Another possibility that could exist within the lifetimes of some of us reading this comment is some definitive development of physical immortality.
It could happen because of a successful scan and emulation of a cryo patient’s brain, it could be done by developing a form of medical AI that does, let’s call it “flight control”. For an aircraft to remain flying, a pilot has to observe what happens and constantly make adjustments. The pilot doesn’t perform an RCT and call up the FDA and spend 1 billion dollars and wait 10 years to make an adjustment, he just changes something.
A medical system that could actually do the job of keeping people alive would probably need to work more like a pilot, where systems analyze the specific physiology and specific genetic and biochem details of a particular patient, and specific small molecules and genetic tweaks are made to reverse their aging and fix and problems as they come up. In a sense the patient would always be living in an ICU.
Anyways I am not a pessimistic as some. I think within 10 years of the development of such a technology it could be automated enough and widespread enough that all the residents of first world nations could benefit. But on day 1 of year 0, only the uber elite get it, and it might seem both grotesquely unfair as now great wealth and status mean you meaningfully get to exist for probably thousands of future years.
It sounds possible. However, before even the first people will get it, there should be some progress with animals, and right now there is nothing. So I would bet it is not going to happen in let’s say next 5 years. (Well, unless we suddenly get a radical progress in creating a superAI that will do it for us, but this is the huge another question on its own). I would say, I wanted first to think about the very near future, without a huge technological breakthrough. Of course, the immortality and superAI are far more important than anything I mentioned in the original post. However, I think there is a non-negligible likelihood for something from the original post to happen very soon (maybe even this year), while the likelihood of the immortality before the end of this year seems quite negligible.
Was there a timescale in the OP? Some readers of this post might be 22 and taking their metformin and see age 98. So 76 years. I personally, having seen the state of things in biomed, think it is a problem that there will not be real progress on until we have substantially better AI systems. I think the fundamental problem is to create a (cocktail of possibly hundreds of drugs and genetic hacks, administered 24⁄7) to cause optimal outcomes in (a matrix of numbers that represent a patient’s health and aging state, obtained from a large battery of continuously run tests).
I think that finding out how to generate the drugs and genetic hacks will require repeating most previously performed experiments, just now a robot is doing them and the data is published without bias to cloudservers.
This cannot be solved by human beings just like we cannot keep a modern jet fighter in their air without computer assistance. But we can write and debug the systems that can.
Another possibility that could exist within the lifetimes of some of us reading this comment is some definitive development of physical immortality.
It could happen because of a successful scan and emulation of a cryo patient’s brain, it could be done by developing a form of medical AI that does, let’s call it “flight control”. For an aircraft to remain flying, a pilot has to observe what happens and constantly make adjustments. The pilot doesn’t perform an RCT and call up the FDA and spend 1 billion dollars and wait 10 years to make an adjustment, he just changes something.
A medical system that could actually do the job of keeping people alive would probably need to work more like a pilot, where systems analyze the specific physiology and specific genetic and biochem details of a particular patient, and specific small molecules and genetic tweaks are made to reverse their aging and fix and problems as they come up. In a sense the patient would always be living in an ICU.
Anyways I am not a pessimistic as some. I think within 10 years of the development of such a technology it could be automated enough and widespread enough that all the residents of first world nations could benefit. But on day 1 of year 0, only the uber elite get it, and it might seem both grotesquely unfair as now great wealth and status mean you meaningfully get to exist for probably thousands of future years.
It sounds possible. However, before even the first people will get it, there should be some progress with animals, and right now there is nothing. So I would bet it is not going to happen in let’s say next 5 years. (Well, unless we suddenly get a radical progress in creating a superAI that will do it for us, but this is the huge another question on its own).
I would say, I wanted first to think about the very near future, without a huge technological breakthrough. Of course, the immortality and superAI are far more important than anything I mentioned in the original post. However, I think there is a non-negligible likelihood for something from the original post to happen very soon (maybe even this year), while the likelihood of the immortality before the end of this year seems quite negligible.
Was there a timescale in the OP? Some readers of this post might be 22 and taking their metformin and see age 98. So 76 years. I personally, having seen the state of things in biomed, think it is a problem that there will not be real progress on until we have substantially better AI systems. I think the fundamental problem is to create a (cocktail of possibly hundreds of drugs and genetic hacks, administered 24⁄7) to cause optimal outcomes in (a matrix of numbers that represent a patient’s health and aging state, obtained from a large battery of continuously run tests).
I think that finding out how to generate the drugs and genetic hacks will require repeating most previously performed experiments, just now a robot is doing them and the data is published without bias to cloudservers.
This cannot be solved by human beings just like we cannot keep a modern jet fighter in their air without computer assistance. But we can write and debug the systems that can.