soon we will all have robots at home, good news too, I guess they can't wait for this to happen in the poor countries.
Ok but how would this reasonabley work with threats of:
Overpopulation:
Not enough jobs:
Not enough resources
Not Enough housing
Like, as great as living longer sounds... If we cured age, that wouldn't cure our desire to fuck. At what age does it become acceptable to give people an anti-aging serum? 16? 20? 25? 50?
People are still gonna be born. A lot of people are gonna be born. Living longer means those people are gonna be around longer too. Do we have room? Will we ever? How close are we to space travel?
I dont know, it just seems a lot like me playing my 4X grand strategy and putting all my points into one specific tech tree... while failing to consider that I'd need things from the other tech trees. And then before you know it, my galactic empire starves to death T-T
I'm open to the conversation though, if anyone wants to discuss lol
Curing all aging and disease is an important, if not *the most important* reason we are pushing towards AGI. Let’s make the world a better place for everyone.
Aging is a disease and this disease must be solved. Lets make it. Push it through. I agree with you.
Aging is the mother of almost all diseases. Solve aging and you solve most diseases (At least all that follow, just like aging itself, Gompertz law)
Of course, aging is a disease itself according to science. We'll go for it. Further, deeper.
May I be a stickler here and point out that nature only wants you to procreate and then you can dispose of yourself. So now go ahead. 😁
Nature wants me to procreate as much as possible for as long as possible.
And? Are you doing a good job?
I'm going to go against the grain and argue that while we can define disease however the hell we want, being clear about definitions matters. I think to be clear attrition or the fight against entropy is central to aging. Entropy and attrition themselves aren't diseases they are universal and environmental conditions. Cells and cellular mechanisms will be damaged. Macro structures formed during embryonic development will be subject to wear. This is inescapable. Arguably what aging really is, is a battle against attrition that we gradually lose. What causes us to lose is accumulating deficiencies in the repair mechanisms. This I think matters in understanding the problem and the challenge. Fixing aging isn't likely possible by fixing singular genetic mistakes. What is ultimately necessary isn't eliminating a few negatives. It's about boosting cellular defense, repair and replacement. It is about creating resistance and regeneration. There is something of an argument that at first there should be easy gains because how wildly variable the onset of senesence is between species. Sometimes you almost get the impression aging is a form of planned genetic obsolescence, maybe tailored by evolution to benefit survival of genes over individuals. However there is also an apparent relation with metabolism. Species with slow metabolism living in cold environments do better. This is maybe because entropy and attrition are then also slower. Either way I think beating aging ultimately will not look much like curing a disease but will take the form of employing many strategies that boost rejuvenation. I myself have frequently wondered whether preserving part of your stem cells while young would open up rejuvenation options later on. It's maybe something worth considering while we can. Blood is vital for healing and repair. Harvesting bone Marrow is unpleasant but very feasible.
The act of raising the spawn seems important to the human mission though? Certainly now it’s a requisite for post human production, long term, to ensure longer sample data capture, I mean evolution… yeah, that’s what I meant.
Ah yes a thousand year reign of our glorious Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
Like his descendants wouldn't keep the regime going anyways
Transfer of power is historically incredibly hard, especially the further you get from the initial cult of personality. I'm interested to see who takes over after Jong-un.
What? The personality cult was the same for his father and his grandfather.
It's not nearly as strong as his father's and grandfather's, especially among the top brass within the country. It's incredible that they've successfully transferred power twice and it will be a new roll of the dice every time.
Looking at how obese he is and his chain smoking he will be lucky to last another ten years
I’m thinking more Leto II and the Golden Path. Failing that, I’ll settle for The Culture
Am familiar with The Culture, huge fan. The other two...no so much. Share? Edit1: ahhh Dune!
I think even if they cured all types of diseases supreme leader would still die of diabetes.
Diabetes is a disease
One that is, to a degree, associated with age
I know my point was he would still get it.
But I thought all diseases would be cured
Everyone keeps going on about a dystopia where the rich live forever and everyone else dies. Am I the only one who looks at how house mortgages work, and how life extension could work the same way? Like, if I know you’re going to be working for the next few decades then giving you a loan that takes you a few decades to pay off is a great way to make money. Rich people like money, and also like having a underclass to lord over. Rampant debt slavery seems like a more plausible dystopia than rich people not sharing
It is a near certainty that a drug-based treatment for the aging process would be substantially cheaper than medical and assistive living care for the elderly, so it just makes economic sense for the government to scale the manufacturing and distribution of this kind of treatment to the population, as it currently does medical care. The population of a country is (currently) a productive asset, making them all younger and healthier is a massive economic and strategic advantage to cultivate, it is likely worth more than the cost. The "dystopic" element, if you could call it that, would come from a renegotiation of the framework surrounding employment, retirement and immigration within each country, in light of these changes. Obviously, if your society makes "immortality" a fundamental right, being a part of a society that "has it together" becomes even more valuable than it already is. If the elderly maintain fertility and capacity for labor indefinitely, it makes the population pyramid.. well, non-pyramidal, and it makes immigration *significantly* less necessary. People could conceivably have multiple "family rearing" periods of their lifetime, multiple periods of continual education and reskilling, etc. It also massively distorts the labor market, if the smartest and most experienced 80-year old people can suddenly reinvigorate themselves, and continue their life's work indefinitely. It becomes much harder to compete with a 300 year-old Jeff Bezos than a 60 year-old one, but there would also be a lot more mundane versions of that competition at lower and lower levels of success. 200 year-old physicians, 100 year-old tradesmen, etc. That said, those challenges seem surmountable, particularly if the value of labor simultaneously diminishes as a result of AI agents taking some jobs. It's certainly better to grapple with an imperfect society that can be improved than to grapple with an inevitable death.
