If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

http://haakonsk.blogg.no/1456259429_if_youre_alive_in_30_.html

by StreamBright • 10 years ago

151 226 10 years ago

haakonsk.blogg.no

peteretep• 10 years ago

There's a whole profession of people whose job it is to predict this called actuaries. They disagree with your conclusion.

harperlee• 10 years ago

But it's in their best interest to assume it wont happen.

If I correctly predict, as an actuary, the demise of the industry, I don't win anything. If I can calculate a superprecise premium for my insurance product based on this being true, I have an expensive product that underperforms the competition, and management is not happy. Whereas if I ignore superlong trends, I get to earn my salary, probably until I retire - you know, it probably won't happen. I value a product competetively. And if we miss, it won't be my only problem. So even if I can do the right thing, I will be punished for the event.

mc808• 10 years ago

If actuaries can collectively predict the future, then term life insurance premiums should show a strong trend down as we approach the point where longevity increases significantly (adjusting for income, inflation, etc). From a few seconds of googling, they seem to be flat or increasing. It might be good to look back in 100 years and see if they got it right.

surfmike• 10 years ago

Life expectancy has been increasing by ever smaller amounts in the past decades. I am hopefully that a lot of new technologies could help buck that trend, but so far the trends don't support the author's hypothesis.

ekianjo• 10 years ago

It was mainly increasing because we almost made the death at birth close to zero. Now the gains are much harder to get on the other side.

nkozyra• 10 years ago

Most people - at least most people here - know that a lot of those publicized numbers are due to infant mortality, but ...

Post-childhood life expectancy has gone up in smaller amounts as the parent comment says. The grand numbers ("life expectancy was just 60 in 1900!") obviously reflect infant and childhood mortality, but we've increased the average lifespan in the United States by 2-3 years in the last few decades alone.

Here's a graph that shows life expectancy at various ages in the UK - you can see this is not all due to childhood mortality:

http://www.maxroser.com/gains-for-all-life-expectancy-by-age...

Spooky23• 10 years ago

Life expectancy is a tricky figure.

Avoiding childhood death improved life expectancy at birth most dramatically on a global scale. But if you look from other points (say life expectancy at age 20), or scope it for locality and gender, the ability to intervene for many formerly mortal events pushed the needle up significantly. Examples: heart attacks, diabetes, cancer.

The differences aren't as dramatic -- saving someone from a heart attack at 50 may move the needle 5 years. But they are real.

nck4222• 10 years ago

I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well.

Seems a little shoddy.

MatthewWilkes• 10 years ago

Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment… if actuaries did agree they wouldn't publicise it as an increased expectation of health is would benefit them financially. If actuaries expected people to live less time they'd be keen to increase rates and advertise it. If they seriously expected people to stop dying then the estimated value of life insurance policies would drop to zero.

Personally, I think it's more than a little unlikely that we're the last generation to know death.

nmrm2• 10 years ago

If they seriously expected people to stop dying then the estimated value of life insurance policies would drop to zero.

I think it's (not im)possible that rates would go up! Here's why:

The most risky (largest) life insurance policies aren't taken out by people who fully expect to reach old age; rather, they are taken out by people in their prime with young families or other dependents. So you have people taking out large policies from ages 25 - 50 or so, and then going back to small policies or no policy at all. The risk pool is now very different -- lots of very pofitable policies, but also a lot of risk. The existential risk to the insurance company might actually increase in that case, and rates would have to be increased to accomodate this risk.

Probably not, and IANAA, but it'd be interesting if an actual actuary familiar with life insurance could chime in.

nikbackm• 10 years ago

Not to mention that most in the know seem to agree Moore's law has come to an end, as all exponential growth must at some point in the real world.

isseu• 10 years ago

Yeah, Some things work with Eroom's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom's_Law?previous=yes

aetherson• 10 years ago

If this kind of simple-minded extrapolation worked, we would all be flying personal vehicles that could break the sound barrier right now, and would take vacations on the moon.

codecamper• 10 years ago

Just hope they don't lose a backup.... that could be the end of me!

rpgmaker2• 10 years ago

You are not being a pessimist, is just that the author presented a weak argument.

vruiz• 10 years ago

I'd like to believe you, but what kills people is not their age, today it's mostly cancer and heart disease. While I'd hope we'll make progress, I doubt those 2 will be just gone in 30 years.

ant6n3• 10 years ago

We'll soon add a new old friend: bacterial infection.

biofox• 10 years ago

For the most part, cancer and heart disease are diseases of old age. Young people rarely die of them.

rorykoehler• 10 years ago

What makes you think we won't cure them? Cancer I think will definitely be cured in 30 years. I haven't been following heart disease so much but chances are we will have huge health breakthroughs by 30 years. I would put my money on there being new/different diseases that kill us in 30 years.

soylentcola• 10 years ago

In theory, couldn't a lot of heart disease (if not more general cardiovascular diseases) be addressed by figuring out how to affordably grow new hearts from tissue? I understand that's not something we're capable of doing right now but from my (largely ignorant) perspective, it seems like the issue is "hearts break down over time". The heart is essentially a mechanical part, and unlike neurological systems, there's no qualitative difference between one heart and another aside from how well it pumps blood. When you have a mechanical part that wears out, you replace it. Artificial hearts have issues stemming from the fact that they aren't 1:1 replacements for human hearts but if you could grow a new heart from a person's cells and get to a point where doing so is relatively affordable, could you not swap out an old heart the way you'd swap out a fuel pump that's wearing out?

Compared to stuff like cancer, I feel like replacing hearts is more an issue of cost and engineering rather than developing entire new forms of treatment.

jobigoud• 10 years ago

If I recall correctly China has reached the escape velocity at some point in the sixties, gaining more than one year of life expectancy every passing year. The even harder part is to sustain this for long period of times.

staticelf• 10 years ago

What can you say? I really hope this will be the case. I want to live 1000 years and preferably even longer.

r7212• 10 years ago

"The latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it is defined as The Maes-Garreau Point. The period equals to n-1 of the person’s life expectancy.

