Once we cure aging, what happens to prisoners serving life sentences?

Declan Molony20 May 2025 5:33 UTC
7 points
11 comments6 min readLW link

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey claimed that the first person who will live to 1,000 years old has already been born. He believes this unprecedented expansion in lifespan will occur with Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV).

LEV is defined by technologist Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Nearer as:

A tipping point at which we can add more than a year to our remaining life expectancy for each calendar year that passes.

This means that our life expectancy could increase faster than we age, which under different scenarios would look something like this:


Once we achieve LEV, we’ll have effectively cheated death. How is this possible?

Kurzweil, an unabashed techno-optimist, predicts that during the 2020s, AI will combine with biotechnology to defeat humanity’s current degenerative chronic diseases like cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

We are now using AI to find new drugs, and by the end of this decade we will be able to start the process of augmenting and ultimately replacing slow, underpowered human trials with digital simulations.

And it’s not just drugs, AI can also decrease the risk of surgery, as well.

The average human surgeon may perform several hundred surgeries per year, amounting to, at most, a few tens of thousands over a full career. By contrast, the AI powering robotic surgeons will be able to learn from the experience of any surgery that system performs, anywhere in the world. In addition, the AI will be able to perform billions of simulated surgeries, tinkering with unusual variables that would be impossible or unethical to train on in a clinical setting.

Ultimately, it may become far safer for AI to perform surgery compared to human hands (similar to how autonomous driving, trained on billions of simulated miles, has already proven to be safer than human drivers—once humanity deploys autonomous driving, we could save the 40,000 people that die annually in traffic accidents in the US, and the 1.2 million people that die every year worldwide).

As AI transforms more and more areas of medicine…we will then be able to start directly addressing the biological factors that now limit lifespan to about 120 years, including mitochondrial genetic mutations, reduced telomere length, and the uncontrolled cell division that causes cancer.

Even more optimistically, Kurzweil foresees (through the trajectory of Moore’s Law) that engineering will develop increasingly smaller computers such that in the 2030s we’ll develop:

Medical nanorobots with the ability to intelligently conduct cellular-level maintenance and repair throughout our bodies.

Take cars as an analogy. My great great grandfather purchased an original 1930 Ford Model A car and it’s been in my family for almost 100 years. It still runs because we’ve carefully maintained it and replaced any dysfunctional parts.

My family’s original 1930 Ford Model A car.

As with cars, the human body is also a machine—a biological one. So with the power of cellular-level nanobots, Kurzweil believes:

We will gain a similar level of control over our biology as we presently have over automobile maintenance. That is, unless your car gets destroyed outright in a major wreck, you can continue to repair or replace its parts indefinitely.

Similar to a mechanic’s checklist for car maintenance (e.g., check the engine pressure, oil level, blinker fluid), Aubrey de Grey in his TED Talk about defeating aging identifies seven core pathways through which the body ages and a checklist of potential solutions to mitigate them:

Seven pathways that, if solved, could theoretically maintain the human machine indefinitely.

Through careful maintenance of our bodies, we could go on living to 200 years old, 300 years old, or even 1,000.

My question is:

When we defeat aging and just go on living, what will happen to all our prisoners serving life sentences?

Australian Charles Foussard served the longest recorded sentence, spending 70 years and 303 days in confinement from 1903 until 1974. He was institutionalized in a mental asylum after murdering an elderly man and stealing his boots. Foussard died at the age of 92 while still incarcerated.

Charles Foussard served the longest ever prison sentence of 70 years.

This means that Foussard rotted away in an asylum during the invention of the Ford Model T car, World War 1, the discovery of penicillin, the widespread adoption of the radio, The Great Depression, World War 2, the adoption of television, Elvis Presley, the Civil Rights Movement, The Beatles, the first successful heart transplant, the Vietnam War, and putting the first man on the moon.

I don’t think Foussard, deemed criminally insane, ought to have been released. But I do want to challenge the humanity of his sentence and consider it with respect to the upcoming longevity explosion.

When looking at a list of prisoners given long sentences but not technically life imprisonment, it’s conceivable that US prisoner Gregory Aaron Gadlin (incarcerated for 16 counts of robbery and being a felon in possession of a weapon) who began his 967 year prison sentence in 2013 could actually serve his full term.