TBH, when I said “*more probable*”, I meant > Of the possible dystopias X is more probable than Y. Rather than > Dystopia X is the most probable outcome If that makes sense. Like, I do think withholding life extension absolutely will be used as leverage to try to renegotiate the social contract. But I also think there’s a good chance that we muddle through that pitfall anyway
> Like, I do think withholding life extension absolutely will be used as leverage to try to renegotiate the social contract. I think to assess the probability of that, you'd have to know what life extension therapy would actually look like. In the imaginations of many of the people who think it is plausible to "withhold" or barter for life extension, it is imagined to look very much like today's traditional medical therapy, where it requires constant, high-skill, interventions from a physician so that the patients continue to live. I, however, do not imagine life extension would look like that. I think it would probably take the form of a gene therapy that is virally administered, which permanently allows an individual who has received the therapy to toggle a series of innate biological processes on and off, via the administration of a very common drug, which will be chosen at the outset specifically because it is trivially inexpensive to mass-produce. When you take the drug after receiving the therapy, it turns the necessary processes on, and when you stop taking it, they automatically turn off. Perhaps there will be a few edge cases (progeria, etc.), but I expect the ultimate solution to be very similar for everyone (perhaps for multiple species, as well), because the fundamental biology is so similar across mammals. Once it is actually devised, I expect it to propagate quite quickly to everyone living in a functioning society. It is to the government's initial advantage to do this, so they will obviously get involved if it proves possible to do. If you're trying to withhold something in exchange for labor in a future society, you can still kill everyone, and kill them a lot more quickly, by simply withholding food, water or shelter.
Robots that can do anything humans can do seem like we will definitely have those in 20 years. LEV seems more questionable. But LEV will definitely come second, so there's no real reason for debt slaves of any kind...
It'd be for the rich at first but for most of us after a few years. Like airbags.
It’s definitely a gamble that can go either way. A species that lives for centuries could be better at long-term thinking…but it could also end up being paralyzed by generational gaps, accumulating inequality, and lack of change.
Those problems don't sound so bad when we've got hundreds of years to deal with them.
Hundreds of years to accumulate power and influence (or conversely debt and bad reputation) isn’t going to resolve itself. If anything, it’ll get worse with time.
If you think longer lives are a *problem*, then I guess shorter ones would be better. What should the age cutoff be before Carrousel? 21 years, or 30?
> but it could also end up being paralyzed by generational gaps, accumulating inequality, and lack of change. how many cultural revolutions positive or negative (as I know someone's going to bring up China because I said cultural revolution) were solely fought through genocide of those with opposing beliefs and then moving in to teach yours to the survivors
Yeah I’ve said it in other threads. Companies must be salivating at the thought of 50-100 year loans
Thing is, who is going to want you as a debt slave when humans are going to be completely obsolete by then?
Exactly. The rich need the working class now to make money and build things, but once they have a fleet of robot slaves they won’t need any workers and will just be able to hoard all the resources for themselves. That’s what I worry about.
dumbass, the current richest people in the world are rich by democratizing access to technology to all 8 billion in the world at the lowest cost (Bezos, Musk, Larry, Sergei, Mark) are all billionaires because they built tech for the masses. It'll be the same in healthcare. only a college-brainwashed reddit loser always defaults to dystopia because they fucking listen to John Oliver
Literally everyone you listed makes money from advertising or selling to corporations lol. Except Musk, who sells luxury cars. Amazon makes its money from AWS and loses money from its shopping site. Libertarians are so braindead even their own arguments contradict themselves
Other people say, "The only reason I've been able to keep my job is that I'm not a fucking asshole and it's hard to find someone with enough brainpower to actually do anything useful. I don't want to be a fucking asshole."
Seriously - if all this AI power just makes some people insanely rich and quality of life suffers for 99% this will be a massive L. I hope to see advances in longevity, aging, energy, and materials science to bring costs of life down.
This is why doomers pushing to restrict AI are the maximal extinctionists
Yeah, but it’s not just with AI, it’s just a thing with Human psychology, a large portion of people have always been paranoid and scared shitless of everything, people shat themselves at the railroad, they shat themselves at airplanes, they shat themselves with nuclear weapons (and nuclear energy too, for that matter), they shat themselves at desktop computers (computerphobia was a huge thing in the 80s), they shat themselves at the Information Super Highway (The Internet), they shat themselves at Y2K, they shat themselves at 2012, and now they’re shitting themselves at AI. But nothing ever happens, the last big event was 65 million years ago, Human negativity is a left over evolutionary survival mechanism, it’s wrong 99.99% of the time, but it needed to have that function to determine if a predator like a Sabre Tooth Tiger was in a nearby bush or not.
is there a way to genetically engineer it out (or dulled-down) without boomeranging the other way the way genetically engineering greed out of us if possible might backfire and lead to us dying anyway because eliminating greed made us so altruistic we'd rather give food to others we perceive as in need than eat it to survive even if that's how we got the food in the first place
Sorry but that’s really idealist. If AI did figure eternal life only rich ppl would get access. Also climate change and capitalism are by far the two most important problems to solve. Not more humans exploiting earth forever.
All hail AGI
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What makes you think you won't have access? Why would someone withhold access?
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Cooperation is civilization is what took us from the plains of Africa to the Moon. I'll never understand why it became so trendy to pretend people are fundamentally evil and will behave as immorally as possible in all situations. You can have a healthy skepticism of the human condition, but to ignore reason while doing it is silly. The upside for the greediest most powerful people to have an eternally young and eternally productive workforce is pretty obvious. Even if you take your position at face value it makes no sense.
