IEEE Future Directions
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The myth of “being forever young” goes back as long as we can trace human history, but that does not make it anymore true, actually, having been pursued for so long with no effect might cast a serious doubt on the hope of fulfilling that desire.
Yet, if we look at the last 100 years we see that the life expectancy has dramatically improved in all Countries but the age limit has not really changed (the actual verified record for oldest person il 122 years old). There seems to be a limit “coded” in our DNA.
Some people, like Ray Kurzweil, are convinced that now we are starting to have the technology that would let us reach the longevity escape velocity, that is the point that as you get one year older technology will extend your life by one more year. The net outcome is that you will live forever.
Now, I do not share this view. Of course I realise I might well be wrong and that looking at the past to forecast the future is not necessarily a good approach. However, at a fundamental level I am not convinced that we can really change a time bounded life into an unbounded one, time wise.
Yes, I can expect science and technology to be able to modify the telomere extending them, as they naturally tend to get shorter, but it is the whole “machine”, I feel, that would need to be re-designed. And, along with it the whole Society will need to be redesigned. How can we make space for newborn if we will be in the way forever?
There is also a personal issue. We forget most of our life, only a few details remain in our memories. Would you remember what you ate on December 2nd in 2002? I bet not, as well as what you were wearing on that day, what you said, how was the weather…. Unless, of course, that was the day you got married or a special day in any other way. Forgetting is natural and in a way, empirically speaking, let us free space in our brain for recording new experiences (there are speculations that our brain is largely under utilised and could actually store much more, but at the same time there are also signs indicating that if we were to remember everything our life would be quite different, and not necessarily better!).
At FDC in the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative we are considering some aspect of Human Augmentation, and clearly life extension is an aspect of augmentation. CRISP/Cas9 are providing tools to manipulate the genome and once we will (and eventually I am sure we will) understand all the aspects of the genome we will be able to tweak it in the direction we may desire. I am still not convinced that a Longevity escape velocity can be achieved, even less as someone claims in the next decade. Your pick?
