Aubrey de Grey (head of SENS) just had an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. At some point during the interview, he made a fairly specific and extremely bold prediction about the near future.
See 56:40 - 58:45+. The short version is: sometime in the near future ("could easily happen in the next 3 to 5 years"), there will be an extremely sudden shift in the public perception on aging through which the alleged fact that it can be reversed becomes common knowledge. At that point, there will be enormous pressure towards funding the field, and you won't get elected without promising to throw money at the problem.
A relevant reference class here could be something like "expert in a field predicting a massive near-term shift of awareness about something related to their field." Predictions in this class probably come true about 0% of the time. On the other hand, there are some reasons to think Aubrey is unusually credible.
My questions are
- How seriously do you take this claim? Aubrey didn't specify a testable criterion in this conversation, but a reasonable one could be something like "a candidate in the 2024 presidential general election lists fighting aging as a campaign issue on their official website."
- Suppose Aubrey is correct, and there is a massive shift within the next five years. Is there a way for a normal person to benefit financially out of knowing this now?
You can check out my attempt on Metaculus to capture the essence of his claim, though it's debatable whether I succeeded. Right now Metaculus says there's a 75% chance of something culturally significant happening in anti-aging research in the 2020s.
My own guess is that something big might happen, but it would not cause public opinion to change as rapidly as what Aubrey has claimed. When the first mouse is demonstrated to have been rejuvenated, there will still be people who doubt it will scale to humans. I expect people to continue to doubt it until there is a very successful trial in humans, at which point opinion will probably have only gradually shifted in that direction beforehand.
I also expect people's resistance to anti-aging to have quite a bit of inertia. My impression is that most people strongly oppose the research, or are indifferent, so it's hard to imagine why this would change due to some development in mice.
I expected most people to be very skeptical of his strict claim so I wanted a more realistic hypothesis.