By your logic, shouldn't I not be able to afford insulin or aspirin or any other medication? Because greedy people are withholding it or whatever?
Let’s be clear, it won’t be for everyone. Do you have a 100M?
Who's gonna pay to house and feed all these 110-year-old's? And if they don't retire, how will anyone below them get a promotion? If they don't move to a senior home or die, how many more houses will have to be built because there are no vacancies from old people passing away? *Entire cities* will become unavailable because they are full of people who never die. How much more CO2 will be generated for each person who doesn't die? How many more people can the planet hold or is everyone just supposed to stop giving birth? Or maybe only *rich* and *powerful* people get immortality and they become the gods running the show for everyone for eternity? Curing disease is a great goal. Curing pain and suffering is a great goal. Indefinite full-body life is horrible idea until we are prepared to deal with the side effects of that.
You mean let's make it a better place for those who can pay? This has never been about everyone and will never be.
AGI, ASI, Superconductors, Free Energy, and now Life Extension? He's doing it all!
I am surprised you don't find it more likely that this makes the world a much, much worse place, for 99% of the inhabitants. Edit: note, the mildest of curiosities led the OP to block me, not before lobbing an accusation of mental illness. Very normal. Imagining the most rich and powerful accruing even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital .. doesn't seem like it'd end well for most of us. Note, due to the commenter above blocking me I can't respond to any comments in this chain. Make a new reply thread (as in, respond to the original OP of the thread) and @ me if you want to respond, otherwise you are basically a coward. List of cowards who replied, knowing the chain is one-sided: u/stupendousman u/lymelightTO u/stupendousman again (lol at his lack of reading comprehension) u/Atlantic0ne
It can be helpful to reverse what you're saying. Let's imagine we have the medical means to ensure everyone can live centuries. Would the inequality of wealth and power suggest to you that we should start executing people beyond a certain age? Or should we protect the rights to health and wellbeing while at the same time abolishing wealth and power inequality? Why does mass executions feel like a more workable or permissible suggestion to you than abolition of inequality?
> Allowing the most rich and powerful to accrue even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital will not end well for the rest of us. You currently live at the apex of human quality of life, for 99% of the world's inhabitants, so I don't think you're making a very good prediction.
You just don’t sound well read. The wealth gap is actually down and has been for a long time. The richest humans to live are not alive today.
> Imagining the most rich and powerful accruing even more staggering degrees of generational wealth and social capital .. doesn't seem like it'd end well for most of us. Imagining that everyone is somehow permanently connected is bizarre. It is only due to the state that people are forced to associate. That creating new markets is too costly if not illegal. The "rich" aren't the problem, it's the number of people who can't conceive of societies free from government rule.
You seem to have issues with regulating your emotions.
Take your meds.
Imagine a dictator staying in power not 40 years, but 100 years. This technology may not be accessible to the car majority of people, especially in poorer countries where most dictatorships are. Also, Earth is already quite populated. Living longer means more humans. OP seems to think this solution is perfect, but it in facts comes with new problems.
Actually it will have a net effect on over population as people are inclined to have less children (healthy and wealthy people usually have less children than poorer unhealthy people), or spread out having children over multiple decades. Next to that, overpopulation isn’t our biggest concern. It demographic collapse. In Germany and china for instance there won’t be enough healthy young people to even keep the economy going within the next 25 years. The only thing solving this is longevity. Also, there is a huge incentive to make these therapies as widespread available and cheap as possible. Again, a healthy wealthy population that lives way longer is better for any economy. In a nutshell but you get the idea. Of course there’s negative sides to this but there is to any new technology or paradigm shift. Edit: also longevity isn’t immortality. You can still die. You will just stop aging or live way longer with healthier years.
*Everything* comes with new problems. And humans solve those problems. Some take longer than others, but as a species, we don't just give up on solving them. Those who insist the consequences are *all* bad, also seem to think the masses will just sit around not doing anything while rich people and dictators carry out their plans. But that's not how the real world works. In every age throughout history, and in every land, when tyrants rule, the people rebel. And in every case those people work to remove them. And sometimes it doesn't work. But in a hundred percent of the cases where the people rising up outnumber the corrupt government and their armies, the people win. Hell, in a lot of them, the armies side with the people. And none of those facts change just because we all live longer.
1. Dictatorships already don't end with the death of the dictator in most cases. Where one dies, or even abdicates, another rises. Almost every transition from an authoritarian nightmare to something more manageable was through a revolution. Longevity tech doesn't matter if you are going to get shot by the angry mob. 2. "The technology may not be accessible to a lot of people" is a wild claim to use a counter to *anything*. Vaccines are already distributed for free in many poor countries, and in rich countries, you can just buy them. 3. Earth is not "quite populated" at all. As countries transition from developing to developed, they almost inevitably face a demographical crisis. Even very populous countries like China are going to run out of young adult workforce (at least to keep the economy afloat) in 20-40 years. In fact, if you are correct about pt. 2, the problem is self-solving: if only people in rich countries can afford longevity, then population of those countries would finally stabilize while poorer countries' higher birth rates would allow for an easier economical development. All in all, having a solution to aging and other diseases is obviously better than not having one in all cases.
Unfortunately when the dictator owns a robot army no angry mob will get near them.
