Thread by @fedichev

You might have noticed that I often ask for likes and reposts on my tweets, referring to the struggle between kind and wicked memes in our longevity community. In the field of anti-aging medicine, there are at least three particularly detrimental narratives:

* Aging is solved: "Aging has been defeated = slowed down and reversed in labs; just a bit more time and money, may be 5 more companies funded against every hallmark of aging, and we're all set for eternal youth."

* Age is Just a Number: “Aging is overrated. Just follow a healthy lifestyle, measure 1000s parameters, meticulously manage every one of them with diets, supplements, exercise, existing and upcoming medicines. Death is optional."

* Aging is intractable without AGI/ASI: "Nothing works; aging is too complex, with no significant breakthroughs for decades. Let's just repent (crossed) and wait for Artificial General Intelligence to arrive and sort everything out"

All these narratives exist simultaneously to the utter confusion of the public. Other than being funny, each of them in its own way suggests that nothing needs to be done (👇see the next message and the important announcement down the thread👇)

🚀No action is required, since:🚀

Problem is solved: “Enough companies have been created, the problem is essentially solved—no need for further action, neither research or investments, as you can't achieve much more or make substantial money: antioxidants, telomere activators, senolytics, and, this time for real – epigenetic rejuvenation have all supposedly reached clinical trials. Gene therapies against aging are already available on exotic islands, soon at your local pharmacy."

There is no problem: "Aging is just a poor choice by the uninformed. No need to research or develop anything—everything is already available or soon will be available by means of exponential growth of technologies around. We only need to supplement ourselves to reach LEV.”

There is no sense to do anything : "No need to act, study aging, or develop drugs any further: the industry is inefficient, the human brain is imperfect, humanity is powerless, let's just wait for the second coming (crossed out) arrival of AGI/ASI/singularity. Shut up and train LLM and/or earn money, since infinite life will not be cheap.”

Something is not right here (👇see the next message in the thread👇).

From the inside, the situation is way “more interesting”

Aging is solved?: If you're a mouse, we might delay your death, but not for long, even with combinations of all we know. Companies targeting single aging hallmarks pivot to drug discovery against specific diseases. As you may know, curing any of them, such as cancer even, would offer at best a few years of life extension. Many such treatments end up being less effective than drugs directly developed for these diseases.
The level of ambition in our field may be judged by the rules of X-prize in longevity offering $100M for extending life by than 10 years amidst a natural lifespan variability of 10–15 years.
There is literally nothing approaching clinical trials that may change human maximum lifespan.

* Age is Just a Number?: aging trajectory optimization by precise measurements and high-quality medicine blending with sport medicine may yield lifespan improvement. It’s not like I am against that, but there is literally nothing approaching clinical trials that may change human maximum lifespan.

* Aging is intractable without AGI/ASI? The deep learning revolution with image and video processing occurred when the cost of producing an image dropped to zero thanks to digital cameras. Biological experiments aren't cheap; creating large datasets requires billion-dollar investments. For modern machine learning, to train the models head-on, we need datasets with far more samples than measurements—just in methylation or genetics, that's about 1M measurements per person/tissue/cell at a few hundred dollars at least per sample.

Optimistically, sufficient data volumes might be available in 5-10 years. We must explore a significant portion of the human population to build large models (there are countries setting up such goals).

On top of that, we do not know when AGI is going to get ready (But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father, (c)). And second, longevity research and development is already competing for resources and investment with AGI initiatives. The priorities for problem-solving by AGI will be determined by AGI in an economy already dominated by AGI. Who knows if we would have enough safeguards in these systems to ensure they prioritize aging concerns as seriously as we do (we did not manage to prioritize such work now with human-run funding agencies, why do you think AGI would care more or get training data to care more?)

Of note, drug discovery is a long journey. The ideas we may have now will require another 5–10 to end up in drug stores (closer to 5 years if we think about hospitals on remote islands, closer to 10 years for widespread adoption with current regulatory environment).

If we aim to conquer aging within our lifetime, or better 10 years, we must care a lot more to which reality we think we inhabit. Yes, it’s true that many things that extend life in animals have been already tried in humans. Isn’t now a good time to recap and find out where are we on the roadmap to extinguishing aging?

Can we progress without agreement on what is aging? Is aging comprehendible? What are the limits and bottlenecks in developing biotechnology to combat aging? Can we transform humans into a non-aging species?

I will be exploring these questions and more with Aubrey de Grey on May 27th in San Francisco. Join our discussion online or in person at the Foresight Institute .youtube.com/live/g7UwkfoLO…