jakexb
#1
Essay about the predicted effects of AI by the CEO founder of Anthropic:
…it’s my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these discoveries, giving us the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years.14 Why not 100x? Perhaps it is possible, but here both serial dependence and experiment times become important: getting 100 years of progress in 1 year requires a lot of things to go right the first time, including animal experiments and things like designing microscopes or expensive lab facilities. I’m actually open to the (perhaps absurd-sounding) idea that we could get 1000 years of progress in 5-10 years, but very skeptical that we can get 100 years in 1 year. Another way to put it is I think there’s an unavoidable constant delay: experiments and hardware design have a certain “latency” and need to be iterated upon a certain “irreducible” number of times in order to learn things that can’t be deduced logically. But massive parallelism may be possible on top of that15.
- **Doubling of the human lifespan18.**This might seem radical, but life expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century (from ~40 years to ~75), so it’s “on trend” that the “compressed 21st” would double it again to 150. Obviously the interventions involved in slowing the actual aging process will be different from those that were needed in the last century to prevent (mostly childhood) premature deaths from disease, but the magnitude of change is not unprecedented19. Concretely, there already exist drugs that increase maximum lifespan in rats by 25-50% with limited ill-effects. And some animals (e.g. some types of turtle) already live 200 years, so humans are manifestly not at some theoretical upper limit. At a guess, the most important thing that is needed might be reliable, non-Goodheart-able biomarkers of human aging, as that will allow fast iteration on experiments and clinical trials. Once human lifespan is 150, we may be able to reach “escape velocity”, buying enough time that most of those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want, although there’s certainly no guarantee this is biologically possible.
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AnUser
#2
Dario is so based. It seems like AI will give us all of these benefits eventually.
He’s right that focusing on safety is more important than anything as well. People who are near death could instead sign up/work on cryonics rather than wanting to speed up AI development if they are gambling on being saved. It’s better than risking (5-10%+?) the entire earth be turned into solar panels and datacenters by an ASI. Of course maybe they don’t think so and that’s okay. Who knows. 
Relevant is as well: Super longevity drugs coming soon 2027-2028
He’s right about the non-Goodheart-able biomarkers of human aging, that’s a good term as well that explains a lot of things.
Thank you Dario, very cool!
1 Like
AnUser
#3
We are going to have swarms of AI agents soon, researching things, either from computers we buy ourselves launching the AI agent, or run up in a cloud session, it’s all going to be optimized eventually using few resources. It’ll tell us great researched answers, help us optimize our own biomarkers with other swarms of agents. It’ll all go very quickly and the AI companies will use them as well, until well, who knows, things get out of control… or not.
1 Like