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singularity

Over the past 10 days or and so, we've highlighted multiple advances in medicine and technology that could change medical intendance as we know it in the not-besides-afar future. For our terminal deep dive on the topic (for now), we're going to accost 1 of the most difficult questions of all, a difficulty that mankind has been struggling to overcome at to the lowest degree since Qin Shi Huang died from ingesting mercury in a bid to brand himself immortal: Man longevity. And while immortality remains firmly exterior our grasp, we're using engineering to ameliorate human being longevity today, and take been since the adoption of fire and simple machines. Using medical technology, nosotros can attack the problems limiting man lifespan.

What kind of technology has (or could have) direct lifespan extension capabilities?

In this case, we're defining direct lifespan extension capabilities as those things that specifically annul aging or causes of decease. Ultimately, in that location are both internal and external factors that cause cells and organisms to age and die. External things like UV radiation (Baz Luhrmann — wear sunscreen!) crusade Dna damage which can trigger a cell's self-destruct mechanisms. Within and between cells, the molecular flotsam and jetsam of life build up like crumbs in the cupholders of a car, causing a status chosen senescence. Senolytics, which are substances that unclog the works by selectively inducing the death of senescent cells, can address that problem. Senolytics have been shown to extend good for you adulthood in mice, but equally usual, information technology's not articulate notwithstanding whether that will translate to humans.

Telomerase is some other probable player in the fight against aging. Telomeres are regions of disposable DNA that cap off the ends of chromosomes, preventing the mucilaginous ends of Dna from attaching somewhere they shouldn't. During life, repeated handling can shorten telomeres, and when telomeres get too short, Deoxyribonucleic acid replication gets buggy, which can also lead to jail cell decease. Telomerase is an enzyme that prevents this degradation, sort of like the protective border around a Polaroid. Getting the do good out of telomerase isn't as simple equally taking telomerase pills to live longer, but we don't know exactly why yet.

Telomeres

Telomeres (artist delineation)

In fact, the whole idea of senolytics is that we can become effectively control over the cell cycle, so that we can tell cells when to dice and when not to. It's much less a statement near any unmarried therapy than information technology is a argument about the relative level of scientific advancement needed to brand these biotechnologies piece of work.

Then there are more indirect forms of technological life extension. We're defining "indirect" life extension equally technologies that prevent unnecessary deaths, extend valuable years, or reduce stress that leads to aging and infirmity. Falling into this category are things similar smart houses — warning and first help systems that can forbid deaths and make daily living easier. Only there are likewise inventions like the exoskeletons we've covered recently and even materials-science innovations like, say, an implant or indwelling device made from a highly hydro- and oleophobic textile that tin can repel biofilm adhesion.

Personalized health intendance, in particular BayMax-like personal health care assistants, also represent a coming sea change in how we age. To the extent to which AI is really improve than human doctors, it volition take over the practise of medicine, no matter how unflattering it may feel at the time.

"Dietary supplements" and megadosing, though, are going the way of the superfood craze. Like every other dietary fad, nutraceuticals are of express use exterior the narrow set of conditions where they've been institute to work. If you've read well-nigh the genuinely dismal state of the dietary supplement manufacture, you may be familiar with this problem. When Ray Kurzweil spoke at RIT in 2008, he had with him a gallon-size Ziploc that he said held the several cups of pills he claims to have per 24-hour interval. Kurzweil is amidst others hoping to hedge their bets and extend their lives with liberally applied nutraceutical-grade serpent oil, proving that you can be smart, well-intentioned, well-informed, and still merely manifestly wrong. The all-time statement in favor of nutraceuticals is "Hey, it can't hurt." There is no dietary magic bullet for life extension, and if you lot're trying the "spray and pray" method like Kurzweil, you lot've already lost.

This brings us to the singularity.

The general idea of a technological singularity is a future where technology has advanced so far that it outstrips the ability of humans to understand it. In that location are, more or less, 2 ways the scenario can play out: in favor of humans, or in favor of the AI. Kurzweil and his singularitarians tend to believe that if humans tin ride the wave of advancing applied science, forming a harmonious relationship with information technology, we tin heighten our own intelligence to the indicate of transcending our physiological premises. In sure possible futures, this could mean straight augmenting the body and brain with cybernetics in order to improve or extend function or lifespan.

If — and this is a big if — we had sufficient computing prowess and sufficiently avant-garde understanding of the crossroads betwixt torso and mind, we could fifty-fifty budge up against mind uploading. Setting aside the difficulties of storage media and whether or not the Matrix is a good idea, heed uploading could neatly circumvent bloodshed by representing your consciousness as a lossless ready of nodes and waveforms and their associated Boolean logic, which could be easily transmitted between systems, like a PDF.

Gordon Moore, of Moore'south Law, actually argued confronting the idea of a technological singularity. He wasn't convinced that the miniaturization of transistors could make them suited to modeling the complexity of the human brain. Kurzweil'south vision of a technological singularity can exist understood differently, by looking at something Asimov wrote called "The relativity of wrong." The full general gist of the piece is that, no matter how wrong we are about things now, nosotros'll never exist that wrong again. Another way of saying information technology is that progress builds upon itself; we don't unlearn innovations we've fabricated, which means that the pace of history inevitably accelerates through time. Every new idea comes into being in the presence of all the old ones, which means that the pool of data never shrinks.

Then, while we're running around chasing longevity, how do we brand sure we get more Guinan and less Lady Cassandra?

Cassandra_closeup_The_End_of_the_World

Moisturize me! (Credit: Doctor Who Wiki)

My personal feeling hither is that sure, we'll get a set of interventions and therapies that can cut down on the vast majority of things that cause crumbling: the first five sigmas, every bit it were. Simply equally we practice that, things volition likely get progressively weirder. Gene products don't ever practice just the one thing; the miracle is chosen pleiotropy, whereby one segment of DNA does more 1 of import merely unrelated thing. Crystallins are a skillful example of this — when expressed at depression levels in body tissues, they act as enzymes, simply when expressed at high levels in the eye, instead of being enzymatically agile, they pack closely and form lenses. Meddling with a gene product is going to exist a dicey proffer at best.

The bottom line is that humanity'southward use of technology has the potential to be at least as constructive as it can be destructive, and navigating the line between those states will require a caste of knowledge orders of magnitude beyond what we have now. In theory, information technology should be possible to build supercomputers with plenty raw processing power to simulate the human being brain within a decade. Fifty-fifty if this occurs, however, information technology'due south merely the first step. The claiming from that point will exist how to simulate a human being brain, and to discover whether or not said simulation is capable of annihilation like man learning or cognitive processes. The question of sapience and consciousness and our ethical obligations in the event that these should occur is an entirely dissimilar tin can of worms.

The singularity, when and if it occurs, is unlikely to be anything like nosotros've imagined, and the gulf between where we are today and where we'd need to be is too enormous to speculate on either its timeline or its properties. There are all the same too many things we know we don't know and undoubtedly many that we don't know we don't know — to speculate on what form the singularity might presume. Mice trials and gene therapy are a long way from the quantum leaps Kurzweil believes the human race will take in the non-too-distant future. But they're the only way to ensure that the future he and others want to create is worth living in, rather than the cyber dystopia that could occur if advisable ethical guidelines and safeguards are not observed.

Read the residuum of our Medical Tech Week stories for more. And be sure to check out our ExtremeTech Explains serial for more in-depth coverage of today's hottest tech topics.