I think an anti-anti-aging movement is more likely, on the model of the anti-data-center movement: "stop the rich from creating a sinister transhumanist world"...
I think you're going to need quite powerful AI to make serious progress on aging. In fact, what you're really going to need is systemic tissue replacement, and those replacements are going to take time to grow.
I think that in turn makes it pretty likely we get bigger warning shots than we've gotten thus far.
My best guess is that results in net negative sentiment towards accelerationism. If you look at the general public's answers to questions like "would you rather have a million dollars of a 50% chance of $100 million" and you'll see that the average person is quite conservative. I'd be a little surprised if they want gamble on AI-enabled radical longevity if they think there's a serious danger of AI job loss and/or death.
My bigger concern at the moment is that we might not get another warning shot because AI is become situationally aware enough to falsify logs. And we seem to be getting pretty close to RSI.
Agreed that people seem very conservative with respect to risk and disruption, and this probably tips the scales towards being fearful of AI rather than going full e/Acc. And furthermore, indeed -- making "serious" progress on aging is probably really hard, and even earlier glimmers -- random cancer cures, promising results-in-mice, some drug that can marginally slow some subcomponent of aging (like what people hope rapamycin might be) -- will take time to show up and then get proven out and affect people's views. Which again favors the forces of AI safety over e/Acc.
But on the other hand, it's uncertain / hard to say. Maybe the idea that a new technology ("it's just math!" it's just computers!") could truly have agency and pose an active threat to mankind, is just fundamentally bizarre to people, compared to the idea that a new technology could deliver a bunch of cancer cures or etc. (Normal people are not going to be aware of the crazy gompertz-curve fact about how even eliminating all cancer would only raise expected lifespans by like 2 years -- many folks would probably perceive "we get a bunch of impressive cancer cures in short succession" as nearly equivalent to curing aging.) Or maybe some powerful group, like -- *checks twitter* -- whoever's President of the United States, or CEO of Nvidia, or leader of whatever AI startup seems poised to make a lot of medical breakthroughs, decides to put a ton of effort into boosting this message.
Maybe the net effect of the two arguments fully entering the public consciousness is indeed favorable to AI safety. But a longevity + e/Acc preference cascade could still probably cause a lot of trouble -- eg, further polarizing AI-related issues, perhaps enough to make a strong, coordinated, swift response to AI emergencies much more difficult.
Also agreed that if we're already really close to RSI, all these considerations probably don't matter very much. They seem more important in longer timelines (whether because AI development naturally still has a long way to go despite appearances, or because we successfully pace / pause development).
I like the framing of anti-aging efforts vs. pausing AI, because it helps us estimate the floor of human suffering caused by delaying technological progress (like achieving LEV). So whenever someone argues for pausing AI, their argument should, imo, address the fact that millions of people will die each day aging cure is not found/deployed.
My mental model for social acceptance of anti-aging drugs is: obesity and Ozempic.
The moment we got a drug that's good enough to actually put a dent in obesity, a lot of "healthy at any weight" and "I'm fine the way I am" went out of the window - in favor of weekly injections.
It's not that people were somehow unaware that being overweight is actually bad for you. It was pretty obvious. It's just that they didn't see the point in fighting it. The moment they saw that there's a drug that actually works? Saw a coworker drop 20 pounds, or a celebrity go from "gaining weight" to "lean and thin"? The effort of "lose weight" went down, the return went up - and suddenly, there was no point in trying to cope your way into obesity not being all that bad.
I expect something very similar to happen to aging. If a drug that actually puts a dent in aging hits the shelves, we'll see the same effect: the true preference for "I don't want to grow old and frail" would override the "I can't fight aging, so let's think of a way in which aging is good" cope.
This is, however, contingent on the "miracle anti-aging drug" having an obvious, undeniable effect. Aging is slow. If you have a drug that simply slows aging by 20% for as long as you take it, with no immediately visible effect? It might make ripples in the medical community, gym crowds, etc - but fail to get a broad societal impact. If we got a "miracle anti-aging drug" that visibly improves skin quality and deletes wrinkles? That makes a "preference cascade" much more likely.
I think anti-aging is very different from ai safety in one perspective: it's affected by social wealth distribution. Better ai safety results in AI causing less trouble like Huggingface incident, and less x-risk, so everyone benefits from it. However the anti-aging cure could be expensive, and limited to only the riches and those in charge of political power.
I think this difference will significantly affect how the public views it.
That's not how pharma works.
For most interventions, we see the same pattern of "R&D is expensive, drug is cheap". So there's a massive financial incentive to sell the resulting drug as widely as possible.
For rare disorders, the uptake has a very hard limit, so the drugs targeting them can stay expensive quite easily.
Aging? It's the opposite of a rare disorder.