This suggests a law:

Maes-Garreau Law: Most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point."

http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-maesgarreau/

reasonattlm4• 10 years ago

"Trust but verify" is a good way to lead one's life. Ideally, we'd never take anyone's word for anything, and have the time and means to dig up supporting evidence for any position or statement that we encounter. But who has the time for that? We have to organize our busy lives around blocks of selective ignorance, portions of human knowledge and culture wherein we choose to take statements at face value, or follow the consensus viewpoint without doing the necessary groundwork to validate it. Books can and have been written on how to best go about this: acquiring and processing information costs time, and time is the most valuable resource most us of possess.

There exist a growing number of people propagating various forms of the viewpoint that we middle-aged folk in developed countries may (or might, or certainly will) live to see the development and widespread availability of radical life extension therapies. Which is to say medical technologies capable of greatly extending healthy human life span, probably introduced in stages, each stage effective enough to grant additional healthy years in which to await the next breakthrough. You might think of Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, both of whom have written good books to encapsulate their messages, and so forth.

Some people take the view of radical life extension within our lifetimes at face value, whilst others dismiss it out of hand. Both of these are rational approaches to selective ignorance in the face of all science-based predictions. It usually doesn't much matter what your opinion is on one article of science or another, and taking the time to validate science-based statements usually adds no economic value to your immediate future. It required several years of following research and investigating the background for me to feel comfortable reaching my own conclusions on the matter of engineered longevity, for example. Clearly some science-based predictions are enormously valuable and transformative, but you would lose a lifetime wading through the swamp of uselessness and irrelevance to find the few gemstones hidden therein.

As a further incentive to avoid swamp-wading, it is generally well known that futurist predictions of any sort have a horrible track record. Ignoring all futurism isn't a bad attention management strategy for someone who is largely removed from any activity (such as issuing insurance) that depends on being right in predicting trends and events. You might be familiar with the Maes-Garreau Law, which notes one of the incentives operating on futurists: 'The Maes-Garreau Law is the statement that "most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point", defined as "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it".'

If you want to be a popular futurist, telling people what they want to hear is a good start. "You're not going to be alive to see this, but..." isn't a compelling opening line in any pitch. You'll also be more convincing if your yourself have good reason to believe in your message. Needless to say, these two items have no necessary relationship to a good prediction, accuracy in materials used to support the prediction, or whether what is predicted actually comes to pass. These incentives do not make cranks of all futurists - but they are something one has to be aware of. Equally, we have to be aware of our own desire to hear what we want to hear. That is especially true in the case of predictions for future biotechnology and enhanced human longevity; we'd all like to find out that the mighty white-coated scientists will in fact rescue us from aging to death. But the laws of physics, the progression of human societies, and advance of technological prowess don't care about what we want to hear, nor what the futurists say.

I put value on what Kurzweil and de Grey have to say about the potential future of increased human longevity - the future we'll have to work to bring into being - because I have performed the due diligence, the background reading, the digging into the science. I'll criticize the pieces of the message I don't like so much (the timescale and supplements in the case of Kurzweil, WILT in the case of de Grey), but generally I'm on board with their vision of the future because the science and other evidence looks solid.

But few people in the world feel strongly enough about this topic to do what I have done. I certainly don't feel strongly enough about many other allegedly important topics in life to have done a tenth as much work to validate what I choose to believe in those cases. How should one best organize selective ignorance in fields one does care about, or that are generally acknowledged to be important? What if you feel - correctly, in my humble opinion - that engineered longevity is very important, but you cannot devote the time to validate the visions of Kurzweil, de Grey, or other advocates of longevity science?

The short answer is trust networks: find and listen to people like me who have taken the time to dig into the background and form our own opinions. Figuring out whether ten or twenty people who discuss de Grey's view of engineered human longevity are collectively on the level is not too challenging, and doesn't require a great deal of time. We humans are good at forming accurate opinions as to whether specific individuals are idiots or trustworthy, full of it or talking sense. Fundamentally, this establishment of a trust network is one of the primary purposes of advocacy in any field of endeavor. The greater the number and diversity of advocates to have taken the time to go digging and come back to say "this is the real deal," the more likely it is that that they are right. It's easy, and probably good sense, to write off any one person's views. If twenty very different people are saying much the same thing, having independently come to the same viewpoint - well, that is worth spending more time on.

One of the things I think we need to see happen before the next decade is out is the establishment of more high-profile longevity advocates who discuss advancing science in the Kurzweil or de Grey vein: nanotechnology, repairing the molecular damage of aging, and so on. Two, or three, or five such people is too few.

beeboop• 10 years ago

You say you've spent a ton of time reading about this, but don't actually say what your conclusions are. I know it's sort of counter to your point, but I would be interested in hearing your opinions on how soon we will start seeing significant increases in longevity.

melling2• 10 years ago

Probably off by a factor of 10. Very few people work in science doing research. The economy doesn't support enough people doing research to think we're going to make that kind of breakthrough within 30 years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pu...

nxzero• 10 years ago

I'd be curious to know how old the author is, since the selection of 30 years to me points to biased analysis. As one likely knows that's spent any time researching the topic, and as others have committed, there's no evidence to support the author's claims. Historically speaking most people have been able to live as long as they do now on average. To my knowledge infant mortality was the big outliner historical speaking when it came to average life expectancy and points to why average life expectancy is a pour measure. Truth is that if there was a major leap, there's zero reason the general public would ever get wind of it; basic economic both in terms of it as a product and the impact it'd have on populations.

BlackBerryBruce• 10 years ago

This article seems inherently flawed in its assumption that a. the exponential growth of computing power will keep up, despite the numerous technical and physical boundaries imposed upon them, b. computational power will solve many of the unknown inner workings of the human body, and c. that being aware of, and understanding those inner workings allows us to modify the human body in such a way that we can 'rejuvinate' the system.

