I think it’s important to remember your fate as it is right now.
If you manage to survive car accidents, violence, early cancer, genetic disease, or spontaneous cardiac death, your best case scenario is you go to be drugged until death in a hospice, or receive an amateur attempt at medical care by cryonics. (what makes it amateur is that as no one has revived a human brain sample and validated the cells function again, this missing feedback likely means each cryonics process makes dozens of fatal mistakes and the best that can be done is a computer emulation of the deceased individual).
If you’re this lucky, your children will be noticeably decayed by aging from their peak when they visit you on your deathbed. They will be uglier, dumber, weaker, and have nothing to look forward to but your fate. And the same for your grandchildren, if any are alive at this point, and so on.
If AI fails or is paused, you can think that “well at least humanity will continue” but you won’t at all know that, all you know is you didn’t live to see the Doom.
So a wildcard like AI makes new things possible. While we humans don’t know precisely how to solve aging, it’s possible and experimentally seems to be viable. Rats still die, so at age 130+ there are probably thousands of possible ways a rejuvenated body would begin to fail, and so you need some way to know what the treatment is for almost all cases. Human minds are likely not capable of managing this amount of complexity. But it’s possible, nature makes new bodies 385,000 times a day via an unintelligent automated process.
Some machine could review all of the papers on medicine, and all of the patients records available on earth, and then design and run likely billions of individual experiments at varying scales to resolve ambiguities, and then model human biology precisely enough to intervene and keep a patient alive across almost all cases.
Interesting times bring opportunity. You were definitely going to lose the game before recent breakthroughs, now you might lose.
I think it’s important to remember your fate as it is right now.
If you manage to survive car accidents, violence, early cancer, genetic disease, or spontaneous cardiac death, your best case scenario is you go to be drugged until death in a hospice, or receive an amateur attempt at medical care by cryonics. (what makes it amateur is that as no one has revived a human brain sample and validated the cells function again, this missing feedback likely means each cryonics process makes dozens of fatal mistakes and the best that can be done is a computer emulation of the deceased individual).
If you’re this lucky, your children will be noticeably decayed by aging from their peak when they visit you on your deathbed. They will be uglier, dumber, weaker, and have nothing to look forward to but your fate. And the same for your grandchildren, if any are alive at this point, and so on.
If AI fails or is paused, you can think that “well at least humanity will continue” but you won’t at all know that, all you know is you didn’t live to see the Doom.
So a wildcard like AI makes new things possible. While we humans don’t know precisely how to solve aging, it’s possible and experimentally seems to be viable. Rats still die, so at age 130+ there are probably thousands of possible ways a rejuvenated body would begin to fail, and so you need some way to know what the treatment is for almost all cases. Human minds are likely not capable of managing this amount of complexity. But it’s possible, nature makes new bodies 385,000 times a day via an unintelligent automated process.
Some machine could review all of the papers on medicine, and all of the patients records available on earth, and then design and run likely billions of individual experiments at varying scales to resolve ambiguities, and then model human biology precisely enough to intervene and keep a patient alive across almost all cases.
Interesting times bring opportunity. You were definitely going to lose the game before recent breakthroughs, now you might lose.