Science Fiction becomes Science Fact?
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For much of human history, living up to a ripe old age was seen as a gift from the gods, an aberration, or just the product of sheer luck. Given that up to the beginning of the twentieth century many of us succumbed to disease at an early age, being extremely fortunate to live anywhere past the age of forty, it should be no surprise that living a long life is still beatified today as something akin to winning the lottery.
Even when confronted with the galloping pace of scientific advances in human longevity, our historical sensibilities have led us to take a defeatist stance towards the subject: “Even if longevity interventions become available during my lifetime, I am already too late to take advantage of them, so why bother?”
Indeed, this hesitation to see human life extension as a real possibility in our lifetime, dismissing it as a dream belonging to the realms of science fiction[1] and futuristic utopias[2] is not an uncommon one, and as long as tangible rejuvenation therapies do not become available, we will feel validated in our pragmatism.
Doing well on such a challenge would appear to require significant advances in AI technology, making it a potentially powerful way to advance the field. In this video, Carissa Schoenick discusses “Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge,” in the September 2017 CACM.
It is critical that those responsible for running our nations have scientific knowledge in order to make the right decisions instead of making them based on misunderstandings of what the real science is.
In Unexpected Futurist, we profile the lesser known futurist side of influential individuals. This episode’s unexpected time-traveler: Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin was an inventor, observer, electricity pioneer, and serial experimenter, so it’s not entirely surprising he looked to the future. But it turns out he was looking to the far, far future. In 1780 he wrote a letter to a friend in which he lamented that he was born during the dawn of science.
I’m excited to see Mark O’Connell’s book “To Be a Machine” (about # transhumanism ) get shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, one the biggest science book prizes in the world. The final chapter of “To Be a Machine” is about my Immortality Bus journey and presidential campaign (a version of that chapter appeared in The New York Times Magazine after Mark rode with me on the bus). The book also has a wikipedia page now. Winner to be announced on September 19. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_a_Machine
Futurist José Cordeiro talks longevity, AI, and the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
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“In 30 years, I will be younger than today, not older,” says José Luis Cordeiro, who’s a founding faculty member at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based think tank devoted to futurism. “Why? Because we are going to have rejuvenation techniques, and these experiments are beginning right now.”
A mechanical engineer with a degree from MIT, Cordeiro has worked in fields ranging from monetary policy to petroleum engineering, and he created the first formal “future studies” course at the Austrian School of Economics in Venezuela, his birth country.
