5 ms·

> Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish the

> Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't. Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo. To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms. It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades. I find this an absurd scenario, and therefore believe to the contrary. Science will overcome the level of complexity of human biology, and continue onward even long after that. Because, putting anthropocentric intuitions to the side, the human body is not the most complex phenomenon imaginable.

dahart 11y ago
Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death. To be clear, I'm not saying it can't ever happen, I'm saying that DeGrey's and Kurzweils claims that it is happening and will come to pass in the next century are bogus.
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  De Grey is most certainly not arguing that it is happening, he is arguing that it can happen with sufficient investment in the right lines of research. A digest of his position is that the science is way ahead of the will and interest to develop that science into therapies. What he is doing, via advocacy, fundraising, and personally funding research with most of his net worth, is to move the needle on getting therapies towards the clinic. So things like the senescent cell clearance approaches presently under development at Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology could have been built (with greater cost and slightly different components) ten or fifteen years ago, to pick one example. It was known that senescent cells were an issue, with a great deal of evidence to support that position. The same goes for glucosepane cross-link clearance. That could have been picked up by any part of Big Pharama a decade ago, had anyone bothered to follow the lines of research that pointed in that direction. And so on.
  - dahart 11y ago
    My mistake conflating DeGrey's arguments with Kurzweil's. I can't speak to what should have been researched and wasn't, but I know DeGrey has an uphill battle getting attention, for whatever reason. http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf
- jbdigriz 11y ago
  >Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death. This is absolutely incorrect, unless you are being exceedingly facetious about the scientific process. There have been some truly remarkable advancements that span the gamut from simple behavioral changes like reduced calorie intake to advances in knowledge of certain enzymes and other compounds that have yielded statistically significant results - published results of just these two examples have yielded up to 50% increase in longevity in various animals with the latter leading to accelerated FDA approvals for human trials. I think you're attempting to split hairs by quantifying two necessarily qualitative terms which really have a common understanding to be how long people live on average. And in doing so, you commit the same error you highlight: surely you're not suggesting that longevity decreased on average between 1920-2000? Even if you hold fast the true importance of lexical disambiguation, most would disagree on straw man grounds. Where I do somewhat agree or at least am very open to consider is that some other force is at play that we don't yet understand. The fairly recent theory of hormosis presents some profound philosophical arguments that cannot be ignored. Life as we know it may have evolved to live less than its full potential for reasons we have yet to discover - perhaps highly interdependent relationships between co-evolved cooporative cells can only resist entropy for so long. If this is the case, then this sort of predefined balance/order would mean gains are offset by newly emerging losses - an example would be the massive increase in cancer occurrence that has mirrored increases in life expectancy, moreso when this broad category of diseases is considered by its generic definition of "uncontrolled cellular growth". So there's certainly room for reasonable skepticism and it should shape our expectations accordingly. But that shouldn't mean the end of these pursuits nor the hope for what they could yield. And prudent scientific observation should at least suggest that greater longevity is possible. I recently read an interesting article about jellyfish and Hydra, which go through various developmental stages that actually come full circle and leading some to theorize that these somewhat basic life forms may actually be immortal. There's also tardigrades, which can live in the most extreme environments imaginable, including volcanic vents and even celestial bodies traveling through space! They've experimentally proven all our understanding of life wrong and that's only in the past few decades. Kurzweil is overly optimistic about these things because I suppose there's a degree of fear and insecurity there - he's likely predicting accelerated time lines because that's a narrative he can be part of and wants to believe that to be likely for obvious reasons. But I don't think he's wrong and fully admire anyone promoting a hopeful and tenacious outlook on life instead of the increasing opposite trend of disillusionment and cynicism - but that's an entirely different discussion.
coldtea 11y ago
>Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo. And who told you it's a given that we'll manage to have such an understanding?
- iMark 11y ago
  Who's "we"? Humanity, or whatever we create to succeed us?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Who said we'll create anything to succeed us? (I mean besides Kurzweil and his ilk)? I find much more probable that we'll wipe ourselves out in one way or another. We had some means to do so since the 40s, but since we added a lot more sick ways to our arsenal...
    - kamaal 11y ago
      >>Who said we'll create anything to succeed us? No body wakes up everyday to write unit test cases for Skynet 1.0 But people are working towards building robots that will replace a lot of human activity. It won't be sudden, it will be gradual, it will be so slow you won't have a way of stopping it. Opposition to any such thing will get you labelled as a luddite. At some point in time trains will run autonomously, followed by courier vans then may be cars, Amazon will decide buying a fleet of robots from boston dynamics yields better returns than hiring people to word at their warehouses. As algorithms get intelligent and sensors get better, march towards singularity is a question of when, not if. Your enemy is automation. Not Kurzweil. The slow march towards singularity didn't start two decades back. It started when the wheel was built and rudimentary stone tools were invented by hunter gatherers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
1812Overture 11y ago
>It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades. Until we have complete nuclear disarmament, this doesn't seem like a far fetched scenario.
snowwrestler 11y ago
> To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms. That's not what science does. Science is the process by which we learn about natural processes. It doesn't overcome anything. To invoke "Science" in this way is to treat it like a religion, like an all-powerful god. I mean, you even capitalized it. Kurzweil, De Gray, and many others do this too. Either they don't actually know what science is, or they are cynically feeding a misperception of what science is. Either way, it's bad. The process of using scientific knowledge to achieve human goals is generally known as engineering. And the heart of engineering is dealing with constraints. We have no idea, today, what constrains human life spans. Therefore we have no scientific reason to believe that we can ever use engineering to extend them significantly beyond what they are today. We do know that all lifeforms have a limited lifespan, and most animals' are shorter than humans. That's a big clue that the constraint might be something fundamental and not easily overcome.
- vram22 11y ago
  > capitalized it. Good point. A related point, which occurred to me a while ago after reading various reports of scientific discoveries vs. other reports of how some things have not been figured out yet, is that there seemed to be a tendency to mention scientists by name for individual discoveries, but for the non-discoveries, people tended to write something like: "[Ss]cience has not yet discovered $THING or explained $PHENOMENON".