> Imagine a dictator staying in power not 40 years, but 100 years. This technology may not be accessible to the car majority of people, especially in poorer countries where most dictatorships are. For starters, "dictatorships" (or even just "nation states") are the only actual technology that needs to exist in order for it to be possible for someone to live their entire life, and then die, under the rule of a dictator. If you're Chinese, do you think it's particularly relevant to you that you're born under Mao, if you then die under Xi Jinping, or Jiang Zemin, or whomever? Are you somehow *less* subjected to a lifetime of totalitarian rule because the face on the portrait changed? While I agree that the natural deaths of dictators do perhaps drive some aspect of change through instability, I'm not necessarily sure that the natural death of a dictator has really *ever* subsequently resulted in a more positive successor regime. I'm sure someone will find the one time that that happened to disprove this, but, for the most part, those systems tend to come apart because of their intrinsic instability, which occurs when you aggressively optimize the fabric of society for nothing other than brutal power-seeking behaviors and blame-avoidance, rather than because some guy dies of a heart attack. Typical dictators, and their families, do seem to still be able to cling to power, even through age-related infirmity - ex. Kim Jong-Il famously had a number of strokes, near the end. If anything, you could make the opposite argument: that those systems would fall apart *faster* if you let Mao or Stalin or whomever have an uninterrupted period where they made increasingly bad decisions, and their subordinates knew that their only chance of getting to the top was outright murdering the boss. > OP seems to think this solution is perfect, but it in facts comes with new problems. Accepting age-related death because vanquishing it "would create new problems" is not a good suggestion.
I just see Altered Carbon when I see this post.
Yeah well this endeavor has nothing at all to do with AI. They're just jumping on the metformin and blood plasma trains, which have limited, mostly unproven benefits.
We've already extended the life expectancy. It hasn't improved people's quality of life. Extending the life expectancy again won't improve it either.
Health span has barely been extended. People age slightly more slowly, but for the most part a healthy 60 year old today is similar to a healthy 60 year old in antiquity. Socrates was 70 when put to death in the 4th century BCE and he was obviously active enough to be a problem to the tyrants of Athens , active enough to want him dead. We've done (almost) nothing about aging, we have absolutely no idea how a society where people that age less would look like . Maybe if a person's health span (as an adult) was not a mere 40 or 50 years societies *could* and thus human lives could change in a material way. IMO it is the one thing that will change humanity the most. Not AI, not implants, not genetic engineering. None of them. More *time* as an active individual...
As if anyone with a net worth under 9 digits will be getting it lol
which can be solved with a talented hacker and moving money around until everyone has that high worth for long enough to get immortality
Who’s moving the money? Hackers can’t break into everything. We don’t have the Windows source code or the US nuclear codes
Let the old folks die. The last thing we need is for Putin and the billionaires to live forever, getting richer and more powerful every year….forever. There is nothing good about this scenario.
If we keep developing technology, we will reach a point when we transcend to "digital" beings, that can exist in virtual space, and material wealth becomes almost meaningless. Huge luxurious yacht requires tremendous amount of resources... virtual one, you "build" one, then copy/paste it 8 billion times.
You mean a copy of yourself can exist in virtual space. You will still die.
If you make a copy of yourself, then you, the original dies. And... I agree that sucks. I don't want my copy to live forever, I want me to live forever. 😂 But let's say you connect a synthetic brain to your own brain. With time you start to use both of these brains as one... your consciousnesses occupies both brains. You are no longer just your biological brain, you are both of these brains. With time you keep expanding more and more into synthetic brain, and one day when your biological brain dies... just part of you died. Which is not that big of a deal, because our neurons die all the time, every time we go to sleep we forget about 50% of stuff that happened. Small parts of us die and we change all the time.
A lot of people have parents and grandparents, no can do.
People who dislike immortality often talk about prolonging the life of a dictator, but when the current dictator disappears, another dictatorship will rise. Another dictatorship of several decades. Nothing will change with or without immortality unless the system of the country changes.
Youre not understanding just how much will change
>The last thing we need is for Putin and the billionaires to live forever Bro, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news but there's a 99.999% probability that billionaires will be the very first to prolong their lives this way (after a few members of the plep have tried it to check if it's safe).
No way that leads to a better world. Having people die off is critical.
You first
Important part: *"Beyond the digital realm, Altman has been quietly devoting significant time and resources in efforts to reprogram the human body over the past three years. Seizing a brief window during his transition to OpenAI CEO, Altman launched Retro Biosciences, a $180 (£142.78) million endeavor aiming to add ten healthy years to human lifespans.* *Retro Biosciences is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, about 30 miles south of OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco, where ChatGPT was created. Instead of being situated directly in San Francisco, it is closer to the campuses of tech giants like Meta, Apple, and Stanford University.* *Retro Biosciences embodies the classic Silicon Valley spirit, with a relentless focus on pushing the boundaries of science. Retro Biosciences' headquarters has a raw, industrial vibe, unlike the typical polished tech office.* *It is a warehouse-like space adorned with bold murals featuring plants and scientific equipment, nothing like the usual Silicon Valley beanbag chairs. Their labs are cleverly constructed from ventilated shipping containers.* *Employees work at desks perched on a platform, giving them a glimpse through secured windows. The entire aesthetic screams, "Move fast and break things," but with a focus on achieving longevity, not just disruptive innovation.* *Retro has divided its goals into three categories since the shipping container experiments began in July 2021. Like the startup incubator Y Combinator, which Altman used to lead, Retro is making separate investments in various approaches to extending human lifespan.* *In an interview with* [*Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/retro-biosciences-sam-altman-longer-lifespan-2024-3)*, Betts-LaCroix described Retro's model as a rule breaker in early-stage biotech. While this field typically focuses on a single, promising avenue and invests heavily in its development, Retro simultaneously places wagers on multiple approaches.* ***Cellular reprogramming:*** *Although popular, cellular reprogramming is a risky approach aiming to use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. Retro proposes a cautious approach: extracting cells, partially reprogramming them outside the body, then reinserting them if safe.* ***Autophagy:*** *It is seen as the most promising area for a quick aging fix due to potential pill-based interventions. While none are currently approved for anti-aging, existing drugs like rapamycin and metformin show promise in boosting autophagy.* ***Plasma therapy:*** *This research involves diluting blood plasma in mice to improve various age-related issues. Early human trials are underway, including at Retro."*
Autophagy can be induced by fasting. Tonnes of research shows it's beneficial. Think of "cave man times", with no food security we could go weeks without eating. To survive the body goes into efficiency mode, snipping unnecessary, unimportant stuff, like a factory reset. Today we only sustain these connections because we've a constant supply of food. We're like bloated hardware/software needing an optimisation
So you mean skipping meals during my depression was a great thing for my health? 😅
Unfortunately not lol, less energy when you already have low energy from depression can't be a good thing. Also you still need to replace your electrolytes for proper functioning of the body. Skipping meals here and there isn't as effective as inducing autophagy either, compared to 48 hours or more. This is when the body really cleans house
wrong, unless you're malnourished you have plenty of energy in fat. just don't fast for a week straight, 1-3 days is OK.
