We are approaching an arc foreseen by decades of scientific speculation yet largely ignored by the media, and it is apparent that it will happen sooner than many expected - it will certainly begin to show itself within ten years.
Two big scientific tsunamis are converging:
- Life extension, with AI-enhanced capacity, by 2030; and
- Income provision, from the replacement of ‘job-earned’ income by ‘social equalization’ guaranteed income, to give the profit-takers customers and to allow the rest of us to live our lives in pursuit of our passionate dreams.
First, let’s consider the thing that seems the most incredible: "Longevity Escape Velocity." It is named after the "escape velocity" in rocket dynamics when an object can attain a certain speed that defies gravity's pull and go into orbit.
There are two paths being followed that will allow us to avoid old age and death.
The first is biological: a solution to the chemical challenge of aging.
The second is technological: the use of computers to extend our lives through a merger between human brains and digital interfaces.
Either or both - and they can be complementary – are likely to give anyone who is under 85 years of age today, the ability to attain effective immortality.
It is a dream as old as story-telling itself; through the veins of the gods flowed a golden fluid called ichor, which also infused the first artificial lifeform described by the ancients: Talos.
Today, we are close to creating our own personal Talos devices, using the ichor of biology, AI and neural networks.
The merger of human and computer consciousness is within our reach, say an increasing number of experts.
We are looking at the rise of a hybrid consciousness where robotic intelligence is fuel for human brain growth.
This has nothing to do with the perplexing question of whether robots can have consciousness. This is about layering a new film of silicon (digital) cells over the carbon (bio) cells in our brains. Our brains will get a big boost from a platform that will not die. If the underlying carbon cells age away, their roles will be assumed seamlessly by the continuing silicon cells.
Every three months, our brains replace all their living structures naturally. Adding a silicon layer to the neocortex is not a radical development. The neocortex, where our subjective self resides, is a structure as thin and as wide as a plate. The silicon addition will be much smaller…yet capable of opening a universe.
Most work in the media today focuses on relatively mild biological ‘extenders’ to aging. Socioeconomic status (SES) for example acts as an age-accelerator, depending on one’s education, income, or occupation—contributes to rapid aging across the life course.
Longevity escape velocity (LEV) is radically different: it posits that at some point in the near future people will be able to escape the debilitating pull of death.
LEV is an apt metaphor, because in our lifetime humans achieved a monumental marker of development: the landing on the moon. An alien civilization might give us a check-mark for achieving “Step One” as a cosmic intelligence. We made that leap in only 66 years: the time from the first powered flight to Neil Armstrong’s footprint on lunar dust. Less than one human lifetime.
My own father lived that lifetime, for example. He saw the early aircraft and he watched, with me, the live TV coverage of Neil Armstrong’s landing. It was stunning.
Think of how impossible that moon landing would have seemed to someone watching the Wright Brothers flight…that they could also watch a human land on the moon six decades later.
Invention surges forward once the ground is broken and the knowledge starts to accumulate; with AI, the acceleration is even faster.
Successfully overcoming old age is just another lunar landing…it is coming.
Dr. Peter Diamandis is an expert on aging, and he points out that we’ve only seen 10% of all the possible longevity-extending technologies that will impact us in the decade ahead - and that such efforts are accelerating. Further, they build on each other with remarkable speed.
Here is a short video on the concept. The basic idea is that we will discover, sequentially, treatments that repair age-damaged DNA, allowing our cells to rejuvenate themselves. Each treatment will get slightly better than the next, as the years go on. The only trick is making it to the first step of the escalator – which should be happening by 2030, according to many scholars.
Harvard geneticist George Church is one, who thinks that we will reach this state within our lifetime. Sourav Sinha, head of strategy at the Longevity Vision Fund, agreed during a recent panel discussion about stopping age-related diseases in New York, suggesting LEV could be possible within a couple of decades.
