= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Mike Darwin on Kurzweil, Techno-Optimism, and Delusional Stances on Cryonics
In a comment on his skeptical post about Ray Kurzweil, he writes,
Unfortunately, [Kurzweil's] technological forecasting is naive, and I believe it will also prove erroneous (and in that, he is in excellent company). That would be of no consequence to me, or to others in cryonics, were it not for the fact that it has had, and continues to have, a corrosive effect on cryonics and immortalist activists and activism. His idea of the Singularity has created an expectation of entitlement and inevitability that are wholly unjustified, both on the basis of history, and on on the basis of events that are playing out now in the world markets, and on the geopolitical stage....
The IEET poll [link; Sep 7, 2011] found that the majority of their readers aged 35 or older said that they expect to “die within a normal human lifespan;” no surprises there.
This was in contrast to to an overwhelming majority (69%) of their readers under the age of 35 who believe that radical life extension will enable them to stay alive indefinitely, or “for centuries, at least.”
Where the data gets really interesting is when you look at the breakdown of just how these folks think they are going to be GIVEN practical immortality:
- 36% believe they will stay alive for centuries (at least) in their own (biological) bodies
- 26% expect that they will continue to survive by having their “minds uploaded to a computer”
- 7% expect to “die” but to eventually be resurrected by cryonics.
Only 7% think cryonics will be necessary? That simply delusional and it is a huge problem....
Nor are the 7% who anticipate survival via cryonics likely to be signed up. In fact, I’d wager not more than one or two of them is. And why should they bestir themselves in any way to this end? After all, the Singularity is coming, it is INEVITABLE, and all they have to do is to sit back and wait for it to arrive – presumably wrapped up in in pretty paper and with bows on.
Young people anticipating practical immortality look at me like some kind of raving mad Luddite when I try to convince them that if they are to have any meaningful chance at truly long term survival, they are going to have to act, work very hard, and have a hell of a lot of luck in the bargain....
Kurzweil has been, without doubt or argument, THE great enabler of this madness by providing a scenario and a narrative that is far more credible than Santa Claus, and orders of magnitude more appealing.
I wonder how people on Less Wrong would respond to that poll?
Edit: (Tried to) fix formatting and typo in title.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (47)
I would probably say I expect to die within a normal human lifespan since the wording on all the alternatives is far too strong. I'd give being actually resurrected by cryonics a much lower probability than having my life extended (biologically) but that doesn't say much about whether I think cryonics is a worthwhile cause.
Polls are tricky. I am very pessimistic about the long term survival of institutions and very optimistic about the biological side of cryonics. It makes my answers to such too-strongly-written poll questions less revealing than they could be.
The expectation that wrong ideas won't be too harmful is something that turns out wrong again and again. (I am not claiming anyone in particular had the thought Kurweil's ideas were wrong and nearly harmless.) The outside view reference class of any mistaken notion one thinks isn't very harmful (because one can't think of how it could be) is that one is wrong.
I would be very interested if someone could explain how to prove the harmlessness of an idea.
I think it's mostly just wishful thinking that makes them ignore the cryonics option and assume they will achieve functional immortality without being dead temporarily before.
I say that because I know it is true for myself. When I think about it rationally I estimate that cryonics is probably necessary. But when I think about it casually, wishful thinking overrides that. I guess that if I saw a poll on that topic and just responded immediately without thinking too much about it (because there are other things to do/other questions to answer), I would probably also say I don't think cryonics will be necessary.
I wonder how many people who replied to that poll made that mistake.
I expect radical extension on my natural lifespan given that even currently: "A second, larger study of men in their 70s found that those who avoided smoking, obesity, inactivity, diabetes and high blood pressure greatly improved their chances of living into their 90s. In fact, they had a 54 percent chance of living that long."
and I have several decades of life expectancy continuing to improve just from mundane medical research.
I would be shocked at no brain uploads by 2085.
How much can you choose to not have high blood pressure? How much is genetic? How much depends on our actions but not in a way we understand yet?
Avoiding smoking, obesity, and inactivity helps, but then it is listed separately. Choice of diet can help, for sure - lowering sodium intake will generally lower blood pressure, for the typical western diet; I believe that vegetarianism can help as well. There are also blood pressure medications - I am not sure whether "otherwise as described but with pre-medication high blood pressure that is being successfully treated with medication" puts you in the demographic or not.
What I don't get is that the "bus argument" is not used more. I knew a woman who was hit and killed by a bus, she was a family friend from when I was younger. One can die from an accident at any time and the vast majority of transhumanist minded people, I'd think, would be signed up for cryonics while they are young--just in case some thing happened to them before any techno-singularity they think will happen, happens...
