
What if aging weren’t inevitable, but a curable disease? - t23
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614080/what-if-aging-werent-inevitable-but-a-curable-disease/
======
mdorazio
From a cynical point of view, the biggest problem with life extension is that
you usually end up extending the _worst_ years of life rather than the best.
The article somewhat covers this, but if anti aging treatments only manage to
keep people alive who are barely functional, you've actually made things worse
for society as a whole instead of better. We need ways to extend productive
years of life and potentially keep people in the workforce (or at least the
socially contributing force) longer. I'm hopeful for some of the treatments
mentioned, but I think a lot of them are going to fall into the "we managed to
keep people in a hospital bed for an extra year" category.

On a side note - has anyone heard anything from Calico recently? I seem to
remember a lot of hopeful statements when they started up years ago with the
intent of doing a lot of the research mentioned in this article, and then they
went silent.

~~~
dannykwells
Re: Calico. Lots of turnover, lots of focus on basic science. Still recruiting
wonderfully talented scientists. Still very secretive about progress. Note
sure if that is useful or not!

------
solveit
I find it amazing that people unironically advocate the _deaths of literally
everyone_ because they can't be arsed to deal with overpopulation. If
immortality were the default, it would rightly be seen as batshit insane to
force everyone to die to solve overpopulation.

~~~
plasticchris
I wonder if social progress or change at all would halt without death as an
agent of change and creation? It seems like a great sci fi premise.

------
NeedMoreTea
That would mean we've invented a huge population problem, and hundred+ year
working lives.

Do people really want to live forever? My impression amongst my now mainly
middle aged friends is that no, that's for a hope for the naivety of youth. Or
the hyper-wealthy who can fund a hedonistic century or three. In my fifties I
am quite chilled and happy that I come with an as yet unknown expiry date.

Am I intrigued what life will be like in the 23rd century? Definitely,
presuming we get past our little climate emergency, which I doubt. Do I want
300 years of mainly boredom and frustration working my way to get there? Most
certainly not. :)

~~~
Aperocky
I think getting [human consciousness] software to run in other hardware will
come before biological immortality, and once that happens there's no point in
keeping a biological form.

The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea
on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

~~~
chousuke
> The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea
> on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

It's not a problem. Live migration of running software is a thing. Whether
it's actually possible for humans remains to be seen.

The principle is the same, though. In my view, it makes sense to see myself as
a software process running on biological hardware, so if there were a way to
simulate a live migration from one hardware to a compatible one, there would
be no point which I could consider a discontinuity, since merely suspending a
process does not lose information.

However, I do think that I'd prefer a method which gradually integrates my
brain with a non-biological implant that eventually takes over. It seems more
plausible.

~~~
dTal
Two points:

1) The "discontinuity" is a red herring. You get one of those every time you
fall asleep.

2) It doesn't really make sense to speak of your brain as software running on
hardware. That's a metaphor informed by the behavior of digital computers,
whose state is comparatively easy to approximate due to their binary nature
(and yet still very difficult, as anyone knows who's tried writing a 100%
compatible emulator for a different computer). But in your brain, the software
and the hardware are the same thing. It's just a hyper-complex object that
interacts with its environment.There's no guarantee there's any way to
abstract that above the molecular level without losing information, and even
if you think you have, there's no way to verify that the behavior of a new
system will match the behavior of the old system in every case.

Take a system you don't normally regard as information-processing, and see if
it works the same way. Can we migrate the software process that runs a ball of
plasma to compatible hardware? Or a rock?

~~~
chousuke
This reply is a bit late, but I think I'll clarify myself anyway. The way I
see it, it's not my brain or body that's "me". It's the ongoing process, which
doesn't really exist as anything concrete (even though it's caused by a
material body). Therefore if there were some way of seamlessly transition this
process to continue in a different body, I would still consider it "me" even
if the new body actually behaves differently (my body certainly doesn't behave
the same way it did ten years ago).

------
ilaksh
I think it's not quite right to put it in the same category as normal disease
or initially have the goal of "curing" it, but I do believe that understanding
and attempting to mitigate or at least partially reverse some of the
underlying mechanisms of aging is the primary path forward for medicine.

I think the SENS approach is most realistic
[https://sens.org](https://sens.org)

------
jakeogh
Accidental death is ~50/100k/lifetime. So 0.9995^n = 1/2 is our accidental
halflife. Works out to about 100,000 years on average. Someone please check;)

~~~
perilunar
Of course it's not just accidents we'd need to worry about if we didn't age —
there's also murder, warfare, suicide, infectious diseases, etc. I think
Aubrey de Grey said the average lifespan would be ~500-1000 years absent age-
related diseases.

~~~
solveit
I think people's risk tolerances would dramatically change with unbounded
lifespans, and we would take any threat to life much more seriously than we do
now.

~~~
perilunar
For a while yes. Though I can imagine very old but fit people taking up
extreme sports when they get bored with life and dying in entirely avoidable
accidents.

------
imtringued
It would be more than enough to cure hair loss, it's almost the same thing.

------
plasticchris
Then there would be time enough for love.