My hero for longevity is Ray Kurzweil, the all-round genius and inventor who has won numerous awards and has worked with many companies and foundations. He set the pace for man-machine mental integration with his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. He sees a time when AI – well beyond the borders we set for it today – will be integrated into the human body and will allow extensions of time and capability. He is not a fan of brain transplants; he foresees the process more as an integration of nano-bot technology, where absorbing the new AI capability is more like eating a paste: “tastes pretty good, actually. It has millions of little computers — we call them trackers — which work their way into your cells.”
He concludes "twenty-first-century machines" will go to church, meditate, and pray to connect with this spirituality. He was once asked if God exists, and he said: “not yet”.
If Longevity Escape Velocity is true, we'll never die (as a matter of statistical expectation.
It is possible that Gen X will be the last generation to know what it is like to care for an aged relative or to grieve their passing.
Aubrey de Grey, quoted above, is one of the scientists challenging the most basic assumption that humans must die. He is President and Chief Science Officer of LEV - the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation.
The British researcher has drawn up a map to defeat biological aging, based on the premise that aging is a disease -- one that can be cured if it's approached as "an engineering problem." He calls his approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).
In July 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove de Grey's claims, offering a $20,000 prize (half the prize money was put up by de Grey's Methuselah Foundation) to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that "SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." The challenge remains open.
Recent research reinforces these ideas.
Harvard Genetics Professor David Sinclair and Postdoctral Researcher Jae-Hyun Yang’s work shows that it is possible to re-set the age of the body by up to fifty percent.
“When you can reverse aging and not just slow it down, then all bets are off. We now know you can reset the eye multiple times and restore vision in old mice — that was our Nature 2020 cover article. In this paper, we’re showing that we can reverse aging in other tissues as well, using the same technology. So, if you can reset the age of the body multiple times, I think it would be dangerous to set an upper limit.”
Their work shows that instead of aging being a hardware problem, similar to having an old computer, aging is a software problem and you can reboot the software of an old computer and make it run like it’s new again. They already have a drug in hand to reset the body to cure blindness.
The reset will not affect the genetic pattern that make each of us individuals. Exceptions are possible for unwanted genetic illnesses, but overall your individuality will be preserved, in both biological and computer-enhanced forms.
Another experiment by a team at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Science, Imperial College London and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore is investigating a protein called interleukin-11. It increased lifespan in mice by 25%. The treated mice showed improved muscle function, were leaner, had healthier fur and scored better on many measures of frailty.
The key question is not whether we can develop advanced technologies that can manipulate our bodies down to the cellular and molecular level – we know that is coming – but at what speed will it arrive?
We don’t have to perfect the technology in 30 years.
What we must do is to develop technology that can make old people somewhat younger again, so that an 80-year-old, for example, can get the body of a 60-year-old. In that case, they have bought themselves 20 more years of life, and in those 20 years the technology will have progressed even further, so that when he is 100 years and his body again is like an 80-year-old’s, he can rejuvenate more than 20 years. In all likelihood we will take treatments more often than once every 20 years, and if so, the remaining life expectancy can be illustrated like this:
Accompanying this rise in the age limit, is a race to put digital power into the brain itself. This is covered in the coming article on Ray Kurzweil and his new book “The Singularity Is Nearer”. Suffice it to say at this point that all of his forecasts have come true. With such power, duplicate “selfs” will be able to be stored in case of original shut-down (accidental death).
He says that we will achieve immortality by 2030. By 2045, he says, humans will merge with the artificial intelligence we’ve created, a phenomenon he calls ‘The Singularity.’ He believes this would exponentially amplify our intelligence, creating unparalleled opportunities for innovation and progress.
“When we get to the 2030s, nanobots will connect our brains to the cloud. Just the way your phone does, it expands intelligence, a million fold by 2045,” he states.