I support SENS, and volunteer at LongeCity/ImmInst which gives anti-aging projects funding. One can support IEET, H+ and otherwise, while still not believing aging will be ended in their lifetime, or there will be artificial bodies they can upload into and have brain back-ups while they are still living. I personally don't feel that will be available for my youngest child, now aged 10, within her lifetime even-let alone mine, and I practice calorie restriction and generally live in as life-extending a manner as possible (sans the newer experimental meds such as TA-65--just exercise and supplements). I signed up for cryonics in my twenties, because I knew my life could end at any moment really and it seemed common sense to have a backup, not that I believe cryonics will work, but that it is better to have a slight chance to get more of what we see as "time" in our current lives.
I've seen great advances in the past decade in life extension therapies and near-term possibilities --yet, I still see it as a slow climb to where we can achieve escape velocity to actual indefinite life-spans. I feel it will take hundreds of years or more, and it is telling that Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil both are signed up for cryonics. There simply should be a back-up in case we don't realize within our lifetimes what we feel may be possible some day. Even if that back-up itself is no guarantee of continuation of life as we know it now.
I certainly hope I can die naturally, get frozen, then be resurrected after I've lived a "normal" life. The idea of my normal life suddenly ending at 30 or 40 gives me existential angst.
I find that Mike Darwin's position is somewhat painfully ignorant of the current climate in medical research towards antiagathics. Unlike the days of Natasha Vita-Moore or even the previous generation, those of us either in our twenties or in our early thirties can exceedingly reasonably expect to see medical treatments widely available during the early onset of our own senescence which are meant to combat senescence in general.
For example, the SENS project to screen senescent white blood cells is recieving real funding. SENS itself is no longer a laughing stock to the mainstream research community. Research is actively underway to locate the genetic trigger of the caloric-restriction effect in order to produce a class of pharmaceuticals to replicate it.
The only question is whether this will ramp up sufficiently to make "escape velocity" before mind-uploading becomes viable, or after. Whether mind-uploading becomes viable during my personal (as a 30 year-old adult male US citizen) expected remaining longevity is no longer a question.
Interesting. I would have given viable uploading within the next 70 years no more than about a 50% chance, even assuming no major socioeconomic collapse. Is there something I could read that makes the case for why uploading is such a good bet?
I do not project a mere 100 years of biological life for myself. Current estimates of expected longevity do not take into account antagapic advancements.
Got it. Just so I understand what probability you're putting on uploading -- how long a biological lifespan are you expecting?
I have no decent estimate (and let me say that all of my projections ignore the probabilities of total societal collapse from various existential risks. That isn't to say I don't believe there are any such risks, just that I find them non-useful in projecting the timeline for various advances). Let me simply say that I agree with De Grey that the first millenarian is very likely alive today, though he or she is also very likely younger than I am.
I cannot conceive of a worldline resultant from the here-and-now that would not include the datapoint that within fifty years from today, antiagapics research had extended human lifespans by at least another fifty years. So even if we aren't at "escape velocity" -- I strongly believe that it will be medically possible for a centenarian at the time I will be a centenarian to live to see another century of life.
Well, antiagapics, tissue-cloning, prosthetics, and so-on. We might also see sideloading long before uploading. (I define sideloading in this conversation as the gradual transition from biological to technological substrate. I.e.; the substituting-one-neuron-at-a-time version of uploading.)
So I can sort of see how you might assign a high probability to this sort of thing. I'm puzzled by claims that one can't conceive of other end results. You can't conceive of for example some parts of the aging process just turning out to be much more complicated than we anticipated?
At this point, almost all the work we've done improving lifespan has been improving the average lifespan. We've done very little in improving the maximum lifespan. The oldest person in the world died at age 122 in 1997. That's not much beyond historical oldest people.
(For some reasons to be a bit more pessimistic, see this earlier Less Wrong thread.)
I can understand assigning this a high probability. But I'm puzzled by strong claims like not being able to conceive of a world-line.
They already have. But at least they are now being researched whereas in the past they did not. We also already know of several potential viable antiagapic techniques, and simply need to determine their safety and delivery systems.
Yes. But up until two or so years ago no one in any mainstream capacity was doing any antiagapic research at all. That has changed. SENS is no longer a 'joke'. The caloric restriction gene activation project is also unlike any previous research done. There has been a change in the climate of medical science regarding the topic of senescence; it is no longer considered 'nutty' to find legitimate ways to reduce it.
So all statistics about how things have been up until now are irrelevant in making predictions about the future -- as the pieces in play have changed fundamentally.
... Enter statistics about how things have been. :-)
From the here-and-now. I.e.; where there has already been successful antiagapic work, it is being taken seriously, and biomedical prosthetics are getting more sophisticated over time over and above the norm, and organ-level cloning has a viable route to practical application, etc., etc..
