It Will Happen In My Lifetime...Or Will It?

In pretty much all walks of life, humans are prone to making their theories and ideas conform to their own personal hopes and dreams.  This especially applies to futurists!  When building a theory that we want to believe in, we tend to focus on the evidence that supports our theory, while ignoring or even discrediting the evidence that contradicts that theory.  Kurzweil conveniently believes that great strides in human advancement – human level artificial intelligence, nanobots in our bodies, even immortality – will arrive just before the end of his lifetime.  Is Kurzweil falling prey to the human tendency to meld theory with his own personal desires, or is he simply looking at the facts?  I hope for all of us that Kurzweil is right, but in the meantime, why not enjoy the following comic from SMBC comics that reminds us all to take futurists’ predictions with a healthy dose of salt:

Will scientific advancements in treating aging let our children eventually live forever?

If living forever isn’t enough motivation to get scientists to study longevity, maybe $3.8 million will work instead. That’s the current size of the Mprize, a special fund put forth by the Methuselah Foundation that seeks to encourage research into extending healthy human life. The prize is awarded to those scientists who can increase the lifespan of lab mice in the hopes that work performed on that species can be readily applied to humans. Can we live longer? Do we even want to? When will the average human life expectancy start to increase by more than a year each year? The Methuselah Foundation’s answers are yes, yes, and much sooner than you might think. Check out Aubrey De Grey’s discussion of longevity at TED 2005 in the video after the break. He’s very enthusiastic to say the least.

The history of offering a cash prize to help motivate research has a long and successful history. Mariners were finally able to determine their longitude at sea thanks to the aptly named Longitude Prize offered by the British government. Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight was in direct response to the Orteig prize. The modern day Xprize is inspiring new achievements in genomics, space flight, lunar exploration, and transportation efficiency. With the Mprize, the Methuselah Foundation may very well bring about a surge in the interest in increasing human lifespans within the next generation. As Aubrey De Grey points out, once human lifespans start increasing by an appreciable amount, further medical developments will occur during that lifespan increasing it even farther. We could eventually reach a sort of lifespan escape velocity and reach immortality. De Grey has since coined the concept as the Methuselarity. Catchy, huh?


The Prize That Keeps On Giving

The Mprize is divided into two awards for those researchers who can increase the lifespan of mice. A Longevity prize is offered to the producer of a mouse that beats the current lifespan record. The mouse has to be healthy, and the size of the prize is in proportion to the amount by which you beat the old record. The Rejuvenation prize seeks to improve the life of mice already in middle age. This encourages research into life extension that could be applied to humans already living. The current winners are (Longevity) Andrzej Bartke who used a genetic treatment to get a mouse to live for 1819 days, and (Rejuvenation) Steve Spindler who used caloric restriction started at 19 months to get 6 mice to live an average of 1356 days. Most of the mice used in these tests would normally live for about 3 years (~1100 days) in a lab environment.

Caloric Restriction should sound familiar. Resveratrol, the substance found in red wine that we discussed previously is hoped to function as a substitute for CR. In fact, one of the early researchers into resveratrol, David Sinclair, is a current competitor for the Mprize.

Which brings up an important and wonderful aspect of the structure of the Mprize: it keeps giving. Each award is proportional to the level of success and the size of the fund. Every time a prize is awarded, only part of the fund is consumed. Donations bring the fund back up over time. This encourages further research into the field. While a single researcher could discover a miraculous cure for aging, no single researcher will ever ‘break the bank’ of the fund. It’s a cool idea, shared by other such prizes, and if you’d like to donate to the fund, you can do so on the Methuselah Foundation website.

