Fight Aging!

Michael Shermer, Scientific American's skeptic-in-residence, has run off a rather sub-par column on Kurzweil and healthy life extension. While I have to agree with him on points relating to supplements and Kurzweil (see some of my previous thoughts, harsh and more forgiving), Shermer makes a number of pronouncements with no basis in anything other than his own opinions. For example:

Two, I question the idea of extrapolating trend lines very far into the future. Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable. Plus, in my opinion, the problems of creating artificial intelligence and halting aging are orders of magnitude harder than anyone has anticipated. Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

Personally, I think it's amusing to see someone think that developing general artificial intelligence is 10 times easier than defeating aging! I think that Shermer would benefit greatly from reading the work of Aubrey de Grey, who makes a very compelling case that we a) know more than enough to get going now on serious anti-aging research and b) making meaningful progress in radical life extension is only a matter of a few decades with the right level of funding.

In addition, I don't think that Shermer grasps the concept of escape velocity in healthy life extension. Even if true physical immortality is a thousand years away - a highly unrealistic thing to say in and of itself - all ("all") we have to do to live that long is to keep adding new medical technologies to extend healthy life span, bit by bit, more rapidly than one year ever year. This is not an unreasonable goal - it is within the capabilities of a large, directed research community. Kurzweil is quite clear about this concept in his writing, and presents it as developing a series of bridges to the future.

The sort of knee-jerk, unfounded skepticism of the sort expressed by Shermer - and millions of other people who think the same way - is one of the many obstacles to widespread support for healthy life extension research. The future is not a conveyor belt, but rather something that is built, brick by brick, by the actions of people. The future is directed, open to change, a road that could go in any direction. Just because something could be done does not mean it will be done: without public support and understanding of healthy life extension and its potential, research will not be funded and science will not move ahead. Skepticism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - which may briefly satisfy some folks, but we'll all be just as dead because of it.