bits

• bits 25 Jul 2026 0:59 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: bits’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  (I know that those conversations have happened here and in plenty of living rooms. I’d be very interested in links to anything one degree more public, if anyone is aware of them!)

• bits 25 Jul 2026 0:56 UTC

  11 points

  1

  on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  Plugging the concept of viatopia again because it’s a nice explanatory partner to a Long Reflection or Long Self-Correction. A viatopia is a world that will, with near-certainty, perform a Long Correction and then implement the desired future. Or, a Long Correction is what you would do if you found yourself in a viatopia when your current sentient inhabitants are not yet ethically developed enough to commit to the project of engineering the future.

  (I’d also be very happy to see someone coin another term that means what is gestured at by viatopia.)

  It’s not a strict definition, because a society undergoing the Long Reflection might be more insecure than what is necessary to qualify as a viatopia.

  I’d like to see people having the public conversation: do we need to achieve existential security before we slow everything down and do a Long Reflection? And more generally, at what level of technology would the world be comfortable stopping?

  It’s possible that AI Pause advocates will need to argue for a concrete technological vision, something like: “With the level of AI we have today in the year 2031, just applying the current models will continue to produce breakthroughs in medicine, manufacturing, etc. enough to cure cancer and bring the world economic baseline up to an American middle-class outcome. We are committed to continuing to fund this progress while still restricting frontier AI development.”

  I think that having that conversation at least lets people imagine a concrete world state from which a Long Reflection can happen. And then there’s an easier way to point at what is being talked about: it’s the answer to the question “and then what?”

• bits 25 Jul 2026 0:20 UTC

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: bits’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  Fable comes up with (curated selection):

  • The Long Cultivation

  • The Long Ascent

  • The Long Deliberation

  I start to feel over-indexed on the “long” part here. CEV is a nice idea because it’s well-specified independent of how long it takes.

  “Cultivation” does seem to capture something more positive than “correction.”

• bits 25 Jul 2026 0:11 UTC

  7 points

  2

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  All of these, and Long Self-Correction, have specific connotations that I expect the public won’t like.

  Long Self-Correction: we must be corrected, i.e. we are bad. Jails are “correctional facilities.” We need giga universal-jail.

  Long Reformation: invokes the Reformation. At least nobody has strong feelings about Protestantism vs Catholicism.

  Great Reconstruction: we are currently deconstructed, perhaps having just undergone some particular tragedy

  Long Becoming: Lovecraftian concern about what exactly I, you, we, are becoming

  It’s easy to criticize, so more ideas:

  • The Great Debate

  • The New Long Horizon

  • Prolonged Revelation

  • Long Dawn of Humanity (of Civilization, of the Future)

• bits 21 Jul 2026 14:31 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

  That’d be great. Right now people in the field often fall back to talking about healthspan, which is the “right” concept, but it doesn’t travel well.

  This is part of why I think a movie that includes life extension could do the trick. To my knowledge there’s no very popular media representation of a world with, say, 40 years of healthspan extension, and it’s hard to imagine.

• bits 21 Jul 2026 14:26 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

  [appreciate the engagement!]

  My parents are in their mid-60s, and I think they have a lot of direct control over whether they make it to 90 or 100, maybe 110 but AFAIK there’s a lot of genetic factors after ~90. In practice they’re already healthy people doing most of the most important stuff, specifically lots of exercise, so there’s not a ton for me to intervene on there.

  One of the main scenarios I’m planning for is just making sure that if there are early treatments available, I’ll be able to talk to them about it. I think it’s possible that there will be treatments available when they’re 75, which will seem early and weird, which would put them on an LEV track, that would not work if they waited until they were 85, or had an acute health crisis. So we talk about this stuff now, I talk about the supplements I take, the research I see, etc.

  Functional life extension treatments in ten years is definitely an optimistic world. If it happens, though, I don’t want the people I care about to miss the bus.

• bits 20 Jul 2026 23:52 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

  It matters a little whether it’ll be available decades from now (presuming you still live) only to the extent it changes your retirement/​savings decisions

  I care about whether it’s true whether or not it means I need to do anything now, certainly enough to think about it.

  But, it matters concretely for decision making if you think there’s a chance you might make it to a point where we reach longevity escape velocity, and that that depends on the trajectory of technology like AI.

  I think it’s very unlikely that my personal health choices will make a difference for me catching the boat for LEV, but I think it’s only unlikely that it will make a difference for my parents, and that’s enough for me to care a lot. I think that position might not end up being uncommon.

• bits 20 Jul 2026 23:15 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

  Sure, observing record-breaking longevity is the direct way to find out that life extension works. It’s also the slowest.

  Life extension is an unusual technology in that it matters much more whether it will be available in your lifetime than whether it’s available right now. I think there are plenty of people who will look at trends and try to make that prediction rather than having no opinion, or a strict negative opinion, until they see someone live to 122 years and 165 days.

