Will Kurzweil's predictions come through?
I do think that effective biological immortality will be acheived. I don't expect that it will be available to everyone, and I'm not sure that we will be able to appreciate it for long, due to the likely emergence of immortal AIs. I am a biomedical researcher. I expect that most cancers will be cureable within the next 20 years or so, mostly through employing a patient's own immune system against the tumor. This will greatly extend the lives of many people. However, I think that problems like neurovascular disease will be more difficult to solve, and I expect that it will be 40 years or so before therapies that effectively reverse the aging process will be available. I haven't read Kurzweil, although I think that there is a likelihood that non-biological AI will inherit the Earth from us.
Is there precedence for this treatment method? I could imagine so many things that could go wrong with it...I expect that most cancers will be cureable within the next 20 years or so, mostly through employing a patient's own immune system against the tumor.
Yes, Here are two recent review articles on tumor vaccine development:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22809568
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22639169 Its an exciting field. In principle, tumors shouldn't grow in most cases, but the ones that do seem to have an immune evasion program. Its not well understood, but many tumors attract macrophages (as they should) then the macrophages switch to a quiescent phenotype (which they should not). Obviously there are some kind of signaling mechanisms that are akin to Obi Wan waving his hand and saying "These are not the cells you're looking for." The idea behind tumor vaccine is that perhaps its possible to expose immune cells to some component of the tumor (secreted vesicle, cell lysate, etc.) ex vivo, so that the immune cells aren't already compromised by the tumor, and then inject them back into the patient. Some preclinical studies have shown a lot of promise, but I don't know if its been advanced to patent trials anywhere.
Sorry about the delayed reply: That's really interesting, but surprising, do all (or even some) immune cells have that sort of plasticity? I was under the impression that it was just B-cell producing the right antibodies, but then again, every time I hear about the human immune system, I am told it is "especially complex". Edit: Link #1 of yours mentions in the abstract that they describe the mechanism in the paper, but I'm behind a paywall and it's too late for me to connect to a computer / network with access. =/The idea behind tumor vaccine is that perhaps its possible to expose immune cells to some component of the tumor (secreted vesicle, cell lysate, etc.) ex vivo, so that the immune cells aren't already compromised by the tumor, and then inject them back into the patient.
Haha, "especially complex" is code for "I don't really understand it, so I'm going to pretend that its too complex to explain to you." I don't think anyone really understands immunology, even immunologists, they just know a lot more facts than we do. But that's the thing about solutions to problems, if they work, who cares why? Don't forget that the IC engine was developed before the ideal gas law. B-cell immunity is one strategy. Another uses dendritic cells or dendritic cell-derived vesicles to stimulate immunity. Its way too complex for me to explain; you wouldn't understand ;)
As I recall, the AMA did a study whereby they said "okay, let's presume we can cure everything that kills people. What happens to the life expectancy?" I can't find it in the amount of time I'm interested in spending, but the answer was something like "we gain an extra 15 years." There's a real problem with living in a reducing environment. It really fucks with your chemistry.
I'd like to see the study. The body does have means to repair/correct for oxidative damage, and there are mechanisms by which DNA sequences can be corrected. Also, telemeres lost in cell divisions can be replaced, and epigenetic regulation can be modified or reversed. One of the best examples of this reverse aging IMHO is cloning with an adult nucleus. It's incredible that just the cytosol alone of an embryo has enough to motivate an adult cell to revert to developmental mechanisms. Immortalized cell lines are a crude example of making cells continue on. Theortically, there is no component of the body that can't be replaced piecemeal, or any damage that can't be undone. There is truth to the notion that we aren't the same material we were when we were born. The trick is to get the body to make the replacement, and to swap in less corrupted components.
this ax has been in my family for 10 generations the head has been replaced 5 times and the handle 6.
So if you could do me a solid, in 500 words or less, what's changed about the state of the art since Dolly the Sheep? My understanding was that the shortened telomere problem was kind of a full-stop. I'll see if I can find the study. It may take a bit.