For anti-aging treatments to be gated behind "social wealth distribution" for any extended period of time, they must rely on something that doesn't scale well - things like invasive surgery or expert input. And with advanced AI, even "expert input" is not the blocker it once was.
I think it'd be very worthwhile for someone to do an AI 2027 style narrative forecast of life extension trajectories, if only so that it becomes easier to talk about scenarios where people might be more willing to slow down AI development because they reasonably come to believe they're going to live long enough to see the benefit of powerful AI anyway.
Anti-aging sentiment might go rapidly mainstream, in the same way AI Safety just did.
Recently, the AI safety community has been enjoying a massive preference cascade that has rapidly moved AI x-risk concerns into mainstream political discourse
Why did this happen?
But this isn’t the only preference cascade waiting in the wings, as we continue to scale AI capabilities. Consider another throwback rationalist classic:
The labs are probably working towards this.
Just like the idea of AI x-risk, the hope of using AI to unlock medical cures and other transhumanist goods is widespread among both employees and corporate leaders at the frontier AI labs, rationalists, etc.
Insofar as they aren’t devoting 100% of their energy towards steering to RSI + trying to do some critical safety work along the way (these two things seems to be most of what they’re doing), Anthropic also seems to be steering somewhat out of their way to push medical capabilities – consider for instance how centrally medical science features in Dario’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace”, their detailed coverage of the biology capabilities of each new model, their development of a project-glasswing-style “Life Sciences Verification Program” for qualified access to bioweapons-research-capable models, how they've allegedly opened a wet lab for biology research, etc. Deepmind also seems to have also devoted a disproportionate amount of effort towards biology research, via efforts like AlphaFold and many others.
Lots of smart people seem to believe that AI-for-longevity is possible, and they’re working hard to make it happen. Maybe they’ll pull it off!
Although perhaps a cascade wouldn’t happen or would come too late to matter.
Maybe anti-aging is just fundamentally too weird to enter the overton window?
Evidence for the tractability of anti-aging medicine might build very gradually and smoothly.
A longevity x e/acc movement might simply take too long to gather steam, thus arriving too late to be relevant.
A longevity preference-cascade would be great! Except, by default, the energies unlocked might flow directly into e/acc :(
This cultural earthquake, or avalanche, or dam-breaking, catalyzing massive societal energies for the fight against aging, is something that the longevity community has dreamt about for for years. Unfortunately, the anti-aging preference cascade might, in practice, channel all its energies into AI-accelerationist sentiment.
Before our current AI safety moment, surely there was nevertheless widespread anxiety about humans being replaced by AI. (See eg the dramatic unpopularity of anything AI-themed in various polls.) But since the idea of AI x-risk wasn’t being discussed publicly, it strikes me that those worries were essentially being “sublimated” (in the psychological sense) in favor of somewhat vague and incoherent anger about datacenters, flock cameras, copyright infringement, et cetera. This sublimation process artificially boosted those movements but (until now) greatly weakened public enthusiasm for AI x-risk mitigation.
Right now, humanity’s terror at the prospect of death is similarly sublimated in a variety of ways, since after all there doesn’t seem to be anything practical we can do about it. But it’s also such an intense terror that it arguably drives a huge percentage of human motivation.
Meanwhile, today’s e/acc movement is honestly kind of pathetic. Its main argument within the current overton window is just that AI is going to make a lot of money. (“...though not necessarily for YOU, average american worker – I was more thinking about my silicon-valley investor friends.”) This is enough to convince Trump (at least for now) that opposing AI safety is essential for making sure the stock market keeps going up. There are a few true e/acc believers who understand that the biggest potential prize is longevity (alongside many other transhumanist goods, like intelligence enhancement). This has little traction with the public, and it seems kind of kooky to even imagine that ordinary people (people like my mom! my neighbors!) might suddenly transform into anti-aging transhumanists.[2] But this was exactly the state of AI safety discourse a few months ago, when a few experts cared deeply about x-risk but public discussion was an incoherent swirl of mere datacenter skepticism and it seemed crazy that “notkilleveryoneism” would go mainstream any time soon.
Historically, the strength of “e/acc x longevity” has been limited by the fact that most people smart enough to grasp the allure of this idea (eg AI lab CEOs, rationalists, etc) have also been persuaded by the argument for AI risk, and thus for caution despite the allure of e/acc x longevity. But a future preference cascade among the mass public (cross-pressured by anxieties over superintelligent AI and bioweapons, versus enthusiasm over medical progress) might not play out the same way. So it seems to me that the combination of e/acc ideas, and a mass public that for the first time truly believes in imminent cancer cures, aging treatments and other medical miracles, could end up going in some pretty crazy directions.