While I do feel that life expectancy of everyone below 40 is probably going to massively higher than historical life expecancies (disregarding systemic failures of society and outside influences), I don't foresee a future where everyone gets to live forever.

shaurz3• 10 years ago

Moore's law has not been an exponential increase in technological capability in general. It has only been an exponential increase in one particular technology - more of the same. I see no evidence that the development of novel technology in general has sped up in any way.

dschiptsov• 10 years ago

Bullshit

Kequc• 10 years ago

I'm of the opinion that I was born anywhere between 2 months and a year too soon to ride the wave of immortality.

arethuza2• 10 years ago

As someone who turned 50 this year - immortality being available in 30 years sounds pretty good to me!

However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro, published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in healthcare as to give effective immortality.

http://www.tof.co.uk/stories/page8.html

[NB Mind you that book did make me rather interested in AI and I did do a CS degree and go on to do post-grad AI research for 6 years up to 1994 where I encountered a far better technology for enhancing intelligence. I can't really be too critical of someone getting this excited, after all I did, eventually somebody is going to do it...].

crusso7• 10 years ago

Yeah, I'm almost your age. When I was in high school, I had naive confidence that medical science would advance quickly enough to prevent my getting "old". I even remember a speech from a principal when I was in middle school, claiming that most of us in my class would live to well over 100 years. I believed him.

Despite that optimism and my very healthy diet and exercise regimen, I deal with increasingly deteriorating knee cartilage, loss of muscle mass, an impinged disc in my neck, decrease in reaction times, typical age-related memory degradation, increase in hair loss, yearly removal of pre-cancerous skin anomalies, failing reading vision, mild hearing loss, etc... you know, I'm getting old. This crap is building up and modern medicine offers no magic bullets to even the most minor of my age-related symptoms.

If I do make it another 30 years and if I'm still mentally with it, I'm sure that I'll be poo-pooing some claim that "in just another 30 years, you may live forever".

I don't doubt that eventually humans will figure out aging and be able to stop it -- but by that time, society will look a lot more like Star Trek with ubiquitous ability to manipulate our biology at an atomic level. Star Trek is at least hundreds of years away, not 30.

arethuza2• 10 years ago

"decrease in reaction times"

I seem to find that playing online games does wonders for this...

Only thing that really annoys me at the moment is my eyesight - I'm quite shortsighted and wear contacts to do things like skiing. Trying to navigate a new ski area (just back from the vast Portes de Soleil) with a map is now getting quite tricky as I can't read stuff up close with my contacts in....

Also I seemed to develop the rare blue/black colour blindness which my wife wasn't happy about.

meric• 10 years ago

I have a feeling we'll have to go through a period of global catastrophe before humanity resumes making progress at a quick pace. The momentum of the previous age of intellect[1] is coming to an end, and we're well into the age of decadence. The strong pillars of duty in Western society have gradually, in the past two hundred years, been swapped out piece by piece with some kind of weak inflammable material of decadence. These days single terrorist groups conquer entire nations before being slowed down, and our inefficient & corrupt governments whose hands and feet act independently are hardly able to stop them even with funding of billions. Millions of migrants from wars encouraged by the West's governments threaten the unity of the EU. The enormous sovereign debt burden carried by the likes of Japan and U.S. creates economic instability which threatens the social fabric, leading to a situation where the choice of leaders is between an egomaniac (Trump) and a megalomaniac (Clinton). The supposed saviour of the world economy and driver of global growth, China, suffers from enormous mal-investments and is burdened with even more debt than the U.S.

My own pessimism is not helping.

[1] http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

    (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great nations seem to be:
    The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
    The Age of Conquests
    The Age of Commerce
    The Age of Affluence
    The Age of Intellect
    The Age of Decadence.
    (e) Decadence is marked by:
    Defensiveness
    Pessimism
    Materialism
    Frivolity
    An influx of foreigners
    The Welfare State
    A weakening of religion.
    (f) Decadence is due to:
    Too long a period of wealth and power Selfishness
    Love of money
    The loss of a sense of duty.

The very decadence that corrodes an empire's institutions, rendering its governments unable to effectively thwart the rise of bandits who conquer vast swarths of territory, creates the conditions necessary for a new cycle with a new empire. Even if they can deal with one, or two, or three, each new group of bandits will become harder and harder for a decadent declining empire to deal with. Taliban, Shia militias, ISIS....

JackuB• 10 years ago

Biologists hate him! This programmer discovered Philosopher's stone with this one weird trick!

Anyway: Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow always flying forward…

adrianN5• 10 years ago

Why would you not want to stop people from dying?

shermablanca• 10 years ago

Cancer articles have been trending on HN lately.

totony• 10 years ago

You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too

saiya-jin• 10 years ago

overpopulation? not enough resources? first let's solve these, so we can have number of humans exploding (exponentially, maybe).

if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster

vixen99• 10 years ago

Aside from the economics of all this I'd suggest that on the basis of what we know about most humans, we'd end up with an appallingly ossified society. The Maos, Stalins, Kim Il Sungs[ list the dictators ] etc., in their 21st century forms will be ruling the roost for ever and a day. The last figure I saw on 'freedom of expression' across the world was (2016) 14%.

For example: "Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. "

https://www.freedomhouse.org/issues/freedom-expression

brianbarker• 10 years ago

Living to be 1000 sounds great until you realize some of the awful people in this world would be right there with you..forever.

shaurz3• 10 years ago

No technology has ever extended life. The so-called gains in life expectancy have only come about by reducing the causes of early mortality and slowing down the diseases of ageing.

paulddraper4• 10 years ago

I don't see the difference.

sambeau• 10 years ago

This TED talk by Aubrey de Grey puts the argument quite succinctly:

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Seeking-immortality-Aubrey-de...

More info on Aubrey de Grey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey

http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/executive-team

J_Darnley• 10 years ago

That sounds like utter torture. Hell I probably won't make it to 59 so what do I have to worry about?

reasonattlm4• 10 years ago

The original paper in which the idea of actuarial escape velocity was proposed by Aubrey de Grey is open access, and worth reading for a full treatment of the concept.

