"The procedure Kurimoto performed is unlikely to restore his patient's vision. However, researchers around the world will be watching closely to see whether the cells are able to check the further destruction of the retina while avoiding potential side-effects, such as bringing about an immune reaction or inducing cancerous growth."
Seems that at this point they're still evaluating safety rather than actual therapeutic benefits. Still exciting progress :)
Being able to "check the further destruction of the retina" is a therapeutic benefit when it comes to macular degeneration. It's the best outcome you can hope for on any of our current treatments for it. The retina is still relatively poorly understood, and our treatments for the pathologies of it are unfortunately limited.
First, I would guess that part of the reason Calico is a separate company instead of just a team within Google is that they don't fit within Google's central mission. Second,I don't know if there really needs to be an altruistic motive; is Larry's concern for his own health and the health of those he cares about not enough?
People died to make room for Larry. For him to try and cheat the system when it's his turn is the ultimate act of disrespect. So no, that isn't good enough.
They probably wouldn't have chosen to do so if they had a choice. Larry, and others working on this problem, want to give people a choice in the matter.
Don't you think that many of the world's problems: global warming, pollution, war, and so on, might be pursued a little more energetically if people knew they were going to be around for 500 years rather than 80?
I'm extremely interested in understanding your perspective. See, I not only publicly support this, but as an aging researcher, I spend my days, nights, and weekends (right now, in fact) working towards this goal.
I do so because I believe that, in a world full of Bad Things, death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them. Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently. Forget Larry, I don't want to see my friends, family, and neighbors die. I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
If you think that extending life is selfish and wrong, then to be logically consistent, wouldn't the Red Cross and hospitals and so on be evil organizations? What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
> Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently.
- Every time a person dies, their life is passed on through those they have connected with and influenced. Their influence on the world does not end, only their opportunity to see its effect. And most importantly, gives room for someone to do even more with what they have accomplished.
> death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them.
- Death may be better described as one of the scariest of them. When you are dead you feel no pain. You don't even know you are dead. Certainly, we miss those in our life who have passed away, but they live on in our hearts and dreams for the remainder of our lives.
> I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
> What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
- When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
I don't want to invalidate your work, but are you sure we really need this as a society? Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
I think this deals with your main premise of the nebulous 'room'.
From the paper Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging.
'Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations.'
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates
Just like when people found better uses for space, people will find better uses for longer lifelines, given the opportunity. Considering how quickly we advance, how much more informed we are, how much more control we have over our lives, and how much increasingly more there is to do in the world for everyone, it makes sense now more than ever.
Other technologies can furthermore make this even more convenient, and possibly even eliminate the trade-off of having less children. The dynamics currently in place were intended for a different world, and the one of today is changing very rapidly.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
And yet so very little life we actually do live in our limited time! Most of our time on this Earth is spent in drudgery just trying to stay alive.
>Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
We ought to be doing both. Anti-aging treatments ought to be available universally, for absolutely everyone, just like all other health-care that saves your life.
We also ought to be getting rid of things like poverty, that kill people a bit more slowly and make them live in misery in the meantime. And toil, too, while we're at it: it's simply got to go.
Unfortunately, our society seems to take no account whatsoever of ought, so anti-aging didn't happen until some billionaire decided he liked transhumanist scifi novels.
To be fair, people have been working on this problem for decades. It is only in the last 1-2 decades, though, that really large datasets (genetic and otherwise) have been available to turn understanding aging from a hard experimental problem into more of a data analysis problem (experiments will obviously still be needed). I think this new availability of biomedical "big data" is what is drawing in a lot of CS-type people recently.
Just like AI, people have been trying for a long time. It's just a damn hard problem.
There's a great diversity in lifespan among organisms, which is a good clue, but the number of organisms that actually show no senescence is quite small, and they are all very distant from humans evolutionarily.
Those few have been studied heavily in aging, but trying to extrapolate differences in these organisms to humans is very challenging because they have totally different anatomies, genomes, and sets of proteins. Plus, lifespan is very multifactorial; for example, you can "extend lifespan" in many species by inhibiting cancer, but that isn't really stopping aging per se.
It's hard for many reasons, but I think the most important one is that we have no good mathematical or experimental tools for understanding and predicting how a given perturbation (drug, diet, etc) will affect a hugely complex network of 25K+ transcripts. Or how those transcripts affect each other causally. In a variety of tissues. And genetic backgrounds. And in the context of longer-term changes like epigenetic changes and DNA mutation.