  I’m sure the early adopters will look like early adopters: more likely to be in tech, be involved with AI, own a whoop, watch podcasts about emerging technology. And, more likely to be relevant decision makers for technology development timelines. That’s part of why I care about the question—they might be the ones who decide whether we race full-speed to ASI or slow down, and their opinions about radical life extension might affect their choices.

• bits 20 Jul 2026 17:11 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: JennaS’s comment on: Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

  Bryan was originally known for founding a payments company that sold for ~$800m. After that, he set out on a project to make himself as healthy as possible with the explicit goal of living longer while publicly documenting everything he tried. He’s spent many millions of dollars at this point and has 2.2m subscribers on YouTube.

  He deliberately courts media attention by saying outlandish things (like how he measures his nighttime erections, apparently a kind of health marker) but also generally manages to hit a pretty high standard for rigor, IMO.

  IIRC this is one of the first big pieces on him: https://​​time.com/​​6315607/​​bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/​​

  And:

  https://​​www.vanityfair.com/​​news/​​biohacker-antiaging-lawsuits

  https://​​www.rollingstone.com/​​culture/​​culture-features/​​bryan-johnson-anti-aging-blueprint-algorithm-1234821163/​​

  He gets enough attention now that his recent announcement that he has an autoimmune condition is being covered from dozens of different sources: https://​​www.foxnews.com/​​health/​​biohacker-hoping-live-160-reveals-alarming-diagnosis-stomach-eating-itself

  His website, where he sells the supplement stack he claims to take: https://​​blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/​​

  His YouTube: https://​​www.youtube.com/​​@BryanJohnson

  Apparently he got a Netflix documentary, I actually hadn’t seen this but: https://​​www.netflix.com/​​title/​​81757532

Peo­ple might start be­liev­ing in rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion soon

• bits 9 Jan 2026 15:43 UTC

  29 points

  4

  on: bits’s Shortform

  CEV is (imo) a good concept for what we ultimately want and/​or what humanity should try to achieve, but I’ve always found it hard to pithily talk about the intermediate world states to aim for now if we want CEV eventually.

  I’ve heard the practical goal discussed as “a world from which we can be as sure as possible that we will achieve CEV”. Doesn’t really roll off the tongue. It would be nice to have a cleaner shorthand.

  The term “viatopia” seems meant to capture the same idea: https://​​newsletter.forethought.org/​​p/​​viatopia

  This also seems like the sort of thing Bostrom might have coined a term for fifteen years ago in some obscure paper.

  I’d be interested in hearing any other terms or phrases that you think make talking about an intermediate goal state from which CEV is very likely (or as likely as possible) easier.

  The two important conversations I’d like to be able to have are “what are the features of a realistic <state>?” and “how can we achieve <state>?” with participants having a shared understanding of what we’re talking about with <state>.

bits’s Shortform

Bi­nary Consequentialism

• bits 14 Dec 2025 12:06 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: bits’s Shortform

  I used to worry that people taking life extension seriously, particularly around these parts, was a bad thing for AI risk. If the people working to build AI believe that death is very bad, that death is technically solvable, that they and their loved ones will die by default, and that building superintelligence in their lifetime is their best shot at longevity escape velocity, then they have a strong incentive to move as quickly as possible. Getting AI researchers to believe more strongly in any of these four ideas has always seemed like a dubious plan at best.
  
  Recently I’ve changed my mind somewhat, and I now think that longevity research and life extension as an ideology might end up being important for efforts to slow down AI development.
  
  If life extension looks promising and is taken seriously, relevant decision makers might be more willing to slow down or pause AI—both because they personally face less time pressure and because if they think they’re going to be around for a while, they have more of a personal stake in not having the future end soon.
  

  Two ways this could become relevant:
  

  (1) We see real progress in life extension research. There are some exciting things happening (IMO) in anti-aging research today, and there’s massively more popular interest (hello Bryan Johnson) and funding available. My optimism about this research, even absent magical AI breakthroughs, makes me think we can get radical anti-aging tech before superintelligence.
  

  (2) In messaging a pause or slowdown of AI research, there is a specific exception made for certain kinds of medical and life-extension related research.
  There’s an obvious tradeoff in (2). We can’t simply specify “we will only use AI for X”. It’s not possible to guarantee that any medical research we do will not contribute at all to general superintelligence research.
  

  However, “pause except we still do AI-based life-extension research” might end up being much more palatable than “pause”. And if that makes pause much more politically viable, it might be worth the risk.
  

  This would require relevant parties to believe that serious anti-aging technology is possible by means of current research and whitelisted narrow AI. That in turn might mean that proselytizing for life extension is in fact one of the more useful things we can do for the development of safe AI.
  

  (I’m assuming this is not new ground, but I haven’t read anything on exactly this topic, at least not that I can remember and not in a long time. Links appreciated!)