The thing to take away here is that this is inevitable, but not necessarily for us, unless we dig in and get the job done right now. The development of the necessary technologies is very thinly funded, meaning that timelines are very uncertain. Senescent cell clearance may be under development in two US startups right now, a part of allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA in clinical trials in France, clearance of one type of amyloid has had a successful trial in the UK, and clearance of glucosepane cross-links a couple of years away from a drug candidate, but other areas of biological repair needed for SENS-style rejuvenation of the old are still years away from getting to even this nascent stage. It is a miserable state of affairs given that the cost of progress towards prototypes in mice is a few hundred million, less than a single drug's development funding. Funding and advocacy make a huge difference at this point in the bootstrapping of rejuvenation therapies.

----

Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/

The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, if first-generation rejuvenation therapies were universally available and this progress in developing rejuvenation therapy could be indefinitely maintained, these advances would put us beyond AEV. Universal availability might be thought economically and sociopolitically implausible (though that conclusion may be premature, as I will summarise below), so it's worth considering the same question in terms of life-span potential (the life span of the luckiest people). Those who get first-generation therapies only just in time will in fact be unlikely to live more than 20–30 years more than their parents, because they will spend many frail years with a short remaining life expectancy (i.e., a high risk of imminent death), whereas those only a little younger will never get that frail and will spend rather few years even in biological middle age. Quantitatively, what this means is that if a 10% per year decline of mortality rates at all ages is achieved and sustained indefinitely, then the first 1000-year-old is probably only 5–10 years younger than the first 150-year-old.

cipriancaba• 10 years ago

You might want to check this rather well documented article about AI

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...

kingkawn• 10 years ago

There is not a more horrible future to imagine than the one described here.

megalodon• 10 years ago

There is a huge difference between life expectancy and life span and this article [1] covers it pretty well.

Life expectancy is skewed by infant mortality rates:

Our conclusion is that there is a characteristic life span for our species, in which mortality decreases sharply from infancy through childhood, followed by a period in which mortality rates remain essentially constant to about age 40 years, after which mortality rises steadily in Gompertz fashion. The modal age of adult death is about seven decades, before which time humans remain vigorous producers, and after which senescence rapidly occurs and people die.

[1] https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

PDF: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...

pc865• 10 years ago

Infant mortality for births beyond 24 weeks gestation in the developed world is well below one half of one percent[0], some below one quarter of one percent. It's not that big of an effect anymore.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf page 3

dghf• 10 years ago

So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live.

Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder).

In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population died from accidental or malicious (but not self-inflicted) injury or poisoning. If we take that as a typical annual risk of death, then over a thousand years you have a 22% chance of dying from one of those causes. At about 3000 years, it becomes more likely than not: at about 9000 years, overwhelmingly more likely (~90% chance of death); at about 50000, a practical certainty (> 99.999%).

Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.

tomswartz07• 10 years ago

On a lighter note, I can imagine that the size of the ego which accompanies the type of person that lives to 9,000 years old would more than likely encourage someone to poison or strangle them.

jerf2• 10 years ago

You gotta play the game theory out. An 8,500-year-old strangling a 9,000-year-old needs to be asking hard questions about the sort of incentive structure they're producing for the 8,000-year-olds.

The world where life span runs on like that is deeply, profoundly weird, and thinking about it is hard because it's so unlike where we live. You can't just imagine one 9,000-year-old and try to imagine what the world is like, because they will not be alone.

ChicagoBoy112• 10 years ago

Beyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.

neuromancer2701• 10 years ago

Why wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years.

There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.

btbuildem• 10 years ago

Not really. Only the wealthy would have access to this technology, the poor would still have normal life expectancy. Society would look the way it does now (stratified), just more so.

RangerScience• 10 years ago

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4021

DyslexicAtheist2• 10 years ago

raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro?

e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only tried to revenge or to set right to what they perceive an unjust society.

Playing god is scary. I think we can only do it if we are really thick enough and full of our selves to believe that certain individuals are better than the rest. (... of course all under the usual disguise of democracy and with a system that ensures the majority of those living under it, that what they do is right and for the greater good).

People suck :-/

pc865• 10 years ago

If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro?

Yes.

cylinder• 10 years ago

We punish based on intent, not on victim type.

Qantourisc• 10 years ago

You already have that philosophical question now: 1 year old VS 99 year old.

Can_Not• 10 years ago

It might be more of a crime. Before, you removed the remaining 50 year potential. Now you removed the 500 year potential. One could say the damages increased x10.

melling2• 10 years ago

"there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder)."

Yes, everyone already knows that. I wouldn't worry about living for 1000 years if you're alive in 30 years, the human races spends much more time discussing the inane. Someone yells the equivalent of "squirrel" and down the rabbit hole we go...

onion2k• 10 years ago

Getting to 150 and then stopping ageing means you'll live the next 850 years of your life in the body of a 150 year old. That doesn't sound fun.

adventured2• 10 years ago

If they can get you to 150 and stop your aging, it implies a mastery over the physiological context that means you can stop worrying about the age of the body as we might have previously. The aging would get repaired one way or another.

RealityVoid• 10 years ago

Hey, as long as my brain works well, I'd be cool with it.

damon_c• 10 years ago

Video games are going to be pretty freaking awesome in a couple hundred years. I'm in.

JauntTrooper• 10 years ago

It's better than the alternative though.

cgriswald7• 10 years ago

Some of the treatments are expected to also reverse the effects of aging, so you wouldn't live for 1000 years in the body of a 150 year old. Although I suspect it won't be neat and clean. So if you're born into a world with aging treatments, you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over (like an obese person who loses weight very quickly and has extra skin).

kamaal3• 10 years ago

Not to worry, they will soon figure out how to put you(your brain or its contents) in a new body(which might not even be biological).

nness• 10 years ago

If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years?

(since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)

morgante2• 10 years ago

The probability of dying every year stays the same, but the probability of dying in one of those 9,000 years is cumulative.

JoeAltmaier6• 10 years ago

For this reason I'd predict a society of immortal conservatives. No risk is worth taking. Speed limits drop precipitously. Traffic infractions become federal offenses. Interest rates drop to nil.

Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.

technofiend2• 10 years ago

There are a great number of books that explore this subject. Robert A. Heinlein's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children is an early treatment. As you say at least one society (I'm sorry I don't remember the book) became increasingly risk-averse and added to an ever-growing list of death penalty crimes to feed the organ banks. Rather than utopia my fear is that would be closer to the truth.

jliptzin• 10 years ago

Perhaps we have already solved death and the world we currently live in is a virtual reality in which death is simply a reboot cycle where memory is wiped and new attributes are assigned.

krisdol• 10 years ago

Then we have the rich not only figuratively starving out the poor by hoarding wealth, land, and production; but, also literally starving them out by simply refusing to die while excessively consuming resources into eternity.

IronIvan• 10 years ago

Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.

Technically, this is not correct.

If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0.

E.g.: If your probability of dying in the first year is 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 and so on, then your probability of living forever is roughly 29 % ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infin... )

Udo2• 10 years ago

I consider myself a transhumanist, though even I can't help but notice that these advances always seem just close enough so the author might manage to benefit from them shortly before he expects to die. Kurzweil did the same thing.

I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scientists like Dennett believe this can't be done even in principle (I disagree with them, but it shows how far we have to go still).

In any case, I'll probably not be around in 30 years, and many HNers won't be either.

adventured2• 10 years ago

The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor.

I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opposite is most common when it comes to great technological leaps forward. Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground. Among the very few people that recognize the time as being ready, will be the person that actually invents said leap technology. And it may even be by accident, the ground was primed and an inventor in a garage put the pieces together (ala the inbound virtual reality revolution, it was all skepticism skepticism skepticism for decades, until the ground was primed to leap forward, while most weren't even looking at it).

Udo2• 10 years ago

may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs

Not in this case, no. I realize your argument is mostly generic, too. Everybody understands that some problems are expected to have these kinds of revolutionary solutions or no solution at all. However, reading a mind into the computer and then executing it is not a matter of figuring just one missing thing out.

A workable solution requires us to be able to decipher and efficiently digitize the fine structure of the brain. Acquiring missing pieces of technique or technology is a necessary but not sufficient piece of this specific puzzle's solution. There is no sudden eureka moment where it all falls into place, it's just a near endless chain of painstaking detective work in biochemistry.

JoeAltmaier6• 10 years ago

A breakthrough may not be of any use to those already around. Likely a genetic manipulation would allow newborns to have a longer lifespan (many mammals have different lifespans already; it may be programmable). Adults may have changed in ways that make it ineffective. So we'd grow old among a rising generation of immortals.

kayoone2• 10 years ago

You totally had me until you mentioned VR which is totally trivial compared to emulating a human brain. I think there was never the question if VR would be possible because we had forms of it 2 decades ago. It was more a question about the market actually existing and technology become faster and smaller to make it financially viable for mainstream consumers.

cgtyoder• 10 years ago

This is very bad writing, with very bad logic. Not worthy of HN.

andrewfromx2• 10 years ago

this reads to me like "better die soon or you'll miss your chance and be forced to live as a human slave forever."

adrianN5• 10 years ago

You can always jump from a bridge...

andrewfromx2• 10 years ago

you would think, but it's really hard to do. I cannot self terminate.

elorant• 10 years ago

The important question to answer is whether those advancements will be available to everyone or just the rich. In the case of the latter economic inequality will go ballistic.

sammydavis5• 10 years ago

They will likely cost billions for the first person, 100s of millions for the next, and keep getting cheaper. Think cell phones, now so cheap your pencil could have one inside for almost nothing in a few years.

pc865• 10 years ago

Something tells me the author's definitely of "quite likely" is very different from the statistical definition.

fsloth• 10 years ago

As I see it Kurzweil's predictions were mostly based on his understanding of computational complexity and extrapolating the development trend in semiconductor technlogy - and figuring out which things are practical. But still, extrapolation based on more or less theoretically well understood concrete principles.

I'm not sure if there is yet anything well understood in the human body. Just mapping the genome will give us very little hints of the consequences in the physical body. Even figuring out how a protein folds is still considered a computational achievement (I think?).

Chess is a concrete computational system. Even most tasks that we have can be considered to be constrainable to a well defined system (hence the AI will replace a lot of manual workforce).

But until such a well defined "theory of human body" exists, computers are quite helpless to create it for us. Just adding computers will not magically make us understand everything better.

Thus, just quoting "exponential development" will certainly provide nice food for thought but will not offer any practical footholds for concrete progress.

ComteDeLaFere• 10 years ago

I feel like these types of articles always miss a key point, which can easily be corrected by adding the phrase "If You're Filthy Rich" to the end of any headline.

"Cure for Cancer Around the Corner, If You're Filthy Rich"

And...

If You're Alive in 30 Years You Might be in 1000 Years Too, If You're Filthy Rich"

See? Clarity is king.

rogersmith2• 10 years ago

tl;dr: "i engage in wishful thinking because i didnt get the memo that moore's law is close to reaching its limits"

richerlariviere• 10 years ago

How can you regulate population with people living half a millennium? The earth won't be able to deal with that unless we apply population control which is... pretty unethical.

chrisdotcode• 10 years ago

Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years ... [and] will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point another technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already "maxed out" Moore's Law? Aren't hardware manufactures already running into problems at the quantum level because of how small and packed transistors are already? That would be why we've "maxed" CPU speed at around ~3-4GHz.

soohyung• 10 years ago

No. That's not quite true. Yes we are very close to maxing out Moore's Law but so far we've still kept up. If I remember correctly there's a completely different reason for CPU speed not being higher than that (maybe the physical limit to transistors themselves?). We are still increasing the number of transistors per chip and not exactly scaling horizontally - after all we are fitting 4 CPU cores onto a chip that previously only fit a single one.

jcranmer• 10 years ago

The confusion here is that people refer to several distinct exponential growths as Moore's Law, and some of them have already faltered.

The CPU frequency growth has halted primarily due to the fact that going any higher means we can no longer cool the chips. Power usage (and, consequently, the heat you need to dispose of) is proportional to the square of the frequency (higher-frequency gates also usually require higher voltage to get the switching times down, which means it's really the cube).

