Ending Aging
I just got my copy of Ending Aging in the mail and I am thrilled. I have read pretty much everything de Grey has written on life extension on his web page and I have skimmed his book and I now realize that he is easy to refute.
Basically, all of the technical details that de Grey goes into in his book are a big obfuscation. His SENS ideology (according to him) will only give us an extra 20 years or so which isn't crazy. After all, we already got 40 years of added life expectancy over the last 150 years. Another 20 isn't unreasonable. Indeed, many of de Grey's opponents in the gerontology community have said that another 7 years might be possible, so 20 years isn't out of bounds.
The reason people are opposed to de Grey is because he believes that we will live another 1000 years, not just 20, and his basis for believing in this can be summed up in one single sentence on page 328:
"This stark contrast between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs is, I would contend, typical of the history of technological fields."
(To put this line in context, read his essay here.)
A HA!!! Wrong!!! Most technologies flop as shown by the 98% of patents that never make any money, or the 99% of drugs that never go to market. The example of flight that de Grey uses proves my point, not his. He says that the Concorde is an example of a successful technological acceleration when it is actually an example of a technological flop that never overcame the problem of noise pollution.
Even though I am a physical scientist, I have been spending a lot of time reading de Grey instead of, say, Drexler. I think the reason is that I consider Drexler (and Kurzweil) to be small potatoes compared to de Grey. De Grey has real scientific arguments and isn't saying frothing-at-the-mouth nonsense like Kurzweil is about the entire Universe being turned into a giant computer. That is why I am so thrilled that I don't actual have to address any of his scientific arguments to refute his immortalist claims.
Thanks Aubrey for making my job a lot easier!
Basically, all of the technical details that de Grey goes into in his book are a big obfuscation. His SENS ideology (according to him) will only give us an extra 20 years or so which isn't crazy. After all, we already got 40 years of added life expectancy over the last 150 years. Another 20 isn't unreasonable. Indeed, many of de Grey's opponents in the gerontology community have said that another 7 years might be possible, so 20 years isn't out of bounds.
The reason people are opposed to de Grey is because he believes that we will live another 1000 years, not just 20, and his basis for believing in this can be summed up in one single sentence on page 328:
"This stark contrast between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs is, I would contend, typical of the history of technological fields."
(To put this line in context, read his essay here.)
A HA!!! Wrong!!! Most technologies flop as shown by the 98% of patents that never make any money, or the 99% of drugs that never go to market. The example of flight that de Grey uses proves my point, not his. He says that the Concorde is an example of a successful technological acceleration when it is actually an example of a technological flop that never overcame the problem of noise pollution.
Even though I am a physical scientist, I have been spending a lot of time reading de Grey instead of, say, Drexler. I think the reason is that I consider Drexler (and Kurzweil) to be small potatoes compared to de Grey. De Grey has real scientific arguments and isn't saying frothing-at-the-mouth nonsense like Kurzweil is about the entire Universe being turned into a giant computer. That is why I am so thrilled that I don't actual have to address any of his scientific arguments to refute his immortalist claims.
Thanks Aubrey for making my job a lot easier!
Drexler is frothing at the mouth?
By the way, your arguments make no sense. Even if only 2% of efforts to develop anti-aging therapies actually succeed, given enough time and money human lifespan will be indefinitely extended, just like cancer will eventually be cured.
If something is considered a big enough deal in medicine, then the scientific community gets it done. Happened for the elimination of smallpox and many other contagious diseases. There is tremendous economic incentives to develop progressively more powerful aging cures. The lifespan of mice has already been extended significantly, and will continue to be lengthened until efforts towards mouse rejuvenation are achieved. This will convince the public that powerful life extension is possible, which will make success in humans only a matter of time.
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"If something is considered a big enough deal in medicine, then the scientific community gets it done."
Good lord Michael, do you have the SLIGHTEST idea how the "scientific community" actually functions? I hate to break it to you but it's not actually an organization with a headquarters.
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I think the 1st poster has a point. While plenty of the efforts to achieve youth extension may fail, this is not surprising, all it would take is for 1 to work. A paradigm that imitates evolutionary forces in that there is massive failure, but the one drug that does the task is selected.
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Chris: Michael is surely a sufficiently bright young lad to be at least somewhat knowledgable about "how science works. W/o getting into the whole quaking methodology discussion (suffice it to say that, if I had to label or categorize my own stance, call me a Bayesian Lakatosian, but I digress), suffice it to say that a vision of the in-principle scientifically/technologically *possible* (a meta-paradigm, if you will) is what serves as a (arguably *the*) background *driver* which "fuels" scientific & techno-engineering R&D. Which is to say that only something that is broadly *conceivable* will even be researched in the first place. So surely it is one of the "job functions" of scientists, engineers, and technologists to constantly be inquiring and *re*-inquiring into "the limits of the possible", to deploy the lamentably-late Arthur C. Clarke's phrase, and also to engage in a dynamic reciprocal feedback loop in this regard with the general public (of course said "public" should ideally be at least minimally well-educated in physical science(s), which, nowadays, of course, and for some time now, tends not to be the case [don't get started...
In any event, and as the late great bio-gerontologist Bernard Strehler himself fully conceded, the on-going concatenation of decay/decline/malfunction which is "aging" or senescence CAN in principle be controlled. We just need to fund an R&D project with that in mind. But some of us have been painfully aware of that for several *decades* now...
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Btw: Surely it's *ridiculous* to claim the Drexler's *Nano-Systems* is mere "mouth froth"...
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What I don't see much in transhumanist skeptics' or advocators' arguments is discussion on economic forces. Scalability is a massive factor as to how viable a technology is. It's one thing to produce something in a lab. But if it isn't easy/cheap to modify current production facilities to create this new technology, it makes it that much harder for this technology to be realized at a consumer level. Competing technologies may succeed or fail depending on a combination of this adaptibility and marketing schemes. In this way we are limited by existing technologies. We need a second generation industrial revolution to reduce the cost of implementing new technologies that require non-existing production processes. When this elasticity is acheived, it will be easier to mass produce technologies based more on their efficiency/benefit, leading to faster developing technologies. Production-level AI may be a solution to acheive this elasticity.
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