Thus far, the National Inventors Hall of Fame member has been 86% accurate in his forecasts. If anything, he has been too conservative…the world has actually moved faster than his forecasts. In 1999, he said we would need a trillion calculations per second to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); he put the date at 2029. Nvidia came out with a computer last year that does 130 billion calculations per second. It looks like we will arrive at the trillion much sooner than 2029. If he is out by a few years on the immortality forecast, I will not complain.
Kurzweil states: “Today, scientific progress gives the average American or Briton an extra six to seven weeks of life expectancy each year. When AGI gives us full mastery over cellular biology, these gains will sharply accelerate. Once annual increases in life expectancy reach 12 months, we’ll achieve ‘longevity escape velocity.’”
It is worth noting that he was wrong about the life expectancy for the past two years, which were depressed by the COVID pandemic. America may also be falling behind because of its lack of universal health care. Social policy can impair technological capability.
Failure to achieve Life Expectance Escape Velocity requires that we fail to accelerate at least six technological fields that are leading us down this path”
Biotechnology - e.g stem cell therapies, enhanced autophagy, pharmaceuticals, immunotherapies, senescent cell clearance etc.
Nanotechnology - Methods of repairing the body at a cellular and molecular level using nanotechnology or nanobots.
Robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) Combined with whole brain emulation - Where the brain is uploaded to a digital medium and increasingly enhanced and replaced with non biological components.
Robotics - The replacement of increasing numbers of body parts, in line with the older concept of a cyborg.
Gene Therapies – The suppression of genes that negatively impact us and the enhancement of genes which increase our tendency toward longer and healthier lives, such as the development of CRISPR .
Whole brain emulation and mindscaping - Mind transfer to a new host, biological or non-biological.
So the odds are six-to-none in favour of escape velocity.
This will be happening in a social policy environment; at the same time as the anti-aging clock is ticking backwards, the rise in AI will affect jobs - it will mean that ALL jobs will be done by machines.
Incomes will not be earned by working for a living – the concept will be logically absurd. Instead, business owners will have to spread their earnings among all citizens, if people are going to have funds to buy their products. It is not necessary that the owners realize this, but the Public Sector will step in and make it mandatory. Public figures do not want society-wide collapse if they can avoid it by allocating someone else’s money.
On the income front, it is almost easier to think of the potential for change from Long Life and AI-enhanced intellect than it is to think that the rich 1% would ever give up part of “their” income. Greed does indeed have a terrific grip on power and purpose.
America, however, has put into place a system that makes fundamental change not only possible but certain.
America’s Founders did not see universal wealth coming…but they would have approved. They were very advanced on their views on social change, as can be seen in their acceptance of the radical reality that slavery would die!
It was not a universal view among them, but Benjamin Franklin and John Jay hated slavery. Franklin co-founded one of the first abolitionist societies in America in 1774.
The fact that the Founders of America could see a drastic social change coming, and were ready to accept it, encouraged them to set up a system to allow it to happen. Not without strife, but with a vision powerful enough to pull the North forward to defeat the slavers.
When you think of all the times America could have gone sideways, with a totally different outcome depending on a few votes or a few troops, it makes you shudder. We are on a roller-coaster that has taken some very hard turns.
Another one is coming up.
But today’s politicians will have no choice but to accept the new radical social notion - as stunning in its way as the elimination of slavery was then - that wealth that is earned by the common intellectual effort of everyone, should be shared by everyone.
“This is AI’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings,” says Kurzweil.
If slavery was the notion that society could be made up of valleys (slaves) and hills (owners), then this new movement is saying that society should be made up only of one upland plateau, and everyone should be on it.
There is more power behind this bullet than behind the stopping-power of the wealthy. Because this bullet is pushed forward by the twin desires for life itself, and for a life well lived.
We need to get prepared for this – to create a survival guide for the technological renaissance that is approaching us.
Yes, it seems unreal and beyond credibility.
But so was the moon landing.