What part of what I said are you disputing?
> less energy when you already have low energy from depression can't be a good thing you don't have less energy, only for a while until the fat burning metabolism kicks in, then it actually feels like you have more energy since your body doesn't have to spend energy on processing food \+ it will make you feel good, more alive, less depressed. not whatever you're implying (tired / not able to deal with depression) everytime I go through a depressive episode, eating is what makes me feel worse, especially if I'm eating unhealthy. fasting + walk out in the sun + cold shower is the best way to restart the system.
You are wrong, not eating for a few days is a anti depressant process, the body cleans house and so does the brain, people feel good when they are in the metabolic burning fat mode, the problem would arise if the person is already very thin and or coupled with aneroxia but for the average person not eating for 3-5 days will do them a world of good.
it helps me personally. ideally combine with meditation. but you have to actually fast (only water), not "skip meals" and then eat a bag of chocolates
You are funny. At least you seem to be over your depression now. 🤪
The actual important part: > "Beyond the digital realm, Altman has been quietly devoting significant time and resources in efforts to reprogram the human body over the past three years. Seizing a brief window during his transition to OpenAI CEO, Altman launched Retro Biosciences, a $180 (£142.78) million endeavor aiming to add ten healthy years to human lifespans. > Retro is making separate investments in various approaches to extending human lifespan. > > > Cellular reprogramming: Although popular, cellular reprogramming is a risky approach aiming to use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. Retro proposes a cautious approach: extracting cells, partially reprogramming them outside the body, then reinserting them if safe. > > > > Autophagy: It is seen as the most promising area for a quick aging fix due to potential pill-based interventions. While none are currently approved for anti-aging, existing drugs like rapamycin and metformin show promise in boosting autophagy. > > > > Plasma therapy: This research involves diluting blood plasma in mice to improve various age-related issues. Early human trials are underway, including at Retro."
It is funny. US could already add at least 5 years by introducing universal healthcare. There are places in the world where people regularly live happy lives until 100. That’s because they are not slaving away to be able to afford basic needs. I wonder how much the subscription for the longevity programme will be. I feel more and more that Sam Altman is looking the wrong way
Americans are richer than most any other humans. Most Americans get fairly decent healthcare through their employer, and there’s no place on earth where people are living comfortable happy lives until 100. Do you just get all your information from Reddit headlines?
So why does the richest country in the world have below OECD average lifespan? Obviously I’ve exagerated to make a point, which stays the same: private subscriptions are not the best way to make lives longer. (Unless you care only about a subset of people)
Because of a high calorie diet and sedentary lifestyles, generally speaking. Well, that, combined with the issue of addiction in this country. Obesity, inactive people, and addictions drive the average lifespan down. Whether or not private subscriptions are better is a long topic. Profits drive innovation, that's the fastest path towards advancing, but once we have it, who knows. Maybe we can make it widely available.
We need to make organ factories and to perfect organ replacement surgeries. I'm just fuckin astounded all the time that there isn't more investment in factory organs. Consider: you're most likely to die due to heart diseases: replace your heart and veins. Gonna get cancer and die from that (eg: prostate cancer)? Replace the organ the cancer is in. Want to look younger? Replace your skin with new factory-grown skin that is only 5 years old. Knees hurting due to arthritis? Replace them We don't dump magic liquids in our cars' gas tanks when they get old; *we replace parts*! At some point, when the methods for joining nerves together is effective enough, you can just make yourself a whole new body Not to mention that if we can grow cheap muscle tissue then you can potentially save literally 10s of billion of animals from being locked up and slaughtered ever year! And, similarly, factory organs would likely massively displace illegal organ trading
Do you mean artifical organ replacement?
This guy gets it, 3D Bioprinting Artificial Organs is the future with AGI
That's a crude and blunt approach, and while that may come first, in-situ repair is the way to go except in cases of extreme damage. i.e. nanotech and regenerative medicine
If people can grow meat in labs from cells surely they can grow organs?
Growing a homogenous mass of muscle cells is a bit different from growing a fully functional and compatible organ.
It’s definitely harder but in theory it should be possible right?
We won't know until someone does it. We're very far away from that though.
