When we are brought into this world, we discover as we grow older that two things are inevitable: change and death. But what if we took something out of that equation? If we could remove growing older and substitute indefinite youth, what impacts would that have on our equation? While we know that change will never end, progress in the several converging sciences may allow us to live indefinitely in the future, at least Aubrey de Grey thinks so.
De Grey is Chief Science Officer at the SENS, or Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence Foundation, located in California. He has been featured on several shows including 60 Minutes, The Colbert Report, TIME, and websites like TED and BigThink.com, where they feature a series on the future of aging that I highly recommend checking out.
De Grey posits that there are seven major types of damage caused by aging that eventually lead to death. Among those types include cancer-causing mutations, cellular loss, cellular age, and intracellular/extracellular aggregates. He believes that many of the therapies necessary to remedy these items, and thus end death by senescence, have already been discovered and simply need to be employed. But is he right?
In 2005, MIT's Technology Review put de Grey and the SENS foundation's claims under the microscope to determine it's legitimacy. The result? A competition was created that challenged teams to prove SENS "so wrong it is unworthy of learned debate" for a $20,000 prize. Of the 5 submissions, no team was able to convince the judging staff comprised of experts chosen by Technology Review that SENS was not worthy of at least such debate. However, the overwhelming answer from much of the scientific community, including several biogerontologists, was that the claims of the foundation were simply "overoptimistic" and would require many more years of hard work to produce anything fruitful.
So yes, a blow to de Grey's claims, but not a death blow by any means. An important aspect of de Grey's postulation is that these increases will be largely incremental, steps at a time, extending the age of humans perhaps 10 to 20 years. In that time, another therapy would be developed that could extend the life of those individuals another 10 years, and so on. Just a few months ago Harvard scientists were able to largely reverse signs of aging in mice, a huge discovery that could be applied to humanity sometime in the future.
But something that I feel many experts fail to take into account is how fast we are progressing in the several fields of technology and how those discoveries can be cross-applied. Ray Kurzweil, whom I mentioned in my post last week, feels there will be a convergence of several technologies (biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc.) that will result in dramatic life extension. In a video interview with expert-driven site BigThink.com, Kurzweil discusses how the convergence of these technologies will allow for microscopic robots to be able to alter our genes, ending aging and disease, and continuously keeping our bodies optimized. A big claim, but nonetheless plausible.
Regardless of how we may extend the length of our lives, there are many social, ethical, and political implications surrounding the issue that may prevent much of the work necessary to make these technologies possible. The same problems that we face in the present will become even more of an issue provided that these technologies were implemented, the most important and relevant being overpopulation. Indefinite life would lose it's value if the world were ravaged by war and famine caused by our dwindling resources.
Fortunately, technological progress stands to create a sustainable future in which all individuals can experience the fruits of the labor of humanity. Drastic life extension has already occurred in our species' past and the average lifespan of the individual is in some cases three fold what it was just a hundred years ago. We are still feeling the effects of this extension economically, socially, and politically but these effects are not anything that we cannot handle. We just have to accept that ideals of the past are not always what is necessary to provide for the future, and as our progress grows faster and faster, so does the inevitably of our reality: change.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
The Law of Accelerating Returns - A foundation for our future
We have all seen the world change around us. Just take a closer look. In a little under 20 years, the internet, what could possibly be the greatest creation of all mankind, has found it's way from DARPA, academia, and corporations all the way into our home computers, laptops, and now to our mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. The information revolution has begun and we can safely say it is here to stay with profound implications for humankind.
We have created a "always-on," global community in which the world's knowledge can be shared in real-time and information retrieval has become as easy as a Google search.
Our generations are witnessing a point in human technological time which has people like Ray Kurzweil and myself very excited. Kurzweil, a famed inventor, author, and futurist, has worked within the modern computing world for almost as long as it's inception. He has received numerous backings from the likes of several esteemed persons, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, and is now experiencing mainstream attention in the form of a TIME magazine cover, a documentary on mainstream film festivals soon to be released, and interviews with several online sources like BigThink.com about his ideas concerning the future of mankind. All of his ideals draw from what Kurzweil has named, The Law of Accelerating Returns.
This law, which Kurzweil outlines in depth in his 2005 book, "The Singularity is Near," is an extension of the more familiar Moore's Law, which states that computing power on a given chip doubles roughly every 18 months. Up to this point in time, Moore's Law has held true since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's explicit statement in 1965. Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns takes it even further, identifying an exponential trend in the growth of technological progress over time. So not only is technological progress increasing, but the rate at which the progress occurs is also increasing. When a threshold is reached, a "paradigm shift" occurs in which a new technology is created to surpass that threshold and the law continues.
Now, back to the status quo. We are experiencing the rapid onset of technological progress like never seen before in human history, and that progress will continue to increase well into our lifetime at a faster and faster rate. This will bring an unprecedented amount of technological change that will eventually fundamentally transform everything about or lives, from how we live to how long we will live. Kurzweil posits that this progress will culminate in what is called a singularity, a point in time which changes our reality so much that it becomes infinitely more difficult to predict. For us, that may be the development of artificial intelligence far beyond our own that continues to improve upon its nature with its exponentially increasing efficiency and intelligence. Or perhaps it is the augmentation of our own intelligence utilizing nanotechnology or genetic manipulation, that creates a vastly superior problem-solving ability for the human race. Whatever the case may be, it is coming.