Of course, another way that the Mprize keeps giving is based on a large, but likely true, assumption: increases in lifespan will continue at a somewhat regular pace due to continuing research in the field. For the past 20 decades or so, the average human life expectancy has increased by an average rate of about 1-2 years per decade. There’s some significant cultural and regional variation, but as a rule, 1 year per decade seems to work out. That means, and this is a gross simplification, that if you manage to extend someone’s life by 10 years, you are actually extending it for 11 or 12 because of the increased opportunities they will have for better healthcare. The Methuselah Foundation, Mprize, and other longevity research in general is aimed at slowly bringing up that rate of increase in life expectancy. The hope is that eventually, lifespan increases will start to work something like compound interest. Growth leads to further growth.

While Aubrey De Grey highlights what he believes are the seven major causes of aging, the solutions may be much more numerous. There are more than a dozen major competitors for the Mprize, and you can review their approaches to the problem of aging on the Methuselah Foundation website.

MPrize competitors can also teach us about the benefits of simply living a healthy lifestyle. Rules for the competition were altered slightly after Sandy Keith won the award by helping the mouse Charlie live for 1551 simply through good animal husbandry. Just taking good care of a mouse isn’t a ‘treatment’ and so it no longer qualifies for the Mprize but it does have parallels in humans. Look at those people who live long healthy lives in the Blue Zones, or extraordinary individuals like Gertrude Baines who lived to 115 without any longevity treatments. Some level of life extension can be achieved by healthy living and heaping doses of luck.

Whether or not the Methuselah Foundation is helping humans reach immortality, it has already furthered research into some level of life extension. Whether or not you agree with Aubrey de Grey’s predictions, he does raise some interesting questions. He also dresses like some sort of longevity seeking wizard…which you have to admit is kind of cool. The quest to live healthier for longer is bound to continue and while I’m not sure if the first immortal will be born in my lifetime, I do think our grandchildren will live longer than our grandparents would have believed possible. 100..150…200 years? It might be possible if scientists keep their eyes on the prize.
[photo credit: Reuters]
[video credit: TED 2005]

Is Ray Kurzweil a visionary...or a man desparate for computer-based immortality?

For those of you just joining the debate, let me say that it centers around two key issues: how fast the technology of intelligence (computers, biotechnology, etc) is growing, and whether or not Ray Kurzweil is a nut. A large part of Lyons’ Newsweek article, and Kurzweil’s response, focused on whether or not Kurzweil’s earlier predictions about technology were accurate. Lyons posits that most of Kurzweil’s predictions were easily forseeable (like the success of the Internet) or wrong. Kurzweil defends the originality of his insights and their accuracy.

These predictions, from Kurzweil’s books and speeches, ranged from the Internet to the Human Genome project. In the mid to late 80s, Kurzweil predicted that the Internet would grow exponentially and enjoy widespread use. Lyons says this was an easy prediction. Kurzweil also predicted, a decade later, that most computers used wouldn’t have keyboards, and would be part of someone’s apparel. Lyons claims this hasn’t happened, while Kurzweil points to iPhones, mp3 players, and computerized hearing aids. Kurzweil predicted the success of the Human Genome project in 15 years (predicting exponential growth in the rate of return). Lyons concedes that prediction but points to Kurzweil’s belief that the economy would keep growing between 1999 and 2009. The list goes on and on.

Figuring out who’s right isn’t easy. What kind of metric do we apply to futurists? How often do they have to be right, and how right do they have to be? If Kurzweil was wrong about everything else, but is correct in predicting that artificial intelligence will be indistinguishable from human intelligence in 20 years, that alone would make him a visionary. In the end, it’s up to each reader to evaluate the predictions Kurzweil made and decide whether they collectively prove he’s a technological seer, or just another dreamer.

One area in which Kurzweil certainly won is his preparedness. While Lyons might have you think that Kurzweil is a pie-eyed optimist, too certain in his beliefs to even consider other possibilities, the truth is far from it. As was evident in the panel-discussion after the Transcendent Man premier, Kurzweil is actively working on projects designed to prevent some of the worst case scenarios new technologies present. He is part of the national security team working on bio-terrorism response in the United States. His books warn against technological perils as well as predicting benefits. Whether or not he is wrong about the Singularity, Kurzweil is preparing for all outcomes.