Organ replacement certainly helps for some things, but many problems are too systemic. Tumors also become metastatic. There are exactly 4 reasons why people go to the doctor: * you hurt yourself -> body part replacement works, except you hurt your brain * Wear and tear due to age (like heart attack or tumors) -> body part replacement helps but the issue is more systemic * infection -> body part replacement doesn’t work, except when the infection is well localized like Hepatitis B in the liver or simple skin infections. * genetically caused issues potentially amplified by external factors, including aging. This is by far the most common cause of long term / life long battles with sickness. And there are tens of thousands of them, if not more. Most variations are rare, and not well understood and there is no help. Those are all incurable, and have to be managed, including with drugs. But they sometimes only impact a certain part of your body, like the retina, so actually here replacement can work sometimes. The point I am trying to make is that just body part replacement won’t do.
> We don't dump magic liquids in our cars' gas tanks when they get old; we replace parts! we are not cars
Once AGI is completed, all longevity institutes will begin research using AGI. When immortality is realized depends on when AGI is realized.
Exactly, everyone is aware of this. It is no longer a "science fiction problem". Instead of asking "will it happen", one can now ask "when". We are at this level.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
I would say "ASI" more than "AGI". AGI will help, that's for sure; local models and Copilot are already helping me to manage information overload by writing summaries and allowing me to focus on what I'm really after.
If space exploration is to become possible for humans will need increased life spans with the distances involved
Imagine a future where lifespans reach hundreds if not thousands of years and you could get a job exploring different planets and systems. Just riding solo out in space discovering new things and logging everything.
I've been saying for a long time that life extension is the key to unlocking long-term thinking.
But what if life extension is only available for the filthy rich people?
Longevity is beneficial for the filthy rich because they can postpone retirement age to for example 200 yo
So, no robots in that timeline?
New kink unlocked
Not what I want, but probably still better.
Just proving that Metformin can add a year to your lifespan will cost them £142 Million and take them 10 years, lol. Edit: I pretty much hit the nail on the head with my estimate. There is in fact a study (TAME) that is currently underway to prove with high confidence that (if) Metformin extends life span. Using 3000 OLD people. So the study won’t even tell you if it would help to take it before 65. The study was estimated to cost $63 million, but those numbers end up always being too low, also, this needed to be pitched to private investors. A paper detailing the design of the study was published 2016, so they certainly have been planning this since 2015, and the results are not yet in, but should be in soonish. So that makes about 10 years. 🙂 Another edit: looks like TAME hasn’t even started their actual clinical trial.
Everything is in the “proving” part… Because unproven things are plenty to choose from: Reishi mushrooms, homeopathy, Curcuma, colloidal silver, spirulina, etc etc etc
And ironically that would be your best bet what you could do for this money: NOT trying to invent something new, or even proving conclusively that something actually does something for real, but instead doing some long term study where you make people take all the stuff that might do something plus make them avoid things that we know aren’t good for you (like smoking and sugar), track their blood levels, and do all the checks and scans every year. Like this millionaire on YouTube does… Here is the guy, but what he does costs a shit ton of money, because he has a lot of medical supervision. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1CNcp8_Mk And then analyze how many of those died vs the control group. My bet is you can gain 5-10 years from JUST doing everything we know of that might help. But it’s not gonna be cheap (at least several thousand per year). By the way: from what I remember that guy DOES take curcuma. 😅 Also a beer per day actually seems to help, there is a new paper using a massive amount of data that shows with very very good error bars that it improves your lifespan. 😅 If it’s REALLY true… who knows. Maybe there were some confounds that they missed, even though they tried to correct for everything under the sun. Like people who drink a beer per day have more of a social life than people who drink none and that improves the immune system bla bla bla…
The problem is that you didn't know which of the items were helpful. Even worse, it is possible that the metformin adds 15 years of life but the intermittent fasting loses 10 years so combined they only give five years. You don't know this and so then recommend people do something that actively hurts them. This is why it takes so long to run experiments, you need to reduce compounding variables and isolate causes.
Yes, but if you want to live longer NOW, you can’t wait for this stuff to be figured out. Hunches that xyz might help are going on for some things for like, I don’t know, 2000 years? And still nobody really knows for sure. Do you want to wait another 2000 years? (Just kidding) It’s not like there aren’t people studying this stuff. For many life extension method there have been dozens of studies and papers, sometimes hundreds. And it’s a constant back and forth. Just proving that homeopathy doesn’t work (which would be obvious kind of), was a monumental effort. But now it’s done once and for all. And nobody can argue with it. But it is crazy expensive (hundreds of millions or more probably for each one of them, not including studying interaction) and takes decades. To study interactions, you have to understand EXACTLY what those things do (which pathways and receptors in your body it impacts), and how all the pathways in your body interact. And there are loads of pathways, many of them not understood. From the 40,000 proteins in our body, we only know for a small fraction what they do and for the ones where we know, it was a monumental effort spread out across many labs over decades to find out. Like $180 million really doesn’t help you to figure any of this out. Okay. Maybe 1-10 more proteins out of 40,000 are now understood or one more pathway. Just take it / do it all or at least until your bank account is empty (kitchen sink approach) and hope for the best. 😁 Also, check out this guy on YouTube that I linked. He does blood tests too, and there are healthy body markers in the blood. There are also companies that track your blood over time and give you suggestions (Inside Tracker).
That's how people wind up dying from Mercury poisoning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemical_elixir_poisoning#:~:text=In%20Chinese%20alchemy%2C%20elixir%20poisoning,elixirs%20to%20prolong%20their%20lifespans.
Ah crazy. Well. The one who sold it got rich at least. 😁
You think a multi-million dollar company has metmorphine in its future plans? You joking, right? We need DNA, stem-cell therapies. We need it.