While the date is placed anywhere from 50 to 100 years from now depending on the source, the singularity will represent a momentous jump in our evolution. For some, it is the "passing of the torch" so to speak from the past into the far, far future. A preparation for humankind for all of the challenges that the universe places against our survival and a ticket for our civilization to proliferate among the stars. For others, it is something to be avoided. A future that will bring dystopia and destruction to the human race.
I take the more optimistic view personally. I believe that we can utilize our technology for the greater human race. We can solve so many problems previously thought to be outside of the realm of our understanding, and create a sustainable future in which all humankind contributes parts to the greater collective whole. However, we must get there first.
We need to make a push for a new age of scientific learning to solve those problems. The next 20 years may be the most crucial in determining our distant future as we face some of the greatest challenges against us. Overpopulation, radicalism, and war will ravage this planet only if we allow it. Instead, let's take a more educated, reasonable path and use the amazing things we have created to sustain life on this planet. After all, as far as we know, we are the only manifestation of life in our cosmic neighborhood which makes our existence even more precious.
We have created a "always-on," global community in which the world's knowledge can be shared in real-time and information retrieval has become as easy as a Google search.
Our generations are witnessing a point in human technological time which has people like Ray Kurzweil and myself very excited. Kurzweil, a famed inventor, author, and futurist, has worked within the modern computing world for almost as long as it's inception. He has received numerous backings from the likes of several esteemed persons, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, and is now experiencing mainstream attention in the form of a TIME magazine cover, a documentary on mainstream film festivals soon to be released, and interviews with several online sources like BigThink.com about his ideas concerning the future of mankind. All of his ideals draw from what Kurzweil has named, The Law of Accelerating Returns.
This law, which Kurzweil outlines in depth in his 2005 book, "The Singularity is Near," is an extension of the more familiar Moore's Law, which states that computing power on a given chip doubles roughly every 18 months. Up to this point in time, Moore's Law has held true since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's explicit statement in 1965. Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns takes it even further, identifying an exponential trend in the growth of technological progress over time. So not only is technological progress increasing, but the rate at which the progress occurs is also increasing. When a threshold is reached, a "paradigm shift" occurs in which a new technology is created to surpass that threshold and the law continues.
Now, back to the status quo. We are experiencing the rapid onset of technological progress like never seen before in human history, and that progress will continue to increase well into our lifetime at a faster and faster rate. This will bring an unprecedented amount of technological change that will eventually fundamentally transform everything about or lives, from how we live to how long we will live. Kurzweil posits that this progress will culminate in what is called a singularity, a point in time which changes our reality so much that it becomes infinitely more difficult to predict. For us, that may be the development of artificial intelligence far beyond our own that continues to improve upon its nature with its exponentially increasing efficiency and intelligence. Or perhaps it is the augmentation of our own intelligence utilizing nanotechnology or genetic manipulation, that creates a vastly superior problem-solving ability for the human race. Whatever the case may be, it is coming.
While the date is placed anywhere from 50 to 100 years from now depending on the source, the singularity will represent a momentous jump in our evolution. For some, it is the "passing of the torch" so to speak from the past into the far, far future. A preparation for humankind for all of the challenges that the universe places against our survival and a ticket for our civilization to proliferate among the stars. For others, it is something to be avoided. A future that will bring dystopia and destruction to the human race.
I take the more optimistic view personally. I believe that we can utilize our technology for the greater human race. We can solve so many problems previously thought to be outside of the realm of our understanding, and create a sustainable future in which all humankind contributes parts to the greater collective whole. However, we must get there first.
We need to make a push for a new age of scientific learning to solve those problems. The next 20 years may be the most crucial in determining our distant future as we face some of the greatest challenges against us. Overpopulation, radicalism, and war will ravage this planet only if we allow it. Instead, let's take a more educated, reasonable path and use the amazing things we have created to sustain life on this planet. After all, as far as we know, we are the only manifestation of life in our cosmic neighborhood which makes our existence even more precious.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Welcome!
Hello all,
Welcome to my new blog, Renewed Enlightenment. Within the coming weeks, I will bring discussions about a variety of topics in the sciences that are having an impact on the future of our lives as we speak. From breakthroughs in green technology to discoveries of new planets, I will bring you a brief, yet detailed synopses of some of the incredible things that us human observers have done and bring some fresh ideas about their relevance to the future as well.
I am committed to bringing informed, credible, and educated content from a variety of sources for which I will provide links in-text, and also make recommendations for reading materials and mind-blowing videos that you can find online.
Just by reading this blog, you are already participating in this new future, so let's make it our own!
Best,
Justin
Welcome to my new blog, Renewed Enlightenment. Within the coming weeks, I will bring discussions about a variety of topics in the sciences that are having an impact on the future of our lives as we speak. From breakthroughs in green technology to discoveries of new planets, I will bring you a brief, yet detailed synopses of some of the incredible things that us human observers have done and bring some fresh ideas about their relevance to the future as well.
I am committed to bringing informed, credible, and educated content from a variety of sources for which I will provide links in-text, and also make recommendations for reading materials and mind-blowing videos that you can find online.
Just by reading this blog, you are already participating in this new future, so let's make it our own!
Best,
Justin
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