Aging – Longivity and Uncertainties

Longevity, AI timelines, and high-level uncertainty

• Obviously, most of these higher-order social effects (which I agree dominate the first-order welfare effects from a long-termist perspective, vast though those first-order effects are) depend heavily on your AI timelines. If timelines are fairly short there’s not enough time for this to matter. Of course, that applies to most other things that aren’t AI as well, so possibly those of us who aren’t in AI should mostly focus on things that are mainly valuable if timelines are long.
• Given that, I think a good heuristic for the potential value of ageing research is something like, “how likely is it that humans will still be making important decisions in 50-150 years?” The higher your probability of this being the case, and the longer you think it will stay the case, the more you should potentially care about anti-ageing research.
• Life extension will almost certainly have big effects on society and institutions. Whether the net effect of these changes will be positive, negative, or near-neutral from a longtermist perspective seems very uncertain. I personally think that most of the very negative effects people worry about aren’t very likely, but that’s just my intuition; I don’t have much formal data and neither does anyone else. Anders Sandberg has a paper on the effect of life extension on the length of dictatorships; if anyone knows of any other work in this area I’d love to hear about it.
• Given the magnitudes of the proposed effects, and our uncertainty about them, the value-of-information of more social-sciences work in this area seems very high, both to try and getter idea of the magnitudes of some of these effects and, insofar as the worries about negative effects are justified, to try and come up with solutions that mitigate these problems in advance. This sort of work also seems less risky than directly trying to hasten life extension. I’d be excited about more EAs working on this, and about EAs funding this sort of work.
• As someone with a background in the field, it seems quite likely to me that we will start seeing significant progress on the anti-ageing front this century, perhaps even in the next few decades, with or without buy-in from EA. On the other hand, very few people are seriously examining what effects this will have on society and culture. This further increases the value of social-science in this area; neglected as anti-ageing research itself is, this sort of meta-research is even more so.
• That said, while I do think caution is warranted and meta-research in this area is highly valuable, I am optimistic about the social effects of life extension, and I’ll discuss this a little below.

Longevity and technological progress

• As discussed in this thread and elsewhere, it’s very unclear how life extension would affect the rate of scientific and technological progress:
  • On the one hand, it takes many decades to produce a peak-productivity researcher, and life extension would allow that researcher to continue operating at peak productivity for a much longer time. IIRC most Nobel prizes are awarded for work done mid-career, and the average age at which the prizewinning work was done has been increasing over time; this is more or less what you’d expect to see as the body of scientific knowledge grew and key insights got harder to find. I’ve often been very impressed when interacting with older researchers (e.g. at conferences); despite their significant age-related impairments in fluid intelligence, my impression is that their deep knowledge and intuition in their field often lets them outperform young researchers in many domains. A big part of my optimism about life extension comes from the prospect of combining this deep expertise and wisdom with younglike fluid intelligence and learning.
  • On the other hand, there’s the “science advances one funeral at a time” issue discussed with MichaelStJules elsewhere in this comment thread. I ran into a similar question in my PhD (which was in immunosenescence): how much of the decline in the ability of the adaptive immune system to respond to new threats is a result of ageing, as opposed to simply learning (and developing strong priors for) the previous immune environment? In the case of the immune system ageing is clearly playing a big role, but you would expect even a non-ageing system to become less flexible over time. Similarly here: I’d expect that much of the loss of mental flexibility we see with age is due to ageing, but I don’t think we know how much is ageing and how much is simply learning. In the neural case there’s the additional challenge of distinguishing learning from development: insofar as a 25-year-old learns less well than a 15-year-old, anti-ageing therapy isn’t going to help you.
• Even if life extension causes a slowdown in technological progress, however, it’s far from obvious to me that this would be a bad thing from a longtermist perspective. If the Technological Completion Conjecture holds (and, as discussed elsewhere on this forum, it’s fairly hard to imagine it not holding), a moderate delay in our rate of scientific/technological progress won’t have much effect on the overall value of the future, as long as technological progress doesn’t stop. And slower progress would give us us more time to fend off anthropogenic existential risks, which seems like a very good thing.
• A more important consideration than the effect of life extension on the speed of research progress might be changes in the kind of research that gets done: what kind of questions get asked, how rigorously they are answered, and how much care is taken not to create accidental risks. I don’t have much of an idea about how life extension will affect this at present, but it seems worth looking into. As one example, it’s my impression that older scientists tend to be less interested in open science, which could plausibly be good or bad depending on your attitudes to various things.