If Lyons had just focused on Kurzweil’s predictions and left it at that, I may not be writing my own article. However, Lyons brings up several sensationalist themes prominent in the movie about Kurzweil’s life, Transcendent Man. As Singularity Hub mentioned before, Kurzweil wants to live forever, and takes a wide-range of dietary supplements to keep him going. Eventually he wants to download, or upgrade himself, into an immortal intelligence (most likely in the form of a computer). Using a similar process, Kurzweil wants to reanimate the intelligence of his dead father, remaking him from data collected in journal’s and Ray’s own memories. He proposes that the rest of us could do the same for ourselves and our loved ones.

It’s a story ripe for pity, horror, or disdain depending on your outlook. Lyons explores all three emotions. Even when attacking Kurzweil’s predictions on their own merit, Lyons is constantly returning to the futurist’s motivations. The optimism Kurzweil feels is really just a fear of death. His predictions are really just hopes to bring back his dead daddy. His continuous speaking tour around the world is just a public display of a mid-life crisis. Am I the only one who finds the focus on these suppositions offensive to my intelligence?

Maybe I’m just tired of someone’s “story” getting more press coverage than their work. You notice it most during the Olympics, but it’s pretty ubiquitous in the media as a whole. No matter who is discussed — politician, scientist, or athlete — the story of their life, the motivations for their actions, are taking up more of the discussion than the actual meaning of the actions themselves. We’re big on narrative but short on analysis, and that’s just silly.

I can’t speak much for politicians or athletes, but I know scientists. Sir Isaac Newton was into alchemy. Einstein wrote his miraculous 1905 papers while slaving away in a dead-end job. Many top scientists have been racists, sexists, drug-addicts, or just general pricks. Many have also been loving, caring men and women who’ve overcome great obstacles in life. Great. I’m enough of a post-modernist to understand that someone’s character and work are not two separate entities, but intertwining states that support one another. Still, I’m tired of being sold the story of someone’s life, when it’s their work that will impact mine.

Ray Kurzweil may be a nut, he may be going through the biggest mid-life crisis ever. I don’t know. I honestly don’t care much. I want to evaluate his predictions, and his actions, on their own merit. It would be nice if the major media outlets focused on the same.

Will we have AI that passes the Turing test in 20 years? Is the Singularity a pipe-dream or an upcoming reality? Can the average person affect the outcome (through voting, buying, or protesting)? These questions need answers, or at least, discussion. As interesting as Kurzweil may be, it’s the what, when, and how, not the who or why, that I’m dying to know about. If Newsweek really wants to focus on whether or not someone wants to become a robot, they should interview seven years olds outside the Transformer’s movie premier. For compelling science articles, I want something that’s more than meets the eye.

At a whopping 20 pages, you really have to be interested in transhumanism to sludge through this article.  For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here is my take on a short summary:

With an ample supply of wealthy people equipped with strong technical backgrounds and an open mind to new ideas, the transhumanist movement has naturally found its home in Silicon Valley.  Recent advances in technology have taken transhumanist ideas such as radical life extension, immortality, brain uploading and copying, and biological or machine based body enhancement from the realm of crazy to the realm of possible.

Large numbers of smart, successful silicon valley players are joining a transhumanist movement that holds both great promise and great peril for mankind.  Some see transhumanists as forward thinkers at the forefront of change, while others see them as borderline religious fanatics attached to ideas that are dangerous and/or ridiculous.

Major players in the movement are mentioned, including:

Peter Thiel – co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, multi-million dollar donor to transhumanist causes

Robert Ettinger – “The Father of Cryonics”, founder of the Cryonics Institute, Author of famous Immortality Books

Aubrey De Grey – Founder of Methuselah Foundation, pioneer in the science of fighting aging

Ralph Merkle – pioneer in cryptography, researcher and speaker on nanotechnology and cryonics

James Clement – Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association

Organizations are covered, including the World Transhumanist Association, Alcor Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Extropy Institute, Methuselah Foundation, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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