…And why focusing on longevity matters, in a nutshell.
Have we reached our potential as human beings? Not likely. Over the past centuries, life expectancy has increased. The main reason is that we are distinguished from the rest of the animal world by being an intelligent species, building tools, and making discoveries in science and technologies, enabling us to have easy access to resources such as water, food, or shelter, which were once considered scarce. What is now the next frontier for humanity? One of them could be space exploration, but how many years do we need to travel to the closest exoplanet? Until we have not figured out the way to travel faster, possibly 100 years+? Making life multi-planetary will require the most scarce resource: Time. By targeting longevity, we are extending our most precious resource: extra time for everyone will fundamentally disrupt society like never before, possibly with the same magnitude as the importance of AI.
In the meantime, we have to stop considering aging as a fatality: we are living in a time where we have the tools to directly intervene in aging-related diseases. By working in this field, we can claim a longer healthspan (Yes, extra years of healthy life), therefore, more time to explore, discover, and live with our loved ones.
Focusing on longevity now is fundamental, first because we should: compared to AI and robotics, it is clearly the least funded pillar of all three. We should have a long-term mindset and think about having a strong impact on society in the next decades. Second, because we can: technology is available, in the long run, it will benefit everyone, making people live healthier; lastly, because it is good for the economy.
As Ray Kurzweil would say, we are witnessing 3 major fields, AI, Robotics, and Biotech/Longevity; one will benefit another, and all together will drastically reduce human scarcity. Automation via AI and robotics will lower the price of goods. Longevity breakthroughs will offer us a better and healthier quality of life. Biotech can now be seen as an engineering field with the same methods and principles applied as for software engineering, therefore having a correlated pace of innovation. The growth is exponential or possibly faster, and many disruptive changes will occur in the coming years.
By Max Kamrani , a Love, Life + Robot enthusiast