Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
Undoing Aging 2019 is the second edition of the Undoing Aging conferences series. It is organized by the SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation. For those of you who don’t know the SENS Foundation, it has been founded 10 years ago by Aubrey de Grey. Aubrey his the genius who has launched the whole field of true anti-aging research for 20 years, after realizing nobody was actually working on curing aging despite the advances of science. He had to fight for legitimacy, until a few years ago when the field finally caught the eyes of some big money and start gaining traction.
It was the first time I participated in a conference about anti-aging. I have been following this field of research since about 2011, when I turned 25 years old and realize how short life was, and panickly wondered if someone was doing something about it. I stumbled upon the excellent blog Fight Aging! , and from there Aubrey De Grey, SENS, the Methuselah foundation,… This blog was instrumental is steering me away from the snake oil industry of “anti aging marketplace”, selling miracle useless supplements to desperate people. Still, I did not act on it immediately, I continued my job as a technician, waiting for others to solve this problem. However a few years later, I am in the position of having a bit more time and money on my hands, and I figured this is a worthy goal, as aging is killing 100,000 person a day (after causing years of suffering for millions more). So my goal coming to Undoing Aging was to get the latest news of the field but more importantly try to find a way to contribute more actively to the cause of anti-aging research than giving and investing money. Ironically this comes at a time when I no longer want to hold onto my own precious little life anymore, when I came to see myself more as part of a species where death is not such a big deal. However suffering is, and no attempt to reduce suffering is vain. We are in a transition age. We might just “upgrade” the planet toward a more sapient planet, with no suffering, a global conscience and sense of direction. Or we might just crash back to mere animals. It depends on the choices we make, and preventing the meaninglessness of death and the tremendous sufferings of old age is a step in the right direction (not the only one of course). It should increase our time horizon, our sense of responsibility, hopefully our wisdom, and change the paradigm of breeding like rabbits on a finite planet for a more sensible population evolution. So, Undoing Aging, here I come.
The conference did not disappoint. It was sold out, with more than 500 persons crowded in the small building. In fact there was actually too many people, which caused some issues when trying to eat all at the same time at the cafeteria in the 1 hour break of lunch time.
You will be able to find the videos of some of the speakers here in the following months. You can find some of the speakers and topics below:
Some impressions:
Most of the talks were fascinating science, but not all seemed that relevant to aging to me. Of course what constitutes a good strategy is a matter of point of view, but some talks were really irrelevant. For example, there was a talk from a company which shall remain nameless, which presented a random approach to a “senomorphic”, which is apparently a class of drug able to modulate the Senescence Associated Secretory Phenotype to avoid its most harmful effects. This was more a less a pitch for one of the company product, without much science behind. This seems exactly the kind of “therapy” big pharma would be interested in, an incremental step toward very slight better health, while some many superior alternatives exists.
On the other side there was some gems, like a technique under investigation to “replace neurons in the aged cortex”, using microglia cells (which can migrate in the brain), and turn those into neurons once they are in place. This can prove very useful in the future, as the brain is not an organ that regenerates easily, and if we are living much more longer, replacing lost neurons might be something we want to do. I am more skeptical about using this to treat degenerative diseases like Alzheimer, I think it would be akin to pumping water out of a sinking ship. There must be better target, more upstream causes to attack.
One last example to illustrate the interesting choice made regarding the speaker: Just after the lunch break, there is a half an hour session to present some abstract of various study, 15 minutes each (as opposed to half an hour for the “regular” session. This is considered the “less important” talks. One of those was made from a new company, Turn.Bio. (Disclaimer: I am an investor in this company). They presented a newly published study showing their ability to rejuvenate a cell using epigenetic reprogramming. This impact most if not all of the hallmark of aging, and, although I may be wrong, this is in my mind the single most promising strategy against aging. Not the panacea, but potentially very close, because it uses the cells own ability to rejuvenate. And the public did not miss it, as there were a lot of questions firing, and the panel for the study was always busy after that. Seems like some people are taking notice of the real important stuff. Still, you have to wonder why Turn.Bio only had 15 minutes to talk…
Of course, one of the main purpose of the conference is actually to connect people. There was a varied crowd there, scientists, postdocs and interns, media, entrepreneurs, investors, and probably just interested people. I have heard 2 people there tell me that the atmosphere is a bit like the early days of Bitcoin, and I think I agree. There is a lot of out-of-the-box thinking here, a lot of dreamers and pioneers, those who want to live forever, those that want to change the world, those that want to make money,… It is a frontier of sort, the first wave of an upcoming revolution that will change medicine forever. And it is time to change it, though that is a topic for another day.
