[extropy-chat] singularity conference at stanford

[Martin Striz]

On 5/15/06, Metavalent Stigmergy <metavalent at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/15/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > > I don't quite follow your comment, Russell.  If you are saying that
> > > increasingly impressive life extension is a fantasy, or that the
> >
> > Where do you see an impressive life extension, in people?
> > What we see is that CR appears to work, and that someday
> > (not necessarily this decade) there might be a drug to
> > mimick the effects of CR with tolerable side effects.
> > Might. We don't know for sure yet.
>
> CR works well in mice and humans are very close genetic cousins.  That
> said, you are right that it's still an unknown.  I try not to rely too
> much upon such things in my own forecasting; although they certainly
> do influence thinking.

The problem, again, is the scale up.  CR can increase the life span of
nematode worms by 300%, from one to three weeks, and mice by 50%, from
two to three years.  Suppose that it increases the life span of dogs
from 10 to 11 years, and so on up, so that the most you can extract
from it is one or two years, even for human life spans.  The longer
you live, the more oppoturnity for other kinds of damage to accrue.
That's de Grey's criticism anyway.

We'll get a better understanding of the potential of CR when we get
the data for dogs.  If you can get a breed with a mean life expectancy
of 12 years to live 18 or 20, then I'd say you have something.

> I don't recall which speaker showed the slide, but it was along the
> lines that in 1900 the average life expectancy was something like 48
> years and in 2000, closer to 78.  Other sources vary from 45 in 1900
> to 73 in 2000.  I interpret anything even close to that range as a
> well established trajectory of impressive life extension.

A trajectory approaching a natural asymptote created by genetics...

> Personally, I think that
> we witnessed some fairly well-educated people making some fairly
> well-educated guesses.

Nick Bostrom gave the best answer.

Martin