Another huge problem is that lifespan studies take, well, lifetimes. So we usually do them in organisms like worms and flies, which are very different from humans.
Almost everything related to getting "serious" mesospheric effects in biological systems is a hard problem. Animal bodies really are that complex.
On the other hand, it can still tick me off how aging and anti-aging are, in much of the world, simply not considered medical issues worthy of research at all.
It raises a lot of social and religious implications many would rather not think about.
But we have learned to deal with it. Instead of saying you're studying aging, you say you're studying "age-associated disease X" (which works for almost any X) and the effects of age on X. Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
>Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
I honestly hadn't thought that this isn't a genuine good argument in favor of anti-aging research.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
Can't you just replace 65 with 55 and say the same thing? 55 with 45? 45 with 35?
Conversely, if I can live through so much life in 65 years, couldn't I live through more in 75? 85? 95? Given n years of healthy, productive life, at what point does the n+1th year of healthy productive life give you a negative marginal value?
First, there's no way you could offend me by anything you say. You've already done me a great service by explaining your views. I've met people with similar views before, but usually they're reluctant to describe them at length.
I agree that traces of people remain after their death -- genetically, in their children, and in the memories of those who knew them. But those traces fade quickly, and for all but the most famous, virtually disappear in a few centuries. And surely you agree that a memory is a poor substitute for a person -- I'd rather be able to talk to my dad or neighbor than have even the fondest memories of them.
We both seem to agree that improving the quality of people's lives, as well as the quantity, is extremely important. Aging is far from the only problem society faces. Tackling inequality/poverty, political dysfunction, war, ignorance, and other problems are also extremely important goals, and I greatly respect people who work on them. I also recognize that curing aging will introduce new societal problems even as it solves others (e.g., rising health care costs).
I think where we differ is that I think these other problems can be solved as well, and I believe that curing aging will, on balance help society more than it harms it. Consider how our scientific progress is retarded when our best scientists die or lose their mental acuity later in life. I've already alluded to the fact that people seem to ignore problems ranging from global warming to the national debt because "I'll be dead before it becomes a problem."
I have several responses to your concern that if people stop aging, we won't have room for future generations. First, it is well known that wealthier people and countries have a lower birth rate, so by solving poverty, the birth rate will decrease. Second, even if people don't age, they can still die from accidents or disease. Also, I think eventually humanity will expand to the stars, although we are far from it now.
Massive societal change is coming, from many sources, whether or not aging is solved (although I make no claims about when). Technology is going to put many people out of work. AI will eventually be created. Methods will be developed to improve human intelligence, enhancing technological development but increasing wealth inequality. Even if none of these developments occur, there is still an increasing centralization of wealth and power in developed countries.
It is hard to know how curing aging would interact with these trends, except to say that I think people would be more circumspect about societal decisions if they knew they would have to bear the long-term consequences. I think the demand for religion would decrease, which would have positive effects on geopolitical stability. Living longer would also give people more time to get educated, which would help with the electoral ignorance that is at the root of so many problems in the US.
Finally, your proposed principle for determining the "correct" lifespan is not a new one:
> When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
The NIH takes a similar view. The problem is that almost all major diseases (diabetes, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, to some extent cancer) are all diseases of aging. Young people don't (usually) get them. It may well be that to "cure" these diseases, we will have to solve the underlying problem -- that is, aging.
Also, consider that it is just genetic happenstance that our species max lifespan happens to be 120. Why should it not be 15 or 60 or 240? Letting evolution decide our lifespan is certainly the simplest method, but it seems fairly arbitrary.
Those are valid points. I'll only address one point below, because I see a lot of your reasoning as being that all technological advancement is a net good, which I feel is often the divide between those who are for and against anti-aging.
As for passing on to others. Its not memories or genetics. It's inertia. As we go through life we set other things in motion. Our interactions with each other and the world around us causes changes in direction and speed. Everything we do sets something else into motion, infinitely unique from what would have happened without us. No matter how small the action.
I watched that attitude over the years (people saying that death is "good"), and I think the reason is people believe death is inevitable. After all, this is how it has always been, and to them, dreaming about immortality is pointless and counterproductive. It's much easier just to find reasons why dying is "good for you".
Luckily, there are also people like you, who choose to do something about it. Personally, I work on AI, so that hopefully IBM Watson in 2050 will be able to help us cure aging.
There are many people who think that way too, but I think fred_durst seems to genuinely be more concerned about the effects on society.
When I was considering careers, I concluded that there are 3 world-changing scientific problems: aging, neuroscience (understanding the brain and cognitive enhancement), and AI. Interestingly, they're all intertwined.