Social/cultural effects

• Apart from technological stagnation, the other common worry people raise about life extension is cultural stagnation: entrenchment of inequality, extension of authoritarian regimes, aborted social/moral progress, et cetera. I’m less sanguine about this than I am about a slowdown in research; there’s no equivalent of the Technological Completion Conjecture in culture, and large shocks could conceivably lead to lasting cultural damage. That said, I’m still tentatively optimistic, at least for countries with reasonably good institutions.
• As far as entrenchment of inequality is concerned, it depends a lot on what an anti-ageing treatment would look like: is it a drug or set of drugs that are very expensive to develop but much cheaper to manufacture, or is it a laborious customised treatment you’d need a personal physician to administer? If life extension looks more like the former, then I’m quite optimistic; even if the price was initially prohibitive, I’d expect it to become much more widely available fairly quickly. Even if governments don’t intervene to make it so, insurers would be foolish not to fund an effective life extension treatment for their subscribers. On the other hand, if anti-ageing treatments looked more like the latter scenario, then we’d have to get much richer as a culture before they could be made widely available, which might lead to significant entrenchment of inequality. Nevertheless this doesn’t seem like the most important aspect of this question to me: I’d be surprised if it outweighed even the first-order benefits of life extension in the longer run.
• Regarding immortal dictators, Anders Sandberg has a paper finding that past dictatorships would only have been slightly lengthened by life extension on average. If that’s true this doesn’t seem like too much of a worry in most cases. On the other hand one might be mainly worried about tail risks: one unusually effective dictator could beat the odds and survive for a very long time, causing enormous damage. On the other other hand, it’s not clear what effect longer lifespans (or the promise of such) would have on people’s tolerance of authoritarianism.
• Regarding moral/cultural progress, there do seem to be significant concerns here, though it’s still far from clear to me that we should expect the net effect to be bad. From a longtermist perspective, it seems like certain kinds of conservatism – those born from experience of the value of good institutions, Chesterton’s Fence, etc. – would actually be quite valuable, and would be expected to increase after life extension. And we have seen significant recent swings in attitudes among older people in some moral domains, such as the perception of gay people. In many respects this goes back to the uncertainties around age-related changes in neural agility discussed in the last section: given that chronologically older people would be biologically much younger, how should we expect this to affect their moral and cultural viewpoints?
• Politically, dramatically increased lifespans should give people much stronger personal incentives to care about the long-term future, and while I wouldn’t expect them to act perfectly rationally with regard to those incentives, I would expect them to make at least some adjustments that would be seen as positive from a longtermist perspective. This would hopefully also be reflected in the kinds of politicians that get elected and the kinds of institutions they support.
• Speaking of politicians, it seems important to note that most of the important decision-makers in modern society – politicians, CEOs, senior officials – are middle-aged or older, and therefore operating with substantial cognitive impairments as a result of ageing. This is compensated for to some extent by improved judgement/wisdom acquired from experience, but still seems likely to cause problems in many domains. Given decent institutions, I’m quite optimistic about life extension improving the quality of thinking, and therefore of decisions, made by people in power, especially as I’d expect the median age (and hence experience) of these decision-makers to continue to increase.
• Insofar as one believes ageing might have serious negative effects on culture, these will be highly dependent on the nature and quality of social institutions. Strong democratic institutions seem like they can withstand any negative side-effects of life-extension quite well with relatively minor adjustments (e.g. term limits for a wider range of official and academic positions); insofar as greater adjustments are needed it seems valuable to try to identify these in advance through social-science research in this domain. I am more worried about countries with bad institutions and authoritarian regimes, as these seem like they might be both more vulnerable to bad social effects of life extension and less likely to implement any fixes we discover. Here as elsewhere, though, I’m very very uncertain, and would value becoming less so.

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