Off topic, and I haven't followed this thread, but... On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 10:21 PM Matt Mahoney <mattmahone...@gmail.com> wrote: >... > > We are not close to reversing human aging. The global rate of increase in > life expectancy has dropped slightly after peaking at 0.2 years per year in > the 1990s. We have 0 drugs or interventions proven to slow aging because it > takes decades to do experiments. Calorie restriction might work but nobody is > doing it.
That seems unnecessarily pessimistic. To nitpick, "0 drugs or interventions proven to slow aging" may be the case for humans, but there are any number of interventions which have been proven for animals with lifespans short enough to test. Going in both directions. In short lived animal models it's become almost routine to produce accelerated aging phenotypes, and then reverse them. So "drugs or interventions proven to slow aging" do exist, in numbers, only not yet for humans. Even for humans, we may not have had the time or inclination to do a double blind placebo study from birth to death. But for biomarkers identified, David Sinclair for one claims his biomarkers have been reversed some 10 years. mTOR and SIRTx activating interventions (from memory) have been demonstrated on a wide enough range of animal models, that it would be surprising if they don't add the same 10-30% for humans (yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)3,4,5, worms (Caenorhabditis elegans)6, fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaste r)7,8, rodents9 and, most recently, rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), says this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm2944) The most interesting current interventions are on the chromatization clock, using variations of "Yamanaka factors", which demonstrably can reverse phenotypes right back to undifferentiated stem cells, and the telomere clock, which produces aged phenotypes when artificially shortened, and then reverses them when lengthened again. If you've got a spare $100k or so, Liz Parrish can swap in a patch to keep your telomeres long, as she did to herself some 7-8 years ago. Likely Parrish's chromatization clock is still ticking, and nobody seems to have wanted to try any kind of Yamanaka factor intervention on themselves yet. But Sinclair has demonstrated it in rodent models: "Sinclair (Table 1), have shown that partial reprogramming can dramatically reverse age-related phenotypes in the eye, muscle and other tissues in cultured mammalian cells and even rodent models by countering epigenetic changes associated with aging." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-022-00002-4 Parrish is arguing that given aging is a case where "do no harm" no longer has the best odds, the existing medical intervention "safety" bar, is out of date. They are proposing a new "Best Choice Medicine" model, which says if you're about to die, you should be allowed to try some things (Trump actually signed a similar bill into law. "Right to Try"? But not including aging, I think): https://www.bestchoicemedicine.com/general-1 So, no, no 100 year, double blind placebo "proven" interventions in humans yet. But "not close to reversing" seems like an overstatement to me. Not close to completing a 100 year double blind placebo trial on humans yet, no. But if I were 90 years old and facing Russian Roulette odds (~1/6 chance of dying each year at age 90?), I think the existing tech is close enough to "starting to reverse aging" that I would be willing to take some risks. > Maybe we can achieve immortality by uploading, if you believe that a robot > trained on your data to predict your actions and carry them out in real time > is you. This one I think is further away. As you hint, it really holds LLM tech to the fire, and reminds us that LLMs still have nothing to say about any kind of theory for replicating human consciousness. (Well, not quite nothing, I would argue that the size these things reach is telling us something, but that's more a hint on the level of say the Michelson-Morley experiment was for physics, which is to say a puzzle which might lead eventually to insight, but which in terms of the mainstream is still just a puzzle for now.) ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T42db51de471cbcb9-Mb681cbc4f7239c48059327fa Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