dahart 11y ago

Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death. To be clear, I'm not saying it can't ever happen, I'm saying that DeGrey's and Kurzweils claims that it is happening and will come to pass in the next century are bogus.

reasonattlm 11y ago
De Grey is most certainly not arguing that it is happening, he is arguing that it can happen with sufficient investment in the right lines of research. A digest of his position is that the science is way ahead of the will and interest to develop that science into therapies. What he is doing, via advocacy, fundraising, and personally funding research with most of his net worth, is to move the needle on getting therapies towards the clinic. So things like the senescent cell clearance approaches presently under development at Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology could have been built (with greater cost and slightly different components) ten or fifteen years ago, to pick one example. It was known that senescent cells were an issue, with a great deal of evidence to support that position. The same goes for glucosepane cross-link clearance. That could have been picked up by any part of Big Pharama a decade ago, had anyone bothered to follow the lines of research that pointed in that direction. And so on.
- dahart 11y ago
  My mistake conflating DeGrey's arguments with Kurzweil's. I can't speak to what should have been researched and wasn't, but I know DeGrey has an uphill battle getting attention, for whatever reason. http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf
jbdigriz 11y ago
>Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death. This is absolutely incorrect, unless you are being exceedingly facetious about the scientific process. There have been some truly remarkable advancements that span the gamut from simple behavioral changes like reduced calorie intake to advances in knowledge of certain enzymes and other compounds that have yielded statistically significant results - published results of just these two examples have yielded up to 50% increase in longevity in various animals with the latter leading to accelerated FDA approvals for human trials. I think you're attempting to split hairs by quantifying two necessarily qualitative terms which really have a common understanding to be how long people live on average. And in doing so, you commit the same error you highlight: surely you're not suggesting that longevity decreased on average between 1920-2000? Even if you hold fast the true importance of lexical disambiguation, most would disagree on straw man grounds. Where I do somewhat agree or at least am very open to consider is that some other force is at play that we don't yet understand. The fairly recent theory of hormosis presents some profound philosophical arguments that cannot be ignored. Life as we know it may have evolved to live less than its full potential for reasons we have yet to discover - perhaps highly interdependent relationships between co-evolved cooporative cells can only resist entropy for so long. If this is the case, then this sort of predefined balance/order would mean gains are offset by newly emerging losses - an example would be the massive increase in cancer occurrence that has mirrored increases in life expectancy, moreso when this broad category of diseases is considered by its generic definition of "uncontrolled cellular growth". So there's certainly room for reasonable skepticism and it should shape our expectations accordingly. But that shouldn't mean the end of these pursuits nor the hope for what they could yield. And prudent scientific observation should at least suggest that greater longevity is possible. I recently read an interesting article about jellyfish and Hydra, which go through various developmental stages that actually come full circle and leading some to theorize that these somewhat basic life forms may actually be immortal. There's also tardigrades, which can live in the most extreme environments imaginable, including volcanic vents and even celestial bodies traveling through space! They've experimentally proven all our understanding of life wrong and that's only in the past few decades. Kurzweil is overly optimistic about these things because I suppose there's a degree of fear and insecurity there - he's likely predicting accelerated time lines because that's a narrative he can be part of and wants to believe that to be likely for obvious reasons. But I don't think he's wrong and fully admire anyone promoting a hopeful and tenacious outlook on life instead of the increasing opposite trend of disillusionment and cynicism - but that's an entirely different discussion.