For these things to together not result in the above-described projection being valid would require that several different underlying principles of the world as I understand it be false. And while I can stipulate counterfactuals for purposes of discussion, I cannot legitimately conceive of things I believe to be inviolate truth being false.
For example; can you conceive of having never actually used a computer being the actual truth in the naive-reality sense? (Don't conjecturally imagine it; attempt to see if you could legitimately integrate that with your current status as having used such a machine.)
Anti-aging research is always going on. How much interest mainstream science takes in it seems to be something close to a random walk.
For example, look at Alexis Carrel who won a Nobel Prize in 1912 and became more well known among both scientists and the general public not for his work that earned him that prize but for his apparently successful attempt to culture the cells of a chicken's heart for an indefinite amount of time. Many scientists attempted (unsuccessfully) to duplicate Carrel's work, even as many scientists visited his culture, and took for granted that his culture was real and there was some subtle difference. (It later turned out that it was likely due to accidental cell replenishment occurring in the culture feeding.)
A more modern example is the work with reservatrol which started being taken seriously in 2004.
Scientists have been working in the mainstream for this sort of thing for sometime. For more examples and a general history of related research, see David Stipp's "The Youth Pill"
So given this history, I'm more inclined to trust historical statistics.
I'm not aware of much successful anti-aging work. Do you have specific examples in mind? Caloric restriction and variations thereof seems in most species to increase the average lifespan but not increase the maximal lifespan.
I agree that prosthetics and cloned organs are likely to help a lot. To some extent, prosthetics are already doing this. Lack of mobility or difficulty moving can easily lead to problems. In that regard, artificial knees and hips have extended the lifespan in the elderly and substantially increased quality of life for many people. As we speak, artificial hearts are rapidly becoming usable for all sorts of people with severe heart problems while pacemakers and VADs are already standards.
Could you expand on what these premises are? I'd be interested in seeing this chain of logic stated explicitly.
... not in any serious context, it wasn't. Given that most medical advances take roughly twenty years to get from the early "theoretical" stage to widespread adoption, looking at what was going on twenty years ago and earlier will demonstrate that there was quite certainly a widespread belief that all "anti-aging" research was non-existent, aside from palliative care for the senescent. Old age was considered unavoidable.
And is still being researched as to its actual mechanisms -- but is widely considered to be a legitimate antiagapic, likely working on the "caloric restriction" effect. One that is not currently in use in humans, but may well be.
THIS is confirmation of my position, you realize. It, in combination with the other items I discussed and the active research now going on at SENS towards that effect, also abolishes the relevance of any statistics currently measuring longevity for purposes of making predictions. Not a single one of those statistics can possibly take into account medical advances that aren't yet in effect.
"The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Verge of an Anti-Aging Revolution", you mean? I find it somewhat difficult to accept the idea that you would believe this text is an argument against the notion that anti-agapics is a field that is getting mainstream attention and has possible successful routes to that effect... especially since you yourself mentioned the most promising example from it. One that is in current research and has never been applied to people.
Umm... I'm not familiar with that claim, and it contradicts evidence I have seen that indicates exactly the opposite.
1) That humans are material organisms.
2) That organisms follow the laws of biology.
3) That there is no supernatural force dictating human events.
Etc., etc.. That's really the only way I could see human lifespan extension becoming viable within fifty years, to the point that at least another fifty years' worth of lifespan extension would be available to persons in my then-state. (I.e.; replacing worn out organs with younger versions or prosthetic replacements; deriving pharmaceuticals for the caloric-restriction effect, SENS counter-damage approaches achieving viability, etc., etc..)
Not my point. I'm not arguing that there isn't mainstream attention. My point is that there has been mainstream attention before now and that that hasn't gotten very far. So the outside view is something to the effect that every few decades scientists become much more interested in life-extension, it doesn't go very far, and then they go do other things.
If all your premises are essentially timeless then one needs to ask if one would have expected this to happen in the past. If for example in 1950, 1900 or 1850, scientists decided to put in a maximal amount of effort into extending human lifespan, do you think they would be as likely to be successful as you think scientists now would be? Maybe you can make that argument for 1950, but I'd be surprised if you'd make that claim about 1900 or 1850. This means that your statement has to include at least one premise involving the level of current medical and scientific knowledge that didn't apply then.
Edited to add:
Yeah, I seem to be wrong here. According to this survey for rodents there's more increase on the average than the maximal but there's a large increase in the maximal age as well.
Defining swans as white only works until you visit Australia.
I feel like I have a fairly good shot at living forever without cryonics. I wouldn't give it 93%, but still.
Same here.