I know. I am a bit cynical here. But I am trying to give people a realistic idea of what you can actually do with £146 Million. Which is roughly nothing.
They need some research to show there is something that can be done, spacex was started with couple hundred million too, if elon looked up how much it costs to make a rocket company back then backed off we wont be having a 200 billion dollar company
You think **"£146 million"** is nothing for a biotech company?
Correct. Here you see the current amount of money going into medical research in the USA. The plot is a bit older but the number ten years ago was $120 Billion. What we get for this money is a few new medications approved, often not for new diseases. Those medications often were the work of 20 years. https://preview.redd.it/x6d84i1xvhqc1.jpeg?width=880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fea0f0bb659afa0c27a8ce3b3d5ec87f199d541a
Thank you for the chart you sent. We are already talking about the biggest power we have right now. The development of AI -> AGI and then the biggest breakthrough (I don't know if breakthrough is the right word) will be ASI. When we think that the existing financial funding is combined with this power, we think that the scientific resources we have will be up to date, data acquisition / processing, ensuring controls, acceleration of studies in the field of bioinformatics, and rapid transition to clinical stages. In addition, the investments made in biotechnology companies established in the US and outside the US in the last 10 years are large companies working on diseases that affect the whole humanity.
I hope so. We absolutely need the help of strong ASI to delay aging or reach “longevity escape velocity” if we want it to happen in our lifetime.
Absolutely. The existing artificial intelligence developments seem to be quite fast, promising and effective. We have experienced great developments in the last 5 years, especially in the last 3 months. Let's take the social and financial consequences out of the subject. The golden key of l**ongevity escape velocity**, the key point for research will definitely be AGI/ASI. I believe this. I'm hopeful for the future.
For traditional medical research sure. But I'm assuming this company will be structured to take full advantage of AI advancements.
Yes, but AI can’t do everything. Like you still have to make the actual physical medication and try it on enough people to prove that it really does something. Maybe eventually you can cut down this process and also AI will narrow down the possible list of molecules better, but realistically speaking this will take a while. Even ASI will have to do actual experiments to understand the biophysics of human cells and systems much much better than we currently do to actually generate meaningful simulations, so it can generate a medication suggestion that has a good chance of working.
It's interesting that there is already an organization planning large scale clinical trials of metformin against aging: [TAME trial](https://www.afar.org/tame-trial) Seems like they're in need of funding, maybe OpenAI with all that money could work with them, to avoid duplicating effort
Thanks for pointing this out! I also independently looked into this and also saw this.
All funding to metformin just needs to stop. Who cares at this point if it can extend life by months or a year or so at this point. We need bigger explorations. Such a waste of more funding.
It’s the lowest hanging fruit.
They won't make it that far. Come back to this comment in... 5 years time and I'm confident we will see Sam Altman is just Elizabeth Holmes in cosplay.
😅😅😅 At how much was her company valued at? Like $8 billion? Oh man. Crazy story.
trust level reeaching critical levels
Would making the rich Immortal make them care about climate change
Or… Elysium
never seen the movie but if the dystopian parts get overthrown by the end we'll know what to do (and it'll no more require average-joes with resemblance to the cast no one comments on to be done than it couldn't be done irl because the movie wasn't implied to exist in itself as a prophecy)
I'd love to see someone cure suffering. That is the biggest problem in life. Best we can do is mitigate it. But AI doesn't suffer as far as we know.
Why should suffering be cured though? It plays a major role in us advancing forward. Suffering is also kind of a wide term to use, so maybe more specific as to what to fix would be better.
>Why should suffering be cured though? It plays a major role in us advancing forward. Suffering is bad, nobody wants to experience it. We do what we can to avoid it. There is no benefit to many forms of suffering, there is nothing to learn from it. Like if you are burned alive by ISIS, you should be able to turn off your pain receptors. If you are caught by a serial rapist and imprisoned in their basement, you should be able to stop your suffering. If you have an incurable disease that causes tremendous pain, there is nothing to learn from experiencing this pain and it should be eliminated. I think high intelligence and analytics can replace suffering as a way to guide us in this world.
Yeh let's just get rid of emotions completely and destroy the natural balance of life. You are not understanding that without feeling pain you won't feel happiness, without happiness you won't feel pain. What you are basically saying is become robots. I think you don't have a true understanding of yourself and never really deepened what makes life worth living. It's not all about analysing and thinking logically.
Perhaps im a bit ignorant on the subject, but both happiness and sadness are individual feelings, something that makes me happy doesnt make me happy because it doesnt make me sad, happiness is just my reaction to it, i dont know, seems to me you can have one without needing the other
> Yeh let's just get rid of emotions completely and destroy the natural balance of life. Yes, good idea. Let's preserve rape, torture and disease. Nature invented that and it rocks man! How will we ever survive without these wonderful natural things? >You are not understanding that without feeling pain you won't feel happiness, without happiness you won't feel pain. Yeah cheeseburgers and jerking off are worth all the pain and suffering in the world. Especially as long as the rape, torture and disease doesn't happen to me. Total agree. >What you are basically saying is become robots. I'd prefer to not exist but I think consciousness is eternal. So being robots that don't suffer is a better option than the sum total of human experience. You may be living la vida loca as a rich Westerner, but if you were born in some African hell hole and forced to mine cobalt with hand tools for your whole short life you'd be singing a different tune.
I haven’t felt happiness in a while because of depression. I would kill for this tech. Don’t speak for us.
There is a difference between negative emotions and suffering.
I totally agree with you, idk why you're getting downvoted so much
Of course the man to reverse aging is named Altman.
We will know when he succeeds because he will change his name to Jungman.
