Michaelos comments on On "Friendly" Immortality - Less Wrong

5 [deleted] 05 December 2011 04:39AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2011 02:21:56PM *  7 points [-]

However scientists are working on these technologies right now, discovering genes that cause proteins that can be blocked to greatly increase life-spans of worms, mice and flies. Should a breakthrough discovery be made, who knows what will happen? Once it's developed there's no going back. If the technology exists, people will stop at nothing to use it. You won't be able to control it.

Just like AI, life-extending technologies are not inherently "bad". But supporting the development of life-extending technnologies without already answering the above questions is like supporting the development of AI without knowing how to make it friendly. Once it's out of the box, it's too late.

I was thinking about your post and these parts don't sound convincing enough to me. You can make a Police State Society that stops every person and checks their Birth Date on a government mandated ID, and just arrest/shoot anyone over 125 (or whatever the age is) Police states are not a GOOD thing by any means and I am not recommending one. But the idea of "You won't be able to control it." just seems like a very odd thing to announce for any kind of Biological life extension technology. How are we talking about an unstoppable opponent in the same manner people think of an AI?

And on the breakthrough side, even if we literally developed a pill to "Cure all cancers for a dollar, side effect free." That would be a STUNNING breakthrough in today's research. But we would need an even bigger breakthrough to get to life extension effects to what you're saying, or more likely, several breakthroughs in separate fields. Are we really anywhere near that?

I suppose to summarize my current beliefs, it is possible that lifespan will go up exponentially at some point, through a biological method, but I don't see that happening yet, and I definitely don't see it being unstoppable, and there are other technological events that I would expect to hit a crisis point far sooner.

Is there evidence that I'm not aware of that would make me change my thoughts on this?

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2011 06:28:21PM *  2 points [-]

it is possible that lifespan will go up exponentially at some point, through a biological method, but I don't see that happening yet

If you are not that very old you only have to increase your expected lifespan faster than time progresses, that is just change the angle to >1 and you are out of the woods, so to speak. At the moment, my lifespan (based upon the population I belong to) increase with about 3 months per year, if it would increase, I would have a shot at reaching longevity escape velocity.

But we would need an even bigger breakthrough to get to life extension effects to what you're saying, or more likely, several breakthroughs in separate fields. Are we really anywhere near that?

You are quite right, according to SENS there are seven categorise of "damage" that define aging:

From Wikipedia

  1. cell loss or atrophy (without replacement)
  2. oncogenic nuclear mutations and epimutations,
  3. cell senescence (Death-resistant cells),
  4. mitochondrial mutations,
  5. Intracellular junk or junk inside cells (lysosomal aggregates),
  6. extracellular junk or junk outside cells (extracellular aggregates),
  7. random extracellular cross-linking.

If you look at every category independently the problem appears rather incremental, it's not very hard for example to imagine that we will have livers made from scratch in the clinic in a decade or two.

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