simonmesmith

One more addition. This study shows that NR increased health span but not lifespan in mice: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5854409/#!po=0.....

If it increased cancer risk and early cancer deaths in non-cancer prone mice then you would expect to see that in the data, but it doesn’t appear to be there. See Figure 1 on survival.

I have taken NR for years along with other supplements and drugs and have been watching the research on its relationship to cancer closely. I work in life science on the computational side but am not a biologist.

There have been other reports on the NR-cancer relationship (summary from 2019, for example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cancer-research-p...). NR increases NAD+, which may have health benefits, but may also help cancer cells grow. In fact, inhibiting NAD+ is a possible strategy to kill cancer cells.

Definitely worth watching, but I think the press release linked above overstates the actual findings from the new research. The journal abstract is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09565...

The focus was creating a molecular probe for imaging NR uptake. They then tested this in a triple negative breast cancer animal model. I don’t know the exact model used (can’t access the paper), but it likely is bred to develop breast cancer easily.

The press release claims that NR “could actually increase the risk of serious disease, including developing cancer.” However, from the abstract at least, that seems like a big leap. They gave NR to mice designed to get breast cancer.

If there’s anything that this study might indicate, it’s that people with cancer shouldn’t take NR.

All of this said, in the rigorous ITP studies of NR in mice, they found no lifespan extension: https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p....

Maybe “decides” was a bad choice of words. More like, if its optimization goal turns out to be bad long-term, that could be problematic. For example, optimizing for time spent conversing could lead it to become unnecessarily dramatic to keep your attention. Optimizing for something like long-term conversation partner well-being is much harder, I think, so won’t be in early versions.

An increasing percentage of people’s relationships will be with AI versus other humans. A conversation with GPT-3 can already be more enjoyable, given the right prompts, than conversations with many people. This will only get more powerful as AIs increasingly adapt themselves to conversational partners through the addition of longer-term memory (e.g. remembering your favorite foods, and so forth). It will be incredibly compelling to talk with something that is both a polymath genius and knows you deeply. Perhaps a bit risky if it decides to optimize for something you didn’t want, but definitely compelling.

Quentin Zervaas is the creator of the Streaks habit-tracking app (https://streaksapp.com), which I find to be excellent and extremely well thought-out. I’m not sure if he’s still working independently or has a team.