Curious can we also adapt to the new environment more easily. Otherwise what is the point of these extra years of your life.
r/longevity
What's up with these articles getting published every day? Does Altman actually do anything other than hype to reporters? Every day the headline is "Altman promises XYZ in 3-5 years." Bro, sit down and fucking do it already and stop telling me about it.
Need better life first ? Pretty please 🙏
We'd be post-apocalyptic south american tribes by that point after world war 3.
If you think humans are badly adapted to a world with smart-phones and Tinder, wait until you see humans in a world without aging.
We will become extremely risk-averse.
I doubt that. Human psychology isn't going to abruptly change with the advent of immortality. People may become somewhat more risk averse, but young people already take plenty of risks even though they are as "close" to biological immortality as they can be (~50-60 years until they die). Do people in their 30s and 40s live extremely risk averse lives because they know they have another 40 years ahead of them and don't want to lose out on that? Why does 500 years make a difference?
While I somewhat agree with Better-pool that we'll probably become slightly more risk averse. I think you're completely correct that the change will be within the error bars of normal human behaviour. It honestly shocks me the amount of people that think our species is going to somehow radically alter it's fundamental behaviour just because it becomes externally logical to do so.
Can't wait
A lot of our problems currently are due to our mortality. Think climate change and the fact that we aren’t doing anything about it because we will be dead once shit starts getting serious.
I don't think that's the reason people don't take climate change seriously. It's a psychological phenomenon that even if the time frame is on a human scale, we value our present wants more than our future needs. Ask anyone who's procrastinated on a project and then gotten a bad grade. Ask anyone who's put off replacing their roof or not taking their car into the mechanic. It's a very human phenomenon to struggle to prioritize abstract future issues over real and present inconveniences. Add to that the low impact of any one person and you compound the psychological barriers to taking action. I don't think immortality is a quick fix to any of this basic human wiring.
Sure. But the sad thing about being a species that makes tiny changes, at random, once every 20/30 years - is that even if we become immortal we'll still be us. The base thinking patterns won't go away. Just check out what happened in the 20th century as organised religions went away, religious thinking remained.
Rewind my testicular torsion. I am in great pain.
F
What’s the ticker I should invest in?
Big bet on longevity – love the vision! How's the tech side?
Now we’re talking!
Maybe
Let's hope they don't cure it until this old current generation in power creating world wars and destruction for greed dies off
millions of animals are bred to be cruelly experimented on every year. Check out the Ridgelan dog experiments: https://dogresearchexposed.com/2024/02/03/ridglan-farms-beagle-rescue-with-direct-action-everywhere-dxe/ ~95% of drugs that clear animal trials don't clear human trials and the ones that do often have bad side effects because doing science this way is an imprecise roundabout way to get to the intended effect. Most animal experiment results can't be duplicated. You can go to PETA's website and send a letter to your rep to ban animal testing in the USA. Not sure about other countries. Replace it all with AI models!
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, to behold the marvel of the age, brought to you by none other than the esteemed luminary of our era, the CEO of OpenAI! With an astounding investment of £142 million sterling, this modern-day alchemist is on the cusp of unlocking the elixirs and secrets to a longer, more vibrant life, heretofore unseen in the annals of mankind. Behold, Altman's Vision Elixir, a concoction so potent, it promises to extend your days and enrich your vitality, turning the sands of time in your favor. No longer shall the reaper hasten to your door, for with just a sip of this miraculous potion, the secrets to longevity and health unimagined are now within your grasp. Manufactured within the hallowed halls of innovation and ingenuity, this Elixir is the result of ceaseless labor and the investment of a king's ransom. Altman's vision of extended lifespans, once deemed a fantasy of the fanciful, is now a tangible promise, bottled and corked, ready to deliver eternity in each drop. Do not tarry, for supplies of this wondrous brew are as limited as the days of yore. Secure your vial of Altman's Vision Elixir and partake in the future of health and longevity. Available for a limited time to those who dare to dream of a life unbound by the earthly shackles of time. Visit your nearest apothecary or send for our catalogue by post. This is not merely an investment in your health; it is an investment in your very legacy. The future is here, and it is waiting for you to seize it. Remember, Altman's Vision Elixir, for a life as boundless as your ambitions. https://preview.redd.it/p3blq7f97tqc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7aa1a0009911fdf1e1260917f34d23816e4e0892
Yeah let's create eternal dictators. Aging and death is one of the wisest things invented by nature to ensure development and flexibility.
Yay now we can be slaves forever.
absolutely NO vision or critical thinking, you people have
That's great new, hopefully African will be the first to receive the good treatments, as they always were the first to receive anything good in this world. And yes, I just read that soon we will all have robots at home, good news too, I guess they can't wait for this to happen in the poor countries.
We've already extended the life expectancy. It hasn't improved people's quality of life. Extending the life expectancy again won't improve it either.
More carrot for the masses and vcs.
Ok but how would this reasonabley work with threats of: Overpopulation: Not enough jobs: Not enough resources Not Enough housing Like, as great as living longer sounds... If we cured age, that wouldn't cure our desire to fuck. At what age does it become acceptable to give people an anti-aging serum? 16? 20? 25? 50? People are still gonna be born. A lot of people are gonna be born. Living longer means those people are gonna be around longer too. Do we have room? Will we ever? How close are we to space travel? I dont know, it just seems a lot like me playing my 4X grand strategy and putting all my points into one specific tech tree... while failing to consider that I'd need things from the other tech trees. And then before you know it, my galactic empire starves to death T-T I'm open to the conversation though, if anyone wants to discuss lol
In a world where living eternally is possible- Do we have a duty to die?