To be honest, I'm not very up to date on cloning. I could take a look a it. However, here in cancer research we are very familiar with telomorase running amok, where the ends never terminally shorten. AFAIK one of Dolly's suspected problems was that the telomeres had already substantially shortened, and they either picked up shortening more at that point, or the telemorase wasn't making up for what had already been lost. But all cells can express telomerase with the right cues, and a number of adult cells do. TBH I'd bet that Dolly had a number of other problems due to a previous life that simple nucleic transfer didn't reverse. Biology is crazy dirty. There rarely seems to be one problem or one solution. Typically the best you can do is to get the body to start doing the thing that you want it to, and let it go with broad guidance. My guess is we will figure out some slick ways to add a few decades, and then a few more, then a few more...
I am a ghost. all of this is a misapplication of Moore's "law" and I think the creation of a faulty metric we call technology. We are treating it as a vector when it is better modeled as a branching bush. It full analogy with the ladder of evolution vs the tree.
R. Buckminster Fuller said "I seem to be a verb". I think he meant something like this. I am not this blob of matter; not really. That is a slice, a snapshot of me. I am a pattern, a knot of information, moving through time. An incredibly complex knot, made of many smaller, microscopic knots, working together. My parents, who were similar knots, managed to split off tiny portions of their knots or patterns, and combine them into a new knot (actually they did this a lot, but only a few knots survived for a long time; at least four have still not unravelled. Eventually all knots unravel. Someday we may know enough to prevent it (would that it were so!). All our knots - yours, mine, the cat's - have survived to this day because it is the nature of our knots to tie new knots. This is life itself.
That's exactly the point I made in a debate with theadvancedapes yesterday: Entropy rules the universe. Period. Exclamation point. End of story. The laws of thermodynamics certainly do not lend themselves to immortality. Medically speaking, we can keep putting more fingers in the dike, but its gonna collapse eventually.
That sounds frightening. Could you expand on this?
Do you expect this possibility to come about in the form of humanoid robots who interact like humans and effect the environment? Or rather AI computers which continue to communicate with one-another after all humans are deceased?
What are the ramifications?Non-biological AI will inherit the Earth from us.
I expect that the AI that will outlast us will be mobile. In fact, I think that intelligence is entirely environment-dependent, and for us to recognize AI, it will probably have to be in the form of one that interacts with the physical world. Just like we have physical limits like how fast we can run, I expect that we have mental limitations that do not define the limits of world-affecting intelligence. -Cheetahs can outrun us. AI will eventually outthink us. When non-biological world-affecting AI proliferates, it will no longer be our world. We will be living in someone else's environment, just as other creatures live in ours today. I'm not sure to what degree the AI will consider our condition, however I don't expect that it will remain a priority to theirs. For that reason, I expect that we will disappear over time. I don't think there's much reason to believe it will be a apocalyptic scenario, but I expect the world will change in response to the actions of this new intelligence, and it we will not be able to keep up with it.
What is "immortality?" Is it a body that doesn't die? Even the most impeccable machine breaks down. If this is your question, then it is a mechanical one - "will we achieve perfect healing?" For me, I don't think so, but I'm not in an industry where I have any insight. Is it an ability to transcend the physical? If so, I suggest you read Jeron Lanier. It doesn't take many minutes of contemplating the nature of death before one is forced to contemplate the nature of life. We are surrounded by immortals. We read of them, quote them, imitate them, and consult them daily. Somebody whose name I should have written down had a quote about how we spend our 40s contemplating death. The Voltaire quote is easier: "40 is the old age of youth; 50 is the youth of old age." I do find that as I age, I find comfort in the words of Mr. Samuel Clemens: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
I like to think of acheiving immortality equal to the ability to perserve one's consciousness permanently, one way or another. Preserving a physical medium for your consciousness similar to how hermit crabs change shells may be necessary in order to continue interacting with the physical world.
Thank you for that Clemens quote, it's wonderful. Throwing that one in my back pocket.
I'm curious about what you mean by this. Are you suggesting that there is a biological expiration date for humans that will be nearly impossible to overcome, or that we have a pre-ordained destiny? Or something else?Are humans, as a species, really meant to live beyond 100 years?
A biological expiration date, I think. I'm no expert, but I think I read somewhere that at a certain stage some people have been known to die simply from "old age," or something to that effect. It's obvious that, as we grow older, our body builds up more and more "mileage" and becomes more and more worn by the passage of time and the bustle of life. Considering most of us are only fully "actualised" from our 20s-30s - a period after which we begin to slowly decline. It makes sense to me that at some point we just break down. Sure, most of the time this buildup of mileage is merely a complication and not the direct cause of death.
