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Logos01 comments on Mike Darwin on Kurzweil, Techno-Optimism, and Delusional Stances on Cryonics - Less Wrong
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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.
It couldn't go very far, technology wasn't ready. It probably still isn't ready, but until that's the case, we wouldn't expect any progress anyway, so its absence says little.
Right. I completely agree with that. The issue is then how do we know that things are so much more advanced now that Logos can say that he "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." I'm not arguing that his projection doesn't look likely from what we know. But the estimate of it being so likely as for alternatives to be inconceivable seems indicate an extreme and unjustified level of confidence.
That's not even remotely valid. The interest in actual, honest anti-agapic research ongoing now (and for the last five or six years which in terms of medical research is "now") has never before occurred. It is exactly a new thing.
It certainly has never had widespread mainstream acceptance within the medical research community. (And by the way; inducing clinical immortality in lineages of cells has been going on for several decades. It's nothing new, and it is not related to antiagapics research in the slightest. If it were, you would have been in the rights to bring up the story of "The Immortal Woman" Henrietta Lacks. Keeping lineages of cells alive is easy. Preventing aging in multicellular organisms is not. They also aren't related fields of endeavor.
Understanding that keeping cell cultures alive doesn't have anything to do with preventing aging is a modern understanding that arose after scientists tried to see if they were connected and failed. Contemporary scientists of Carrel for example certainly thought they were related. It is only in hindsight that we've realized that that wasn't the case. The discovery of the Hayflick limit was a major step in realizing that. In fact, that discovery killed off further anti-aging research in the 1960s and it took a while for it to recover.
We seem to have an actual factual dispute here. Or it may be an issue of what you mean by "actual" and "honest". But for example, work in trying to extend telomeres dates from the 1990s and the basic idea about telomeres dates from the 1970s. I don't know if this work gets classified if as "actual, honest" by you since it turned out to a large extent to not work as well as people thought it might. Also, in regards to the issue of premises, are you asserting that if scientists in 1900 or 1950 had put in current levels of attention into anti-aging that they would have succeeded at the level you estimate? I suspect not, which means that there has to be some other detail here that's relevant concerning our current knowledge level. There's an unstated premise about how much medical/biochem knowledge we have now.
I'll note incidentally that the argument you are making now is substantially weaker than the argument you made earlier in the thread where you said:
which apparently has now become last five or six years. Does this represent an update of your views on the timeline?
The topic in question is fuzzy/indeterminite. The transition to widespread acceptance from marginalization was not instantaneous. The work currently ongoing began sometime after Resveratrol's antiagapic effects were discovered.
There were also minor items of research over the years which were conducted -- but senescence was, definitively, seen by the mainstream medical community as something to which only palliative care was worthy of researching, as opposed to senescence itself being a treatable condition.
Even that much is somewhat new historically speaking: there were no geriatricians in the US until 1978, for example.
No, its failure to that end has little to nothing to do with the topic at hand. It doesn't apply for the simple reason that the research in question was not done for the purpose of combating senescence. It was never meant as anything other than a tool for theoretical understanding of the role of telomeres in biology -- a topic we still understand only very poorly, with many conflicting ideas about the specific functions and purposes therein.
No. I have no such claim to make. They might have discovered something like resveratrol and ways to make it available to the common public -- that is, pharmaceutically mimic the caloric restriction effect -- and it's possible that if we extend this counterfactual scenario to the 80s'/90's, it's also possible that some other genetic therapies might have been uncovered/disseminated by now. (For example; work is currently ongoing at the SENS group to determine if senescent white blood cells can be screened from the body in a process similar to dialysis, which would allow the 'more vital' cells to repopulate within the patient, thereby restoring a more vital immune system, prolonging disease resistance in the elderly. This is also something that conceptually could have been in widespread application as early as the late 70's.)
No, there really isn't. It's not about that. It's about topical focus. It's about old age itself being seen as a topic worthy of being disassembled and its mechanisms researched in order to find solutions to that effect. The failure for this to have occurred until now is not representative of any promise of immediate success upon the conceptual breakthrough but rather a guarantee of the absence of success in the absence of the concept.
I'm reminded of a science fiction short story that delineates this same idea, in a way, though obviously with more "fantastic" results: Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken".
I don't get that impression from my (limited) knowledge of the field. If Stipp's book is accurate then there have been many attempts in the last hundred years by serious scientists.
but also specific estimates for the current technological level and general knowledge level. So the question becomes then how confident are you in those estimates? Pedictions of sweeping change are usually wrong. Such changes do sometimes occur from technologies, but most of those are things like ubiquitous cell phones or the internet or GPS which are not heavily anticipated or are anticipated in only a rough fashion. The outside view suggests that predictions about major technologies should have their confidences reduced.
This can't be all that matters if the same result would not have occurred in 1950 or 1900 (or even more to the point 1850). That means that at least one premise needs to be not just about topical focus but about the overarching technological level. To use a weak analogy, post 1945 or so it woud be fair to say that the only issue preventing a major power from getting to the moon was one of topical focus. But that's because one is taking into account the general tec level. I couldn't make that claim in 1900 or 1850. And in defending that difference, I have to be able to point to specific technologies that they had in 1945 that they didn't in 1900.
It seems to me that you are arguing in a way that is useful to convince someone who assigns a very low probability that lifespan extension will occur that they should assign a high probability. That's not a point I disagree with. The issue is your claim that:
This is in context a bit stronger than this because you seem to be claiming not that people born fifty years from now will have a lifespan extension of another fifty years but that this will apply to people who are already old. This is a difficult position since with the exceptions of prosthetics and tissue-cloning, most of the plausible methods of life extension (such as reservatrol) rely on starting the process when people are young. Even if we have some form of reservatrol-like compound in fifty years that slows aging down to a crawl, someone who is a hundred years old at that point will still have the cells of a centenarian (assuming minimal prior anti-aging treatments).
Moreover, one can easily conceive of circumstances where many of the proposed anti-aging systems just won't work. For example, humans have a much longer average life-span than most mammals. It could turn out that humans already do something to their cells that mimics most of the effects of reservatrol.
There's also a general evolutionary issue at work here: If a species has a maximal lifespan of around L, then if there are any ways to get more reproductive fitness at a younger age that create problems sometime around or after L. So, one should expect not just one thing to go wrong as a species ages, but lots of things to go wrong. In fact, this is close to what one sees. If this problem is severe enough, it is possible that there are diseases which will show up in the very elderly that we haven't even noticed yet because the population of such people is just too small.
To further this discussion, over at Prediction Book I've made a series of predictions about age extension related predictions. I'm curious how much and where your estimates disagree with mine. (I'm not including separate links to each, but the ones on that list are the reservatrol predictions and the sets about oldest living people).
Defining swans as white only works until you visit Australia.