I think trying to separate belief/expectation this completely from actual observable results is a mistake. The single biggest mover of expected lifespan is MEASURED (or at least reported) life extension (or significant health extension into later years).
So a lot depends on WHO you're talking about. The general populace is likely to lag in their beliefs vs what is possible. Early-adopters and pundits are likely to be ahead of what's possible, but won't track truth very closely (they'll believe it's sooner or easier than it turns out to be).
Sure, observing record-breaking longevity is the direct way to find out that life extension works. It's also the slowest.
Life extension is an unusual technology in that it matters much more whether it will be available in your lifetime than whether it's available right now. I think there are plenty of people who will look at trends and try to make that prediction rather than having no opinion, or a strict negative opinion, until they see someone live to 122 years and 165 days.
I'm sure the early adopters will look like early adopters: more likely to be in tech, be involved with AI, own a whoop, watch podcasts about emerging technology. And, more likely to be relevant decision makers for technology development timelines. That's part of why I care about the question -- they might be the ones who decide whether we race full-speed to ASI or slow down, and their opinions about radical life extension might affect their choices.
Life extension is an unusual technology in that it matters much more whether it will be available in your lifetime than whether it's available right now
Well, no. It matters if there are choices/interventions that you need to make right now in order to gain the benefits. It matters a little whether it'll be available decades from now (presuming you still live) only to the extent it changes your retirement/savings decisions, but for the VAST majority of people "being healthy for 20+ years and living another 15+" is very similar in terms of financial planning to "being healthy for 110 years and living another 50". It's just not possible for reasonable long-term plans to diverge that much.
It matters a little whether it'll be available decades from now (presuming you still live) only to the extent it changes your retirement/savings decisions
I care about whether it's true whether or not it means I need to do anything now, certainly enough to think about it.
But, it matters concretely for decision making if you think there's a chance you might make it to a point where we reach longevity escape velocity, and that that depends on the trajectory of technology like AI.
I think it's very unlikely that my personal health choices will make a difference for me catching the boat for LEV, but I think it's only unlikely that it will make a difference for my parents, and that's enough for me to care a lot. I think that position might not end up being uncommon.
[thanks for the interesting discussion, I'm likely to bow out after this - I'll continue to read, but probably not respond.]
I'm curious what change or behavior you or your parents would undertake if LEV is somewhat likely, which wouldn't benefit you if it's very unlikely. My model of most people (including myself) is that "unknown remaining lifespan between 20-60 years" is unlikely to differ much from "unknown remaining lifespan between 50-200 years, or longer".
For individual decisions, most long-term horizons get rather flat before 20 years.
If your parents are old enough that they're retired and probably have < 25 years remaining, it could matter, but that also massively reduces the likelihood they'll be able to take advantage of any breakthroughs.
[appreciate the engagement!]
My parents are in their mid-60s, and I think they have a lot of direct control over whether they make it to 90 or 100, maybe 110 but AFAIK there's a lot of genetic factors after ~90. In practice they're already healthy people doing most of the most important stuff, specifically lots of exercise, so there's not a ton for me to intervene on there.
One of the main scenarios I'm planning for is just making sure that if there are early treatments available, I'll be able to talk to them about it. I think it's possible that there will be treatments available when they're 75, which will seem early and weird, which would put them on an LEV track, that would not work if they waited until they were 85, or had an acute health crisis. So we talk about this stuff now, I talk about the supplements I take, the research I see, etc.
Functional life extension treatments in ten years is definitely an optimistic world. If it happens, though, I don't want the people I care about to miss the bus.
Looking at AI as a model, I don't see a giant shift on longevity coming soon. The prospect of AGI/ASI has been a sci-fi mainstay for decades, and, as recently as ~2015, redditors were loudly proclaiming that AI would bring them total automation and a UBI check to anyone that would listen, but the general population wasn't very receptive. Now that LLMs are a part of daily life, a lot more people are interested in them, but the sentiment I've seen boils down to either "I could make a lot of money by getting into this before other people do" or "I hope my pointy-haired boss doesn't get talked into believing that ChatGPT can replace the janitor".
Angry sentiments about data centers come partially from sometimes-overblown fears of electricity bills and water shortages, and partially from a general dislike and distrust of the ultra-rich. I haven't really seen anyone in the general public, outside of our sphere, who sincerely expects Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to successfully "build God". Even the religious-types seem to consider it too implausible to get mad about. Joe the Plumber has heard the hype, but has concluded[1] that it's a bubble, even as awareness of the idea of AGI approaches saturation.