Another aspect is the size of the transistor. Some features are already getting down to the point where it's more useful to talk about them in terms of monolayers--i.e., the exact number of atoms. Some elements of a 14nm transistor are already two or three monolayers in size, and the distance between two transistors is already about 100 monolayers, which puts a hard cap on the maximum possible minimization, since you can't make transistors smaller than a single atom. In terms of the smallest transistors that can be feasibly made, the general consensus is that there is at most around 3 shrinks remaining.

There's another dimension, too: whether or not it's cost-effective to keep doing these shrinks. The 14nm node itself has given Intel lots of trouble, and the 10nm node doesn't look like it's much better. Intel has already been forced to give up its Tick-Tock cycle, and the semiconductor industry as a whole may explicitly give up maintaining Moore's Law as a collective research goal shortly.

In short, then, Moore's Law either ended a decade ago, is just now ending, or will end in a decade, depending on what you want it to mean.

cushychicken2• 10 years ago

One of the better societal aspects of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was the concept of "Meths" - super rich people who could effectively afford to live forever by inserting their consciousness into new bodies (or "sleeves" to use Morgan's terminology). One of the downsides of this was that, since the rich lived effectively forever, they only accumulated more and more wealth in greater and greater quantities, and limited the trickle down to other people.

koralatov• 10 years ago

The Meths differ from the modern-day superrich only in that they live on to continue concentrating wealth, rather than passing it on to their offspring to continue as has been the case throughout human history.

I quite enjoyed the book, and the idea of sleeving was pretty interesting and well-explored. It was kind of sad to see that most people worked their whole lives to save enough to re-sleeve simply so that they could live another life doing, effectively, the same. On the flip-side, it was quite well-observed that the eternally young Meths actually suffered from extreme cynicism and boredom.

cushychicken2• 10 years ago

It's been a few years since I read it - probably about time I gave it another go.

On a side note, I just found out today that Netflix is apparently making it into a series. Neat!

legulere• 10 years ago

The growth of life expectancy looks quite linear to me: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Lebenserwartung_Deutschl...

I don't really see a miracle technology coming around the corner that will help us reduce deaths faster than now.

rusanu2• 10 years ago

Oxygen[0] by Nick Lane makes a pretty compelling argument why this will not happen. With perfect health you can at best achieve ~120 years age. I think this paper A unifying view of ageing and disease:the double-agent theory[2] covers some of the arguments in the book.

To give a simplified view, the big obstacles are a) a technology capable of repairing damaged mythocondrial material in a living organism and b) a technology capable of repairing neural cells w/o replacing them (that is if you want to preserver 'you', not just your body). That is assuming that our current understanding of senescence[1] is even mildly accurate.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence [2] http://www.nick-lane.net/double-agent%20theory.pdf

EGreg2• 10 years ago

What do you define as "perfect health" when you are made up of cells that keep being regenerated?

Some animals have biological immortality as far as we know. Most however enter senescence after reproduction, probably because evolution optimized for that.

I think that if we sampled people's DNA at 15, and then used a retrovirus every few years to refresh the DNA in the cells, we would solve the biggest issue of random mutations piling up. But this is a long way away. Of course, there may be other processes that build up but a youthful immune system should be able to fight them relatively effectively.

Even so, the chance of death would only be reduced from exponential-exponential to exponential, since the chances of someone living A to B and B to C are independent and therefore multiply.

adrianN5• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure that you can replace a significant number of my neurons without changing "me".

rendezvouscp• 10 years ago

That’s a great question that’s been pondered by philosophers for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Here’s a fun video talking about the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

rusanu2• 10 years ago

What makes you sure? Central nervous system neurons are incapable of regeneration[0], so is anybody's guess what would happen if they did get replaced. And, long term, "significant" has to be "all".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration

snowwrestler3• 10 years ago

To the contrary, "you" are constantly changing as your existing neurons reconfigure themselves. Replacing them would have at least the same effect.

erjjones• 10 years ago

From a Biblical perspective (if you believe that) it isn't possible. Genesis 6:3

EGreg2• 10 years ago

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

==================

This is talking about biological immortality - obviously an external event can still kill a person. In fact, a catastrophic species-ending event like a meteor would still be devastating.

And we still have to worry about runaway viruses (the Black Plague), political mind viruses (Nazism, Communism, Islamism), bacteria (Malaria etc.)

The biggest danger would be, as it already is, overpopulation. I think people would have to make a trade-off: have children or live forever. You won't be able to have both. At first, only the rich would be able to afford children and live forever, but given a long enough time period, social mobility will rotate enough people into being rich enough to afford it.

Now think about it realistically and philosophically. If computers are going to take over most of the tasks we do today - driving, cooking, research etc. as well as have a worldwide network of knowledge (eg Watson, Google) then what does any individual person become? Like an animal in a zoo, who exists mostly for pleasure and socializing but whose services to others aren't required. We can already see this as people get internet-connected cellphones... why ask your parents anything if you can google it? Both parties actually prefer that we google it.

Now imagine if it moves to even less latency, via heads up displays or into a computer-brain interface. What is each individual person really doing if the hive mind already has all the answers? Why do other people need this person? Just for pleasure and interaction.

And now think about your life when you were 1/3 the age you are now. Do you remember doing a lot of particular things? How does it feel to realize that most of the things that you did, it's almost as the same as if you didn't do them? Had sex that one random time with that person - how much would it matter to your current self if you did or didn't? Outside formational life events, most routine things you do today might matter to your future self almost as much as to some stranger!

So what is this continuity between your current self and future self? If you lived until 5 million years old, how much of your life could you really meaningfully remember, unless you are accessing an external memory? If you lived 5 trillion years but only remembered around 50 years total of your personal life, how is that much different than a person living 300 years and remembering 50? Only that you continue to live and your self preservation instinct always wins.

The older I get, the more I have questions about the meaning of my future self living 1000 years from now, with dim memories of my current self, versus someone else living 1000 years from now. Does anyone have similar questions and what answers have you come up with?

talles• 10 years ago

What an optimistic roller coaster that reading was.