In fact, human flight was denigrated as a possibility by well-educated people such as George W. Melville, Engineer-in-Chief of the U.S. Navy, who wrote a scathing article about the pursuit of flight. He began with a Shakespeare quote that implied the goal was a childish “vain fantasy” that “is as thin of substance as the air”.
The author of the above statement, published in 1903, was overtaken within nine weeks when the Wright Brothers took off.
In fact, human flight was denigrated as a possibility by well-educated people such as George W. Melville, Engineer-in-Chief of the U.S. Navy, who wrote a scathing article about the pursuit of flight. He began with a Shakespeare quote that implied the goal was a childish “vain fantasy” that “is as thin of substance as the air”.
The author of the above statement, published in 1903, was overtaken within nine weeks when the Wright Brothers took off.
Through all of human history, it was an impossible quest…not even a quest, it was so remote as to be inconceivable.
Yet within 60 years of powered flight, we were walking on the moon.
The technology had progressed so exponentially fast, that the impossible got overtaken by the “done that” check-mark.
People underestimate the exponential.
They see something in front of them that looks impossible, and they resist its probability…but after it has happened, they push back on its importance. It was no big deal; it means little; everyone could see that coming.
This will be the way of immortality. It is within years of achievement. The push-back against the idea is as frantic as the resistance to the notion of a lunar landing - and as misguided.
The worst mistake a commentator can make today about progress in human life extension is to recoil from the advances that are – with a bit of focus – able to be clearly seen.
This is no longer a “vain fantasy”; if you are relatively healthy today and younger than 85 years old, you are likely to be breathing a century and more from now.
Already the US Food and Drug Administration is granting fast-track designation for trials of vaccines that promise to cut cognitive decline in half. Testing is underway on an anti-aging drug that has extended the lifespan of mice by 25%. Similar trials are going on around the world, and the pace of the work is increasing.
This achievement will be humankind’s greatest step forward. To be able to step over the coffin and into new sunlight will change everything – especially religion, which exists largely as a promise of delivery from death.
Our children will never be able to understand what it has meant for us now, to grow up in the shadow of an inevitable end.
And I am grateful for that. I wish I could have grown up in this coming environment myself; to know the feeling of immortality. It has been crushing me all my life.
No more.
If I die before the end-of-death, so be it. But for the first time, science is able to point to a new sunrise. I find it incredible, in fact, to believe that I am alive at this singular moment in human history, privileged to have access to the key of Life. So many more worthy people have lived and died before us. It is so humbling that it takes the breath away.
Almost takes the breath away.
The singularity promises much more than additional breath, as well.
Please join me for the next article on Kurzweil’s explorations of the extension of the brain, not just the life.
Check out how an expansion of the human intelligence a millionfold will change human life forever.
As the book reviewers say: “The culmination of six decades of research on artificial intelligence, The Singularity Is Nearer is Ray Kurzweil's crowning contribution to the story of this science and the revolution that is to come.”
Prepare to land upon the moon, again.
Fascinating column, Barry. It makes me consider whether or not I want to live into my 100's or longer. For me, the underlying question has to do with our natural tendency to discount things as they move further away in time or place - or character (race, ethnicity, religion, wealth). An example might be this: Two hundred thousand-plus Iraqi casualties in the Second Gulf War are less significant to me than 3000 Americans killed on 9/11, and they are less significant than the death of my mother. Will my 'discount rate' move closer to zero, if I know I'm going to be around for another century or two? It might with regards to time, but I will still have the problem of discounting that which is further away in place or character. In other words, we still have the problem of discounting "the other" which is the source of so much conflict in human history. How does living longer solve that?
“When we get to the 2030s, nanobots will connect our brains to the cloud. Just the way your phone does, it expands intelligence, a million fold by 2045,”
This is all well and good... however, increasing himan intelligence exponentially without ensuring that human wisdom develops even faster seems to be begging for trouble.
I genuinely appreciate your optimism, Barry, Keep up the great work!