You've probably seen the extensive media coverage of Bryan Johnson. It's hard to say how much he's directly responsible for opening the Overton window on aging and life extension, but he's clearly received as more legitimate than early fringe-coded RLE efforts, even if half of his audience is morbidly fascinated by the prospect of his ironic early death.
I've seen less gravedancing than I'd been worried about seeing, which assuages my faith in humanity, but I do think that the overwhelming majority of people see him as either "quirky tech guy with some wacko theories" or "well-intentioned mad scientist using himself as a guinea pig for our edification/entertainment". Even before recent events, I think only a vanishingly small share of his audience expected him to make it to three digits of age, let alone immortality.
I think his impact on longevity is something akin to classic-era Stephen Colbert's impact on conservatism. Maybe a few people became a bit more aware of it, but the image presented was as something silly and ineffectual, and it didn't win the movement a lot of converts.
Rightly or wrongly
I wonder if some kind of rebranding might help. For example, instead of "life extension" let's call it "youth extension", and make the pitch something like: people are already living longer, let's keep them young for longer.
This could be less controversial, because instead of discussing pros and cons of immortality (which are not even relevant yet, and can get you in trouble with all kinds of people, not just religious) we will simply suggest that people get more healthy and youthful, which seems like everyone would agree with.
That'd be great. Right now people in the field often fall back to talking about healthspan, which is the "right" concept, but it doesn't travel well.
This is part of why I think a movie that includes life extension could do the trick. To my knowledge there's no very popular media representation of a world with, say, 40 years of healthspan extension, and it's hard to imagine.
Bryan was originally known for founding a payments company that sold for ~$800m. After that, he set out on a project to make himself as healthy as possible with the explicit goal of living longer while publicly documenting everything he tried. He's spent many millions of dollars at this point and has 2.2m subscribers on YouTube.
He deliberately courts media attention by saying outlandish things (like how he measures his nighttime erections, apparently a kind of health marker) but also generally manages to hit a pretty high standard for rigor, IMO.
IIRC this is one of the first big pieces on him: https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/
And:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/biohacker-antiaging-lawsuits
He gets enough attention now that his recent announcement that he has an autoimmune condition is being covered from dozens of different sources: https://www.foxnews.com/health/biohacker-hoping-live-160-reveals-alarming-diagnosis-stomach-eating-itself
His website, where he sells the supplement stack he claims to take: https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/
His YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BryanJohnson
Apparently he got a Netflix documentary, I actually hadn't seen this but: https://www.netflix.com/title/81757532
Fun fact: He also founded a neuro technology company in between these quests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(neurotechnology_company)
I think it would be nice if society was more epistemically calibrated about life extension, but I wonder whether greater societal awareness would be a net gain or a net obstacle to the technology.
It could very well be that wider society sticks to its old ways of thinking for a while and oppose the technology's development.
tl;dr: I think people might start believing in radical life extension soon, maybe all at once.
There is plenty written about if and when radical life extension (RLE) is going to happen. I want to ask a different question: when will people come to believe that RLE is going to happen?
I think it's increasingly likely that sometime in the next few years there's a cascading flip in the public's expectations about whether RLE will be available in their lifetime. I don't mean that people will believe RLE is coming in the next few years, but that it will happen in time for them to experience direct benefits, enough so that they start considering changing their behavior around things like retirement, investment, childbearing, career choice, etc.
Radical life extension here means: notable improvement over possible human healthspan and lifespan, as distinguished from increases in average healthspan and lifespan that occur by means of shifting people toward one end of the existing outcome distribution.
There are four trends that I think together make it seem, to a normal person, like radical life extension is possible:
1. The Overton window has been blown wide open (with special thanks to Bryan Johnson)
You've probably seen the extensive media coverage of Bryan Johnson. It's hard to say how much he's directly responsible for opening the Overton window on aging and life extension, but he's clearly received as more legitimate than early fringe-coded RLE efforts, even if half of his audience is morbidly fascinated by the prospect of his ironic early death.
(N.B. Bryan's schtick involves doing things that are almost certainly not going to produce RLE like eating a lot of olive oil. But, he talks clearly about the more radical technologies and has very explicit DON'T DIE messaging.)
Thinking about RLE isn't nearly as weird as it used to be. Peter Thiel and his blood boys were a whole news cycle not that long ago.[1] Now we have official looking researchers with Harvard labs like David Sinclair doing podcasts about the "longevity revolution"[2] and... lots of shortform content.[3]
2. AI progress
People keep telling me that AI is getting better at stuff. Some are saying it might be able to do things humans can do. Could some hypothetical future sci-fi AI contribute to medical research? Many are talking about this!