Obviously the judge who sentenced him expected him to die in prison. Yet legally, he will be set free in the year 2980. Perhaps the law will have to be reinterpreted to argue for the judge’s intent: that the government wants him to die behind bars. But if he duly serves the time he owes, we can’t arbitrarily change the law to prevent his release, right? Nevertheless, after stewing in prison for almost a millennium, do we think it’s a good idea for him to rejoin society?

Alternatively, we could deny prisoners with long sentences access to longevity healthcare and effectively murder them by condemning them to an early death of ~70 when the rest of us are living well past 700. And remember, prisoners are human, too. They are somebody’s son or daughter, somebody’s father or mother.

This begs the question: what’s the point of prison?

Do we want to punish people forever for their misdeeds (forcing them to potentially spend hundreds of years in a cell with the key thrown away), or will we acknowledge the kernel of humanity in criminals and try to rehabilitate them with the eventual goal of societal reintegration?

After all, it’s not Foussard’s fault that he’s criminally insane, right? He didn’t choose to be that way. Who would? He was born that way, or perhaps was molded into the shape of a monster due to a neglected or tortured childhood. Of course, he shouldn’t have simply been given a slap on the wrist and set free, but I think the punishment ought to fit the crime. And eternity in prison seems extreme.

We are coming closer to understanding the neurology of criminals. We know that, for example, shrunken prefrontal cortices and smaller amygdalae promote violence. Soon, we may be able to target and address antisocial behaviour on a neurological level.

If this sounds far-fetched, it’s good to remember that we’ve been here before.

In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, author Robert Sapolsky writes that people used to blame epileptics for their condition (because of sins they committed, like masturbation). But scientific advances in neuroscience have shown that epilepsy is caused by overexcited neurons having nowhere to deposit neurotransmitters (and, apparently, not caused by masturbation). So scientists invented a type of medication that helps to treat epilepsy by regulating dopamine sensitivity.

We now view people with epilepsy not as malicious aberrants possessed by the devil, but instead as people with a medical condition.

Another example Sapolsky gives is for learning disabilities:

Kids who are having trouble learning to read and keep reversing letters aren’t lazy and unmotivated; instead, there are cortical malfunctions in their brains that cause dyslexia.

This is [yet] another domain where we have managed to subtract out the notion of blame from the disease (and, in the process, become vastly more effective at treating the disease).

Similarly, we now know that certain genes correlate with aggression. According to a meta-analysis on data from 24 genetically informative studies, “up to 50% of the total variance in aggressive behavior is explained by genetic influences.”

Perhaps we’ll eventually come to view antisocial, violent behaviour as a medical condition—like epilepsy or dyslexia—that needs treatment on the neurological level. So whether it’s for medical or criminal maladies, Sapolsky recommends the following quarantine approach for punishment:

Quarantine Approach for Punishment
Medical versionCriminology version

  1. It’s possible for someone to have a medical malady that makes them infectious, contagious, dangerous, or damaging to those around them.

  2. It is not their fault.

  3. To protect everyone else from them, as…an act of collective self-defense, it is okay to harm them by constraining their freedom.

  4. We should constrain [them] the absolute minimal amount needed to protect everyone, and not an inch more.

  1. Some people are dangerous because of problems with the likes of impulse control, propensity of violence, or incapacity for empathy.

  2. If you truly accept that there is no free will, it’s not their fault—it’s the result of their genes, fetal life, hormone levels, the usual.

  3. Nonetheless, the public needs to be protected from them until they can be rehabilitated, if possible, justifying the constraint of their freedom.

  4. But their “quarantine” should be done in a way that constrains them the least.

One day—perhaps just a few decades from now—we’ll be able to give the one in seven people serving life sentences in the US (roughly 200,000 people) a choice:

“Hello, John Doe. As you know, you’re currently serving a life sentence in prison. Your neurological makeup, as it is now, is unsuitable for societal reintegration. Our data suggest that you’re suffering from a kind of…mental sickness…that’s incompatible with getting along with others and predisposes you to impulsive, sometimes violent behavior.

I do, however, have good news.

Similar to how we give people suffering from epilepsy anticonvulsant drugs that regulate their neurotransmitter levels, we’ve found a drug that helps to regulate your violent impulses. We’re willing to provide you this medicine, and once we’re confident that you’re stable and no longer a threat to the greater public, then you may leave prison and return to your family. Or, should you wish to refuse treatment, you’re free to remain locked up, possibly for hundreds or even thousands of years. The choice is yours.”

Declan Molony20 May 2025 5:33 UTC
7 points
11 comments6 min readLW link