coldtea 11y ago

>Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo. And who told you it's a given that we'll manage to have such an understanding?

iMark 11y ago
Who's "we"? Humanity, or whatever we create to succeed us?
- coldtea 11y ago
  Who said we'll create anything to succeed us? (I mean besides Kurzweil and his ilk)? I find much more probable that we'll wipe ourselves out in one way or another. We had some means to do so since the 40s, but since we added a lot more sick ways to our arsenal...
  - kamaal 11y ago
    >>Who said we'll create anything to succeed us? No body wakes up everyday to write unit test cases for Skynet 1.0 But people are working towards building robots that will replace a lot of human activity. It won't be sudden, it will be gradual, it will be so slow you won't have a way of stopping it. Opposition to any such thing will get you labelled as a luddite. At some point in time trains will run autonomously, followed by courier vans then may be cars, Amazon will decide buying a fleet of robots from boston dynamics yields better returns than hiring people to word at their warehouses. As algorithms get intelligent and sensors get better, march towards singularity is a question of when, not if. Your enemy is automation. Not Kurzweil. The slow march towards singularity didn't start two decades back. It started when the wheel was built and rudimentary stone tools were invented by hunter gatherers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

1812Overture 11y ago

>It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades. Until we have complete nuclear disarmament, this doesn't seem like a far fetched scenario.

snowwrestler 11y ago

> To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms. That's not what science does. Science is the process by which we learn about natural processes. It doesn't overcome anything. To invoke "Science" in this way is to treat it like a religion, like an all-powerful god. I mean, you even capitalized it. Kurzweil, De Gray, and many others do this too. Either they don't actually know what science is, or they are cynically feeding a misperception of what science is. Either way, it's bad. The process of using scientific knowledge to achieve human goals is generally known as engineering. And the heart of engineering is dealing with constraints. We have no idea, today, what constrains human life spans. Therefore we have no scientific reason to believe that we can ever use engineering to extend them significantly beyond what they are today. We do know that all lifeforms have a limited lifespan, and most animals' are shorter than humans. That's a big clue that the constraint might be something fundamental and not easily overcome.

vram22 11y ago
> capitalized it. Good point. A related point, which occurred to me a while ago after reading various reports of scientific discoveries vs. other reports of how some things have not been figured out yet, is that there seemed to be a tendency to mention scientists by name for individual discoveries, but for the non-discoveries, people tended to write something like: "[Ss]cience has not yet discovered $THING or explained $PHENOMENON".