Immortality just doesn't seem like something that is possible to achieve, as I'm sure this mileage would catch up with us eventually. Maybe life could be sustained, but would we eventually be reduced to weak, bedridden cripples? This all sounds very pessimistic, I know, but I just think that it's the natural course of life. People are born, they live their life, and then they pass from it.
Thanks. Much of what we call aging is oxidative processes. A gene that once encoded a protein properly no longer does, and the misfolded protein doesn't do as good as a job. That actually happens in your skin, and it plays a role in why old people have less elastic skin. However, we could in theory swap out the bad copies and replace them with new ones. Your skin would once again make the correct protein, and your skin would grow youthful looking again. All of what we call aging comes down to physical changes. And these physical changes can, in theory, be reset. If your skin is new, and your bones and muscles strong, and your vascular system healthy, you've started to really turn back the clock. Our cells break down after a number of divisions because it wasn't important for our evolution for them to go on forever. However, single-cell species don't die off because they get older with each new division. If you could imagine each cell in your body to be as viable as a single-celled organism, you'd have a body that didn't age very much.
I think I should refer this question to theadvancedapes, he has a great podcast on the singularity that perhaps he can direct you to. Also he posted this comment which is his vision of the future that ties nicely in to your question.
That comment really sums up a lot of my thoughts about the future. I've also written a lot about the technological singularity on my site if you want to check that out. But I will try and elaborate a little bit on my thoughts about immortality (or negligible senescence) more specifically.
Technologies that will move the average life expectancy from 70-80 to 160 are really only decades away, not centuries away (this is in line with many predictions about exponential doubling of human life span). As Michio Kaku has stated, the 20th century was "The Age of Discovery," and the 21st century will be "The Age of Mastery." This includes mastering the biological, chemical, and physical world that we spent so much time learning about last century. The first half of this age will most likely be characterized by the three revolutions mentioned in The Singularity Is Near: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). Once we can specifically control how our cells develop and age, and once we can grow and replace organs, negligible senescence will essentially be achieved. However, I don't know how much it will matter. This is because the transformations brought by nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (N and R) will probably takeover any biologically-relevant processes before we have a chance to experience what it is like to be a 300 year old "young" biological human.
In my mind, the question of whether our generation has a chance to live indefinitely is not really that interesting anymore. It seems extremely likely. What is interesting is discussing some of social repercussions of that knowledge (i.e., what will it be like to live that long? What does it mean for our social lives? Our relationships? Our partners? Our working lives? How should we approach the rest of our lives?). It is also interesting to discuss what will happen post-singularity. People are working on these ideas now (which brings up whether "the singularity" is the right metaphor for the transformations to come this century). Singularity U is a great place where these discussions can take place. I feel like in my graduate program I have to censor myself regarding these issues, although I am making some progress in discussions. But Singularity U is a place where graduate students can do research on these issues. I would recommend checking out John Smart's YouTube channel for more info on this as well. Also, I always find Singularity Hub to be a great site to explore these ideas and to discuss discoveries and research that are happening now with relevance to the future of this century. EDIT
I would just like to add that we need to divorce the idea of the singularity from Ray Kurzweil. It is not "his" idea. It was first proposed by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and many computer scientists throughout the 20th century predicted "singularity-like" events in the 21st century. Kurzweil did a great job popularizing the idea, but he is not the only one predicting this future. There are many many research papers about it and many different researchers from different academic disciplines actively studying this. If anyone wants a suggested reading list contact me.
Thank you for that insightful comment. While I am rather biased toward the idea of our generation being the first to achieve some form of biological immortality, I would really like to be able to construct a more informed opinion. I'd appreciate a reading list on how far along we are on the path to immortality, i.e. types of life extension technologies, how viable these methods are, what obstacles they have to overcome etc. Funny you should mention Michio Kaku though, cuz it was his Physics of the Future that prompted me to ask this question aha.
Alright, I'll try and organize a suggested reading list on the subject.
We've already reached immortality. Well, not humans, but there is a species of jellyfish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula) that is immortal.