AI is getting better across the board. The more you think LLMs and domain-specific AI like AlphaFold are going to contribute to scientific research, and the faster you think that's going to happen, the more plausible near-term RLE seems.
3. Funding and Funders
Money going into anti-aging research has increased by something like an order of magnitude or more over the past decade. Who is providing that funding will be more important to some onlookers than the raw dollar figure.
A disproportionate amount of early anti-aging money came from Thiel, and the people have never known what to make of Thiel. Now there are big, conventional names throwing billions of dollars into big ventures:
4. Visible medical miracles
Seeing people lose weight on GLP inhibitors constitutes, I think, a common medical miracle. And, it's a medical miracle of a different type than "they cured [kind of cancer]". It feels like a real step toward achieving mastery over our bodies, in a fight people often have experience with losing.
"They're going to find Ozempic for aging" sounds oddly plausible. It's the first drug that I remember being aware of that feels like an appropriate analogue for a general life-extension treatment. (I don't think that holds up to any medical scrutiny, but.)
In large part because of widespread GLP adoption and the necessity of sparing lean mass during acute weight loss, we may see FDA approval of myostatin inhibitors and related drugs with the potential to cause significant muscle gain. People may be able to achieve steroid-like outcomes cheaply and safely. That effect would, IMO, be even more shocking, and be another directly visible bit of transhuman-ish technology.
Honorable mention: actual research progress
There's been some actual progress in life extension research, but I think the reality on the ground is much less important than how the results are interpreted and relayed to the public.
For example, the kind of cellular reprogramming that Life Biosciences is now trialing[9]in humans with the OSK subset of the Yamanaka factors is the kind of big-boy therapy that seems like it could actually produce a "rewind" effect, rather than a mere slowing of aging. But, my ability to actually assess this line of research as a relatively up-to-speed observer is limited. I imagine that from further outside the field it all sounds like "scientists discover new science thing! This will revolutionize everything, unless it doesn't!"
Why would it happen fast?
I claim that the above features of the information landscape make it generally more plausible to a moderate-information observer that RLE might happen in the next few decades. But how long will it take for people to change their minds?
I think it's likely that at some point a combination of preference falsification cascade and adaptive preference dissolution will snowball and cause a lot of people to flip in a short period of time.
Right now it's still weird to say you really want to live longer, and even weirder to say you're going to go out of your way to try to make that happen. We have a lot of cultural baggage around not trying to cheat death or obsess over our mortality. (And that's probably been both individually and societally adaptive!) It's particularly strange to "obsess" over RLE when it seems like a fantasy. But, as RLE gets more and more plausible, being excited about it makes you less of a blood-boy-vampire and more of a blood-boy-enthusiast. The implausibility of RLE has held some number of people to keep quiet about their true preference for living longer. A preference falsification cascade seems likely once that wears down enough.
Maybe more importantly, when RLE becomes plausible, it becomes less psychologically dangerous to reckon with the brevity and finitude of our fleshy existence. Not wanting to live a lot longer is a textbook adaptive preference. Thinking about your own lifespan, the timing and manner of your death, sucks when there's nothing you can do about it. Less so when there's hope. Or: when not getting hit by the baseball bat becomes a live possibility, people may find they don't really like getting hit with a baseball bat.[10]
Living a (much) longer, healthier life is an appealing idea when a person is allowed to consider it.
I think there will be plenty of candidate moments that could set this process off over the next few years. The ones I'm looking out for, in roughly decreasing order of coherence:
It'll probably be something silly that's not on my list. But, I think once it starts, it's going to pick up steam quickly.
Or not! My theory of mind here could be hopelessly mis-calibrated because I've believed in RLE for a long time. Maybe Bryan Johnson will die of olive oil poisoning and trigger a life-extension winter.
Even if the update is far away, I think it's worth considering what people might think, and do, if they start to believe too.
Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood ↩︎
The Longevity Revolution Is Here | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair — S2, Ep. 1 ↩︎
one, two, three ↩︎
Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever; Fierce Biotech ↩︎
AbbVie, Calico raise their age-related disease alliance funding to $3.5bn ↩︎
Longevity startup Retro Biosciences says latest fundraising values it at $1.8 billion ↩︎
NewLimit raises $435M Series C, valuation hits $3.1B ↩︎
Hevolution Foundation ↩︎
Life Biosciences — First Patient Dosed in Phase 1 Trial of ER-100 ↩︎
How to Seem (and Be) Deep ↩︎
The most compelling life-extension movie is still Twilight. ↩︎
Xi and Putin Discuss Becoming ‘Immortal.’ Their Countries Are Investing In It ↩︎