I haven’t had the chance to meet most of the people present, but I was able to catch a few very cool guys, very mission oriented, with whom we might just help make some progress in the right direction. There is so many things to do.
And here we are now, 2 and a half day later. It was too short, but amazing to get a foot in the field, see how fast things are progressing, despite all the obstacles, the inertia of regulations, of bureaucracy, of ego and power grabbing and quick profit making,… Still among that, a few idealists are making things move forward. 100,000 life a day. It is time to do something about it.
So that’s the topics of the week, blogging and resting (a lot of rest actually) updating, post by post the holes in the story. While Raph is going to the undoing ageing conference, you can see my workspace below.
I have a small assistant who’s whispering ideas of post in my ears, as you can see she’s overactive !
This book is formalizing perfectly my thoughts for the future of mankind: How to better link humans through technology, specifically mind to mind technology. It was a fascinating account of how we might interface brains between them, using existing technologies (that still needs to be much improved upon).
The book was also telling the personal story of its author, how he found meaning, how he discovered the power of touch, of real human contact, and how he found love. This might seem completely how of place for such a book, but it is not. On the contrary, he knew we could accuse him of wanting to replace humans by a mindless zombies dystopia like the Borg in Star Trek. So the author used his personal experiences to stress the importance of rediscovering human relations and sense of community. To illustrate how a technology that would allow humans to share emotion over the internet might be more humanizing that current communication systems.
The book imagined how a global self aware consciousness might emerge and what form it could take.
In short, this is a very inspiring book. I hope it encouraged entrepreneurs to explore the possibilities of brain-computer interface. Certainly I will be paying close attention to the field and help if I can make this dream come true.
This book is the kind of science-fiction that takes place in the past. More exactly it is an alternate history fiction.
To call it “science fiction” is actually a bit of a stretch. The book tell of the history of humanity after the Black Death entirely decimated Europe, through the eyes of a few protagonists that lives through many reincarnation. This is quite a stretch for science, and it through me off a bit.
But after a while, it grew on me and I could enjoy the book though certain lyric discussion on religious matter were a bit of a stretch. It still made for an interesting book, but don’t expect many surprise: the history of technological and scientific progress is the same. This is actually the “thesis” of this book: to show that Europeans are not specials, that with them humanity would have followed the same trajectory. This is a thesis based on liberal faith rather than science, but I think it is true: life tends to evolve toward increasing complexity, which science and technological development certainly are a sign of.
Earth in Human Hands is an optimistic book about our future, and the future of our planet. And in an unexpected way it touches upon a topic that has been of increasing interest to me these last few months: mind to mind communication. Well, not explicitly of course! It is a book about ecology and human and what to do with all of our power.
But the author revisited with insistance the “Gaia Hypothesis”, the idea that the planet is a single organism, with each elements interacting with all the others in endless feedback loops. And for the author, the humans could become a precursor to a planetary mind, the planet becoming self aware. No mind to mind communication here, but the idea is certainly a variation on the subject of integrating everything under a global and conscious entity. In a sense, it already is integrated, though we can’t say the planet is yet self-aware. Only by massively increasing the brain to brain bandwidth could we achieve that. But I disgress.
This book opened my eyes on just how tightly everything interacts with everything. For example, the CO2 in our atmosphere is absorbed into the ocean, integrated with organisms that die and fill up the bottom of the oceans, to finish in the Earth’s crust, then in its mantle, then back into the atmosphere when volcanoes erupt. This cycle keeps the climate under control, avoiding runaway greenhouse. That is until a species became so successful as to fill the whole planet with themselves and CO2 faster than the ocean can pull out. This just shows how fragile our planet is.
But no doomsday gloom here, no hatred of humanity, no wish to return to a pre-industrial state. David Grinspoon is not opposing human civilisation and ecology, on the contrary, he makes the case that only through our ingenuity, through moderation, through maturity, through worldwide cooperation, can we overcome the challenges that we created for the planet, and help it to enter a new eon he coined the “Sapiezoic”, an eon when the planet becomes self-aware.