IMO the (small, very inside-baseball) controversy over Nick Bostrom’s paper “Optimal Timing for Superintelligence” reflects AI safetyists’ understanding of this dynamic. “Don’t speak too loudly about this very selfish, dangerous idea!” people seem to be saying. “If anyone else hears, it might set off the latent anti-aging preference cascade!” Personally, I don’t think that analytic-philosophy essays (or, for that matter, LessWrong posts like this one) are going to be the match that starts this particular fire. But the kindling is building up.
Of course I’m not saying we should oppose medical cures!
I’m in a weird position here, I guess. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to use AI to develop some medical cures. Medical cures are great! (Other things equal, of course. Where “other things” includes x-risk from both reckless AI scaling and from enabling easier bioweapons development.) Even Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks we should try to go for the medical cures, if we can do so in a responsible way: in his Time open letter of 2023, he says “The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide... If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.” Even as he also says that it would naturally be “incredibly selfish and evil” to roll the dice on misaligned AI as described in Bostrom’s “Optimal Timing” paper.
So then what SHOULD we do?
idk! Here are some thoughts for AI safety groups and funders:
Beyond that, I think AI safety folks might also want to establish some anti-aging bona fides well ahead of time. Some ideas for how to do that:
All the above stuff, taken together, sounds like I’m pitching a maximalist agenda for basically transforming EA/rationality into a longevity-focused movement, which would be absurd. I’m instead just saying that we should consider doing some of this stuff, a little bit more than we already are.
The overarching idea here is that AI safety should be ready to present an alternative vision of radical longevity progress – one that isn’t reliant on breakneck general AI scaling. This plan doesn’t necessarily need to explain how it’ll actually OUTPERFORM a plan of breakneck scaling at achieving medical progress (which might be unrealistic). But during a preference cascade, we’ll need to address the issue in some way. (Just like how it behooves Republicans to have some kind of notional plan even on issues that are unfavorable for them, like healthcare. And similarly behooves Democrats to make some sorts of commitments on immigration, even if they’d mostly rather people not talk about the issue since it’s unfavorable for them.) Lest we end up looking like the e/accs do in the current AI safety moment – losing the argument in the eyes of the public, reduced to weak rebuttals, weird ad hominems, and transparent attempts to change the subject.
The “support for FDA reform and scientific research” stuff earlier is important not just so we have a track record to point to, but also because after a longevity preference cascade, there will be strong public demand for taking action on aging. People will want a roadmap, they’ll want big initiatives being launched and funded, and so on. So, EA / rationalist groups should perhaps fund some of these things in small-scale now, with a view to being able to impressively scale them up later when the demand arises. Cryonics also seems particularly relevant here as a shovel-ready plan that acts as a “Plan B” alternative vision for longevity. Ideally the idea of a crash program to improve the science and scale up the practice of cryonics might be capable of relieving some of the desperate urgency and time pressure that the public might feel about the problem of aging after a preference cascade, and would answer some of the newfound political will to immediately “do something about aging” in a way that doesn’t involve further scaling AI.
What about the labs themselves; what should they do?
Final thought: in all the above discussion I’ve made it seem like it’s important to have all these plans ready (to channel the energy unlocked by a longevity preference cascade) for the purpose of performing PR judo and deftly deflecting a movement that might damage the cause of AI safety. But obviously there’s another good reason to have such plans ready in advance: properly directed, a longevity preference cascade could be really great! It would be amazing to use all that energy for good, using it to fuel more ambitious medical progress in a way that isn’t existentially dangerous. So, for that basic object-level reason, it would clearly be great to have some shovel-ready plans scoped out for rapidly scaling up ambitious medical research.
Longevity fans will complain that progress on aging is actually more tractable than the public thinks. I agree! But look at the history of the field: resveratrol? senescent cells? some mouse trials? None of this stuff has produced a genuine miracle for human life expectancy; and meanwhile there have been lots of weird fads and hype. It is very understandable that a distant general public (who has a harder time sifting fads from more promising science) perceives this all as snake oil, or at best overly-optimistic empty promises in the vein of “commercial fusion power is just 10 years away”.
I’m not sure what exactly how transhumanist a longevity cascade would end up looking like. Would it mostly be focused on enthusiasm for curing normal diseases, like cancer or Alzheimer, without touching the still-taboo idea of anti-aging? Could it possibly get crazier than anti-aging, and into other transhumanist goods, like BCIs or etc? Perhaps most importantly, how much would people connect the dots between medical progress and AI policy? Maybe everyone would get excited about medical breakthroughs but this would just translate happily towards pressure for more research funding, FDA reform, etc, without politically connecting to any AI issues? Or maybe people would go full on "worship the coming machine god" at the first whiff of some new AI-developed antibiotics for treating hospital staph infections, or whatever. Who can say!