If we think overpopulation is a problem now (I know I do), can you imagine what it would be like if old age was no longer a factor in ending a person's life? This world would be full in a matter of years and we'd all go starving. Sure, there's more than enough food on this planet to sustain a larger population yet. But if people keep up with their wasteful practices (which I can only imagine they would) there'd be no food left for anyone.
no Ray Kurweil drinks his own bath water. History is not linear and the future does not belong to us. support
There's a really fun sci-fi novel called The Postmortal by Drew Magary on this exact topic. Well written, and goes from the discovery to the repercussions decades later following one person who gets the "cure." http://www.amazon.com/Postmortal-Novel-Drew-Magary/dp/B007SR... If we do happen to somehow achieve immortality before the end of the century, the glory of it all won't last long. The coming ecological catastrophe that is global climate change will make sure most people won't be sticking around more than they should be. The level of change and cooperation needed to avoid it is impossible if somehow we decide that we deserve to be on earth longer than was ever designed.
This is a classic dystopian futuristic narrative, and it has a very simple logical structure: if x, y, and z technologies allow us to do something, and all of our current problems remain the same, then catastrophe will ensue. The same type of reasoning was used to suggest that there would be a globally catastrophic famine before 2000 back in 1900 because many demographers predicted that the Earth would have more than 6 billion humans (when are people going to realize Thomas Malthus was wrong!). They reasoned there would be a global famine because they understood that population in the 20th century was going to increase dramatically (which it did) but did not factor in how our technologies would also increase food production (which they did) = no global catastrophic famine. The logic of this argument is the same.
Right now climate change is a major issue, and we need to address it. The important thing to remember is that we will. Renewable energy technologies are not going away... they are only getting better, and they will eventually become our main source of energy (despite how much the fossil fuel industry fights it). Also, there are other technologies that will be developed this century (e.g., nuclear fusion) that will make energy super abundant and cheap for the entire planet - with no negative side effects. This is not far fetched - this is following current trends (EXAMPLE of trend: The average person in Britian in 1800 had to work 6 hours for 1 hour of candle light. The average person in Britain today has to work half a second for 1 hour of electric light (Ridley, 2010).). Also, there are already nanotechnologies being developed that will be able to modify the chemical composition of the atmosphere. It is extremely likely that by the 2030s will be be able to use either genetically engineered bacteria or nanotechnology (or both) to really balance out our atmospheric composition to desired levels. Let me be clear, there will be problems in the future. There may be bigger problems in the future than the problems we are facing now. BUT the problems we are facing now won't be problems in the future, because we are a very adaptable species. When we recognize a problem we dedicate a tremendous amount of resources to solving the problem. We don't solve problems perfectly, and never will, but adaptation is strong and the problem will, given enough time, be overcome.
Also, the second issue krisc brought up was about overpopulation. This isn't true either. The demographic transition, which is a process that has been happening for centuries and will be completed this century, will LOWER our overall population by 2100. Most estimates, including by the UN, claim that our population will top out at a maximum of 10 billion people before starting to decline. I'm not going to go into detail about the demographic transition, but if you haven't read about it yet, do so. The logical conclusion of the demographic transition is that people will live indefinitely but have no offspring. Finally, overpopulation won't be as big of an issue because you are supposing that we will have more people with the same level of access to resources and energy. This won't be the case (as I argued above). When we transition to a Type 1 civilization we will have complete control of all resources on our planet (with no negative side effects) and we could essentially host far more people on our planet than we do now (even though we may not need to). Of course, we may have more overall intelligent beings on the planet in 2100 since most (or all) will likely be non-biological, and I can't make predictions about post-singularity populations.If we do happen to somehow achieve immortality before the end of the century, the glory of it all won't last long. The coming ecological catastrophe that is global climate change will make sure most people won't be sticking around more than they should be. The level of change and cooperation needed to avoid it is impossible if somehow we decide that we deserve to be on earth longer than was ever designed.
But wouldn't more people be more disposed to finding ways to prevent and/or reverse these ecological meltdowns if they immortal? After all, they're still gonna be around a few hundred years from now and no one wants to live in a shithole. That book sounds pretty interesting though. Thanks for the recommendation.