If you are interested in (anti) aging science Aubrey de Grey work seem like a good start.

blubb-fish• 10 years ago

... with your head attached to tubes and wires floating in a jar. Oh yeah ... but thanks to VR it will feel like being on vacation.

anexprogrammer2• 10 years ago

However appealing this might be for some, I hope we "solve" global population growth first.

Of course that means we need an ethical, voluntary, way of keeping population in check.

Which infers true sexual equality, or you get one child policies as successful as China's.

Or we have an exponential increase in lifespan and ever more people chasing those finite resources.

So, it's going to be a world very different from ours, or it's going to be a bloody mess.

May you live in interesting times?

ant6n3• 10 years ago

The trick is not to 'use up' finite resources. There's lots of energy coming from the sun. And matter can and should be recycled.

anexprogrammer2• 10 years ago

Oh, I agree. It's just that historically we've not been terribly good at that.

paulddraper4• 10 years ago

Population growth has been declining since the 60s.

UN estimates are that we'll peak at 10 billion.

Besides that it's already happening, reducing population growth isn't necessarily a good thing, in econimic terms of aggregate "utility." Is there a difference between preventing birth and causing death?

cgriswald7• 10 years ago

That estimated peak is based on existing and projected death rates. Even Japan's population would grow if death from old age and age-related disease ceased.

crusso7• 10 years ago

We have many examples whereby societies that become "comfortable" see decreasing birth rates leading to negative population growth. As mortality pressure decreases, the urgency and drive to hurry up and have children decreases.

There's no reason to believe that if we all suddenly could live forever that we wouldn't dramatically slow down how quickly we had children.

Talk to any family about why they're stopping to have children. You'll normally get answers along the lines of, "Well, we're not getting any younger." What if you know that you're not getting any older either?

Personally, if my wife and I hadn't been pushing into our 30's and worried about having a couple of kids before we were too old, we would have waited indefinitely.

Who knows... maybe we might not even have been married? If you have 1,000's of years ahead of you, do you saddle yourself with one person for an eternity?

thatcherclay• 10 years ago

My issue is that while medical technology may progress at an exponential rate, so too might the challenges of repairing our biology. So yea, we may be getting way smarter, but the problems may keep getting way harder, and then it is not as self evident as this particular article makes out that we are all going to be immortals.

shaurz3• 10 years ago

It's funny watching techno-religious belief systems emerge in the West as Christianity recedes. This is literally the replacement of the afterlife. Sorry guys, this ain't gonna happen. One day you will die, get over it and start praying.

DougN7• 10 years ago

I've had the same thought so many other times. We blindly believe the 'clergy' of science despite not having any evidence ourselves of what is taught (other than for the obvious that we experience every day). String theory? Black holes? Gravitational waves???Granted, it's probably true (I'm a believer too), but it's blind faith -- I've never replicated any experiments myself, would have to trust the measuring devices even if I tried to replicate the experiments, so I believe because everyone else tells me to. And that's the hard-core replicatable physics! It gets worse as you move to less mathematical sciences like chemistry, biology, psychology, nutrition, etc.

sammydavis5• 10 years ago

Come on, science is not the faith part! Things that are observable and testable are clearly science. Things that are just ideas, ideas that are not verifiable (like string theory which don't predict anything) are not science, it's just ideas. Just like saying god created me, prove it wrong. If I make up some equation that I say I believe with evidence is true, that's not science.

dahart6• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking.

Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn't vary much and hasn't for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity

Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't.

The part that bothers me is that Kurzweil, at least, knows his argument is wrong, it is clear that he's intentionally misusing the data and knows it. Take a look at the very last graph and paragraph in this piece, for example: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns.

Kurzweil uses data from 1850-1920 and then conveniently skips all the years between 1920 and 2000. That is not possible to do accidentally, it is a misleading abuse of statistics. Unfortunately for Kurzweil, if you look at the data between 1920 and 2000, it paints a completely different picture, one of life expectancy asymptotically flat-lining.

Kurzweil also appears to conflate life expectancy with longevity, he says "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity;". That statement is false. We added to human life expectancy, not longevity. And the gains were due to reductions in infant mortality and violence, and improvements in medicine and general health.

reasonattlm4• 10 years ago

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1478-7954-8-18

The ongoing increase in life expectancy in developed countries is associated with changes in the shape of the survival curve. These changes can be characterized by two main, distinct components: (i) the decline in premature mortality, i.e., the concentration of deaths around some high value of the mean age at death, also termed rectangularization of the survival curve; and (ii) the increase of this mean age at death, i.e., longevity, which directly reflects the reduction of mortality at advanced ages. Several recent observations suggest that both mechanisms are simultaneously taking place. ... We illustrate the method with the evolution of the Swiss mortality data between 1876 and 2006. Using our approach, we are able to say that the increase in longevity and rectangularization explain each about 50% of the secular increase of life expectancy.

-------------

This history has happened without anyone trying deliberately to target and treat the causes of aging - all gains in longevity have been incidental. The difference between the past and the future at this point is that now the research community is just starting to develop therapies that do in fact target and repair the causes of aging. Future results will reflect that change of focus.

dahart6• 10 years ago

This is interesting research! Thanks for the resources. It should be noted that focusing on Switzerland is taking a developed country that has an abnormally high life expectancy in the global context, relative to Africa for example, so it is to be expected that gains in life expectancy are small, and thus gains in longevity can be relatively large by comparison. This doesn't directly support the claims Kurzweil made, even if those claims were true.

I am curious; I think there's a gray area in between life expectancy and true longevity, where it's hard to distinguish between them. (As if it wasn't hard enough already.) It is possible that what we call longevity is increasing right now due to reductions in pollution and other impossible to measure environmental factors. That would mean that increases in longevity are actually increases in life expectancy in disguise.

From the WP article on Longevity:

"The U.S. Census Bureau view on the future of longevity is that life expectancy in the United States will be in the mid-80s by 2050 (up from 77.85 in 2006) and will top out eventually in the low 90s, barring major scientific advances that can change the rate of human aging itself, as opposed to merely treating the effects of aging as is done today."

jsnathan• 10 years ago

Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't.

Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if.

The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo.

To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms.

It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades.

