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singularity

Over the past ten days or so, nosotros've highlighted multiple advances in medicine and engineering that could change medical care every bit we know it in the not-besides-distant hereafter. For our final deep swoop on the topic (for now), we're going to address one of the most difficult questions of all, a difficulty that mankind has been struggling to overcome at least since Qin Shi Huang died from ingesting mercury in a bid to make himself immortal: Human longevity. And while immortality remains firmly outside our grasp, we're using engineering science to meliorate homo longevity today, and accept been since the adoption of fire and simple machines. Using medical technology, we can set on the problems limiting human being lifespan.

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

In this example, we're defining direct lifespan extension capabilities as those things that specifically counteract crumbling or causes of death. Ultimately, at that place are both internal and external factors that crusade cells and organisms to age and dice. External things like UV radiations (Baz Luhrmann — vesture sunscreen!) cause Dna damage which can trigger a cell'due south cocky-destruct mechanisms. Within and between cells, the molecular flotsam and jetsam of life build upwardly like crumbs in the cupholders of a car, causing a condition called senescence. Senolytics, which are substances that unclog the works by selectively inducing the death of senescent cells, can address that problem. Senolytics take been shown to extend healthy machismo in mice, but every bit usual, information technology's non clear notwithstanding whether that volition translate to humans.

Telomerase is some other likely player in the fight against aging. Telomeres are regions of disposable DNA that cap off the ends of chromosomes, preventing the sticky ends of DNA from attaching somewhere they shouldn't. During life, repeated handling tin shorten telomeres, and when telomeres go likewise brusque, Deoxyribonucleic acid replication gets buggy, which can besides lead to cell decease. Telomerase is an enzyme that prevents this degradation, sort of similar the protective border around a Polaroid. Getting the benefit out of telomerase isn't as elementary equally taking telomerase pills to alive longer, simply we don't know exactly why nevertheless.

Telomeres

Telomeres (creative person depiction)

In fact, the whole thought of senolytics is that nosotros can get finer command over the cell cycle, so that we can tell cells when to dice and when non to. It's much less a statement about whatsoever single therapy than it is a statement about the relative level of scientific advocacy needed to brand these biotechnologies work.

Then there are more than indirect forms of technological life extension. Nosotros're defining "indirect" life extension every bit technologies that forestall unnecessary deaths, extend valuable years, or reduce stress that leads to aging and infirmity. Falling into this category are things like smart houses — alert and offset aid systems that tin prevent deaths and make daily living easier. Only there are also inventions like the exoskeletons we've covered recently and even materials-scientific discipline innovations like, say, an implant or indwelling device made from a highly hydro- and oleophobic textile that can repel biofilm adhesion.

Personalized wellness care, in particular BayMax-similar personal health intendance assistants, also stand for a coming sea change in how we age. To the extent to which AI is really better than man doctors, it volition take over the practice of medicine, no matter how unflattering it may feel at the time.

"Dietary supplements" and megadosing, though, are going the style of the superfood craze. Like every other dietary fad, nutraceuticals are of limited employ outside the narrow prepare of conditions where they've been found to work. If y'all've read almost the genuinely dismal state of the dietary supplement industry, y'all may be familiar with this trouble. 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 take per twenty-four hours. Kurzweil is amid others hoping to hedge their bets and extend their lives with liberally applied nutraceutical-form snake oil, proving that you can exist smart, well-intentioned, well-informed, and still merely plain wrong. The best statement in favor of nutraceuticals is "Hey, it tin't hurt." There is no dietary magic bullet for life extension, and if you're trying the "spray and pray" method like Kurzweil, you've already lost.

This brings us to the singularity.

The general idea of a technological singularity is a future where technology has avant-garde so far that it outstrips the power of humans to empathise information technology. There are, more or less, ii ways the scenario tin can play out: in favor of humans, or in favor of the AI. Kurzweil and his singularitarians tend to believe that if humans can ride the moving ridge of advancing engineering, forming a harmonious relationship with it, nosotros can enhance our own intelligence to the point of transcending our physiological bounds. In sure possible futures, this could hateful direct augmenting the trunk and brain with cybernetics in order to meliorate or extend function or lifespan.

If — and this is a big if — we had sufficient computing prowess and sufficiently avant-garde agreement of the crossroads betwixt torso and heed, nosotros could even budge up confronting mind uploading. Setting aside the difficulties of storage media and whether or not the Matrix is a expert idea, heed uploading could neatly circumvent mortality past representing your consciousness as a lossless set up of nodes and waveforms and their associated Boolean logic, which could be easily transmitted betwixt systems, similar a PDF.

Gordon Moore, of Moore'southward Law, actually argued confronting the thought 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's vision of a technological singularity tin can be understood differently, past looking at something Asimov wrote chosen "The relativity of wrong." The full general gist of the slice is that, no matter how wrong nosotros are nearly things now, we'll never be that wrong once more. Some other way of proverb it is that progress builds upon itself; we don't unlearn innovations we've fabricated, which ways that the pace of history inevitably accelerates through time. Every new idea comes into being in the presence of all the sometime ones, which means that the puddle of information never shrinks.

So, while we're running around chasing longevity, how do we make sure nosotros go more Guinan and less Lady Cassandra?

Cassandra_closeup_The_End_of_the_World

Moisturize me! (Credit: Doctor Who Wiki)

My personal feeling here is that certain, nosotros'll get a set of interventions and therapies that can cut down on the vast majority of things that cause aging: the outset five sigmas, as it were. Simply every bit we exercise that, things volition likely go progressively weirder. Factor products don't always do just the one thing; the phenomenon is chosen pleiotropy, whereby 1 segment of DNA does more than one important simply unrelated affair. Crystallins are a skilful example of this — when expressed at low levels in trunk tissues, they act as enzymes, but when expressed at high levels in the eye, instead of being enzymatically active, they pack closely and form lenses. Meddling with a gene product is going to exist a dicey proposition at best.

The bottom line is that humanity'southward use of technology has the potential to be at to the lowest degree as constructive equally it tin be destructive, and navigating the line betwixt those states will require a degree of knowledge orders of magnitude across what nosotros have at present. In theory, it should be possible to build supercomputers with enough raw processing power to simulate the human brain within a decade. Even if this occurs, however, it's only the first step. The challenge from that point will be how to simulate a human brain, and to discover whether or not said simulation is capable of anything like human learning or cognitive processes. The question of sapience and consciousness and our ethical obligations in the event that these should occur is an entirely different can of worms.

The singularity, when and if information technology occurs, is unlikely to be anything like nosotros've imagined, and the gulf between where nosotros are today and where we'd need to be is as well enormous to speculate on either its timeline or its backdrop. There are however besides many things we know we don't know and undoubtedly many that we don't know we don't know — to speculate on what class the singularity might assume. Mice trials and factor therapy are a long way from the breakthrough leaps Kurzweil believes the homo race will accept in the not-too-distant future. But they're the just manner to ensure that the future he and others want to create is worth living in, rather than the cyber dystopia that could occur if appropriate ethical guidelines and safeguards are not observed.

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