This is a message for ecology we can all get behind!
Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future by David Grinspoon
Artemis by Andy WeirToday I broke a 4 days water fast started on Thursday.
Up until now I only made 3 days water fast. I had symptoms of lightheadedness and muscles pain yesterday, and discovered that adding salt to the water I drank helped A LOT.
So the lesson of the day: During fasting, drink a lot of water with added salt. Adding magnesium could be a good idea too.
This is what I broke the fast with:
Followed half an hour later by 1kg of mince beef with 400g of kimchi. Yumi!
The Nexus Trilogy is a postcyberpunk thriller novel trilogy written by American author Ramez Naam and published between 2012-2015. The novel series follows the protagonist Kaden Lane, a scientist who works on an experimental nano-drug, Nexus, which allows the brain to be programmed and networked, connecting human minds together. As he pursues his work, he becomes entangled in government and corporate intrigue. The story takes place in the year 2040.[1][2][3]
The Nexus trilogy – wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy
Nexus tied for Best Novel in the 2014 Prometheus Awards given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society.[4] It was also shortlisted for the 2014 Arthur C. Clarke award.[5] Nexus was published in 2012. Its sequel, Crux, was published in 2013.[6] The third volume of the trilogy, Apex, was published in 2014, and won the 2015 Philip K. Dick Award. The film rights to Nexus were purchased by Paramount in 2013.[7]
Somehow this introduction from Wikipedia doesn’t do justice to this trilogy. This trilogy was among the many sci-fi books on my to-read list. After finishing the Foundation universe from Asimov, I was interested in the idea of connecting or merging mind and other mind-to-mind technology, so this book Nexus seemed look a good read. And boy it was.
Nexus describes the world as it could be in the near future, and how society and people around the world would react to various human enhancement technologies.
First, I found that the author did a great job trying describing these technologies without embellishing them too much. The “headlight” technology of the book, Nexus, is a computer made of nano-“processor/antenna” sitting in and interfacing with the brain, able to wireless communicate to the near surroundings. The potential for abuses are great, mind control, slavery, rape, theft,… All of this are part of the plots in the books, and all these technologies brings their fair shares of sufferings and violence especially in the last one.
With that said, the author does make the point that the benefits outweighs the costs. I am biased in that I already think humans should enhance themselves by any means (in fact I think this is the only way out for us as a species), but still I think the arguments he presented are convincing. The main take away is that all this technologies are about connecting more deeply. And when you think about it, language and speech is a way to communicate more deeply, to transmit more ideas to one another; in this light, telepathy is just a step up speech, and it is not a fundamentally different change. Of course some could argue that one change is natural and the other artificial but this doesn’t actually hold against rational scrutiny.
So these books do an excellent job at convincing us that human augmentation, and especially mind to mind communication, is desirable (especially in the first book in which the author explores the argument again and again.
But what took me by surprise was the place taken by meditation in the story. Meditation is everywhere, and actually a crucial and necessary piece of the final resolution of the story (spoiler spoiler). And this is what made this trilogy so special to me. It is clear that the goal of transcendence, the goal of the Buddhist Nirvana, of tearing apart the illusion of the self, is what we should all look forward to. And the nexus nanites are presented as just a more efficient way to bring the masses to nirvana, and a way to merge individual consciousnesses into one “global mind”, a consciousness that is “more than the sum of its parts”, as Naam insist on throughout the story. Buddhist monks play important roles throughout the books, and with them, and through the eyes of the main protagonist, the author allow the reader to discover what meditation is, what it means, what it can bring. Having recently “discover” mindfulness myself and been slowly transformed by it, I particularly appreciated this marriage between mindfulness and transhumanism. The 2 should go hand to hand together. In fact, if we don’t want to get lost by technology, we want them to come together, to stay on an ethical path that doesn’t leave behind (or worse) any humans.
So the Nexus trilogy is describing a violent future. But this violence is a childbirth pain to a new state of humanity, with less suffering, more intelligence, more beauty. And while I very much hope we never come to the violence depicted there, I do wish to see humanity embrace transhumanism, go to its next step in evolution, and take the whole planet with it toward Gaia.
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