I find this an absurd scenario, and therefore believe to the contrary. Science will overcome the level of complexity of human biology, and continue onward even long after that.

Because, putting anthropocentric intuitions to the side, the human body is not the most complex phenomenon imaginable.

dahart6• 10 years ago

Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death.

To be clear, I'm not saying it can't ever happen, I'm saying that DeGrey's and Kurzweils claims that it is happening and will come to pass in the next century are bogus.

coldtea3• 10 years ago

Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo.

And who told you it's a given that we'll manage to have such an understanding?

1812Overture• 10 years ago

It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades.

Until we have complete nuclear disarmament, this doesn't seem like a far fetched scenario.

snowwrestler3• 10 years ago

To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms.

That's not what science does. Science is the process by which we learn about natural processes. It doesn't overcome anything.

To invoke "Science" in this way is to treat it like a religion, like an all-powerful god. I mean, you even capitalized it.

Kurzweil, De Gray, and many others do this too. Either they don't actually know what science is, or they are cynically feeding a misperception of what science is. Either way, it's bad.

The process of using scientific knowledge to achieve human goals is generally known as engineering. And the heart of engineering is dealing with constraints. We have no idea, today, what constrains human life spans. Therefore we have no scientific reason to believe that we can ever use engineering to extend them significantly beyond what they are today.

We do know that all lifeforms have a limited lifespan, and most animals' are shorter than humans. That's a big clue that the constraint might be something fundamental and not easily overcome.

yoha• 10 years ago

Direct link to the graph: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/chart33.jpg.

It shows… 5 data points.

aecorredor• 10 years ago

overpopulation anyone?

izzydata• 10 years ago

You can't fool me internet. I'm not going to get my hopes up on such a long shot.

dalke2• 10 years ago

According to Ray Kurzweil, as soon as something becomes an information technology, it starts progressing according to Moore's Law

My field of chemical information - a subfield of cheminformatics - has been an information technology since the 1800s. It was the Big Data of the 1940s and 1950s, many of the pioneers of information retrieval worked on chemical data (Luhn, Mooers, Taube), and the term "information retrieval" and concepts like stop words (as part of KWIC) were presented at chemistry conferences.

The doubling period for chemical information is 15-20 years.

Citation indexing is another offshoot of 1950s information technology. Scientific publication grows by about 5% per year (says http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909426/ ), so doubles every 15 years.

Either 1) those are not information technology fields, in which case, why not? or 2) "according to Moore's Law" means generally "has exponential growth", not the more specific doubling every two years.

With #2 firmly in mind, consider "and that's the main reason why we can expect medical technology to advance exponentially in the future."

How do we measure "advance" in medical technology, how do we know it isn't already an information technology field, and why should we expect the doubling rate of under 20 years?

Finally, here's a quote from someone who "served on the advisory council of [a longevity] organization, along with the chairmen of a number of major US corporations":

Why has the problem of aging been such an intractable one? Up until [recently], the prevalent view of scientists had been that the task of controlling aging was fundamentally impossible. But today, such a consensus no longer exists. Many researchers now believe that their predecessors failed, not because their goals were misguided, but because the tools and the level of sophistication they could bring to the task were inadequate. Moreover, it is argued that progress has been hampered because funding has been scarce, and researchers concerned with aging have been too few and far between. ...
Growing public and private support for aging research reflects the scientific community’s own increasing commitment. Today, aging research occupies unprecedented numbers of highly talented individuals, not only specialists in gerontology, but researchers from other disciplines as well. These include biochemistry, endocrinology, immunology, neurobiology, genetics, and cell biology, to name only a few.

I'll give the link to where that quote comes from, but before following the link, when do you think it was written? http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p107y1983.pdf .

macintux• 10 years ago

Probably should have obfuscated the link.

dalke2• 10 years ago

D'oh! Didn't see that.

sammydavis5• 10 years ago

Thanks for your thoughtful insight. Battery technology for electric cars appears to be on a slow doubling rate but hopefully faster than 20 years. Maybe 10% improvement per year (72/10 = 7.2 years to double then). Kurzweil doesn't say information tech doesn't double every 2 years in general, just I think that it's rate is somewhat steady. It's at least very exciting to think about progress continuing (however it is defined). 30 years to immortality is what every futurist should predict any time they publish a paper, because as an about 50 year old, that feels achievable.

crusso7• 10 years ago

We are way too far from really understanding our own biology to be able to predict such an over-the-horizon end result.

I don't even know if we'll be able to reliably cure toenail fungus in the next 20 years - much less be able to solve a significant number of problems with aging in 30 years.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

Not unless they find a way to deal with boredom.

madaxe_again• 10 years ago

Big damned if. Personally, I expect us to all starve or burn within the next 30 years. We have repeatedly shown that we are not responsible guardians of our own technology, and our disasters just get bigger.

Additionally, immortality is not a good thing. It would lead to domination of the world from now until eternity by the powers that be at the point at which the tech becomes available, stagnation of development (if you have 1000 years to do something, you'll take your time), and ultimately the depletion of what it is to be human.

The only way immortality could work would be with a complete moratorium on new births, and perhaps a Logan's Run style annual carrousel that randomly eliminates a percentage of the population.

None of that sounds better than what we have now.

tomcam• 10 years ago

They were saying that 30 years ago

pjdemers• 10 years ago

... I need to increase the amount I'm putting in my 401k.

yetihehe• 10 years ago

So you think wage slaves have it bad now? Just imagine what "low income" will mean in future. Credits for rejuvenation plus wage low enough so that your expected life earnings are just enough to pay for next life extension... Indentured servitude can be eternal problem now.

alpineidyll3• 10 years ago

Total garbage...

PhilWright• 10 years ago

His life expectancy graph is a bit naughty. Why doesn't the y axis start at 0? How about showing something more realistic...

http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/...

Doesn't look quite so good now, does it.

hoechst• 10 years ago

If a scientist working in the field writes about this, backing his assumption with research papers and actual work that's being done in the field: I'm listening.

If a futurist writes about this, mostly backing his assumption by repeating alterations of the phrase "because of technological progress": I'm expressing my skepticism on hn.

If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

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