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Comment by biofox | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more about funding SENS related research.

I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit).

The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined.

Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything.

I don't understand why AI safety gets more attention. We're already facing our own personal dissolution from natural causes -- a real and tangible existential threat which is already claiming people in the most torturous ways possible. To be brutally honest, I'd rather die quickly in an AI takeover than suffer decades of chronic pain and dementia... and one of these scenarios seems a lot more likely than the other.

Let's get real, take responsibility, and do something about ageing.

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I don't think this point gets mentioned enough: since physical degeneration due to aging is such a big risk factor for so many diseases, anything we can do to reverse that degeneration could end up being hugely effective at preventing some of the diseases of old age. And there's a surprising lack of investment in this, probably because discussions tend to get bogged down in lengthy, heated philosophical digressions about how long people should want to live.

If you're looking for medical miracles, this is a very plausible place to find them.

Reducing existential risk is not about minimizing the amount of suffering in our own lives. It's about making the lives of our potential trillions of descendants possible.

There's no reason to care about "potential trillions of descendants" who don't exist, nor is there any reason to maximize the amount of humans in the universe, etc.

The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term future. Given the incredible prior improbability of intergalactic utopias, there's basically no reason to take the thought-experiment at its word or to value a particularly improbable imagined far-future over the actually-existing present and very likely near-futures.

The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist...

Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.

I was under the impression it came from Nick Bostrom. And other than some assumption or some Bostromian thought-experiment, where in the world did the phrase "trillions of descendants" even come from?

> I don't understand why AI safety gets more attention.

Solving AI would allow us to fix ageing, but only if we get it right. Please watch Bostrom’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our...

AI is not a question with an answer, and so will never be solved.

AI safety is not relevant to exploiting technology to ameliorate senescence.

Absent immediate focussed direct efforts in ameliorating senescence, by the time there is a level of AI technology which can make a dent in medical progress, at least a billion, probably many billion, people will have suffered and died who might otherwise have avoided that fate. And the loss of their productivity will impoverish the survivors - and so cause AI progress to suffer.

There are new companies working on applying AI to epigenetic data to extend human lifespan including this one "On a global basis and in aggregate, wet lab experiments in human biology produce one of the most important forms of data known to mankind, especially when it relates to epigenetics, genes, proteins, genomic pathways and environmental factors that can improve human health and extend human lifespan. We are a start-up with a focus on Life Sciences in the area of advanced artificial intelligence analytics connected to extending human healthspan and extending human lifespan." http://45.55.135.97/index-life.html

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