Best of luck. Personally I think AI will come before a cure for aging. In some ways, I view my work as a fallback, in case AI doesn't come fast enough.
No. Not at all. In fact things like pollution and war will likely get a lot worse. I'm shocked people can even publicly admit they support this type of selfish behavior.
Why do you think, that there have to be future generations after aging is solved? And why do you think that humans will always be limited to living on earth?
Planet Earth is our home and will be. I would like to see we spend our resources to control pollution, contain global warming and save species from being endangered first before looking to outer space for help.
And yeah future generations will be looking at us how we act because they definitely would prefer living here imo.
T-Mobile is claiming that they are not sponsorships and that Spotify, Rhapsody, Pandora, and the other launch partners are not paying for data-exempt status[1]. That said, this still raises serious net-neutrality red flags.
Why is that a concern to me though (I'm representing the public)? Net neutrality proponents regularly couch their rhetoric in being an issue for the public's interest. To me it seems like one industry (tech/web companies) jockeying over another industry (telcos/cable) to accrue the benefits/cost savings to themselves. Start ups and other businesses that exist on the web don't like the idea of sponsored data because it could possibly raise their costs of doing business, but again why is that something the public should care about and that government should step in to prevent? No one is providing Jolla with protections or subsidies to better compete with Apple or Samsung, but yet the web companies in pushing for net neutrality (and waging a great PR campaign that enlists the greater public to their side) are essentially asking for one. Maybe your music start up will have to pay carriers to better compete with Spotify or Apple, that's really your problem and perhaps you'll have to suck up the additional operating expense.
I'm not necessarily saying that the carriers should regulate. I'm just saying that T-Mobile just lost every bit of goodwill that they had earned by becoming a "european" style carrier.
I don't own a smart phone, I don't stream music. I listen to free or libre music mostly.
I think the entire Net Neutrality is based on a stupid and foolish assumption that we have to stream (or more accurately, download and delete) entertainment.
Because without Net neutrality we are going back to the AOL closed Network Model of the 90s where everyone has to use the services the ISP thinks are right for you and with prices they decided are fair. Nobody in their right mind wants that! Unless you are an ISP or bribed politician of course.
How? I imagine it's implemented as "don't meter packets going to these IPs", for Pandora/whatever's streaming IP addresses. Adding some extra firewall/software rules doesn't violate privacy IMHO.
Speaking from experience, I see everyone from the team leader to the interns tackling bugs on my team at Google. Furthermore, the engineer with the highest level on my team has done a tremendous amount of refactoring and maintenance work over the course of the past year. Clearly this is just anecdotal, but from what I've seen an engineer who took the initiative to improve performance/stability or significantly refactor old code would have just as good a chance of promotion as an engineer churning out new features.
Former employee here. I had a very opposite experience. New features were key for promotion. Performance/stability tweaks or bug fixes would only add to your promotion chances if they had a demonstrably large impact.
I wasn't at that level but this was super true for L5-L6ish engineers or above. Yes they had to tackle bugs, but they weren't getting to L6 unless they led an effort for a big feature within a project, or L7 unless they launched a project with a solid impact.
Management made efforts to give more weight to refactoring, but it seemed like a token effort. Refactoring was thankless unless it was a truly gargantuan change.
Working at google was great, but the engineering incentive structure is far from perfect.
I'm a PM and feel this is the case as well. I've seen massive migrations as one type of 'maintenance' wrapped as a launch that led to promotions, but generally the best way to go about it was join a rapidly growing project (G+) with user-facing impact.
I see you're getting downvoted for this, but the only thing that's wrong with it is that you're a bit late on the schedule. If you go back to the 2011 era it was absolutely true.
I wanted to say "As someone who got promoted in 2011, I can concur", but technically I got promoted about 3 months before I integrated my project with G+.
Perhaps - it's hard to say. (The project was Google's Authorship program.) The product would've been a very different one without it. We had designed a federated system that worked at the level of the Web and let any website serve as an identity provider. In theory, this was going to change how the web worked, and that change would also be accessible to other search engines and spiders. We didn't accomplish that. The request to make it only work with G+ basically involved restricting that system so that one of the URLs must be "plus.google.com".
OTOH, this did subsequently simplify the system a lot, and enabled follow-on features that wouldn't have been feasible under the original design. Our original design defined an author as a clique of webpages that all linked to each other using rel=author|contributor backlinks; defining a primary key is challenging in this situation, because you have to carry along the identity of the clique throughout the system. Requiring G+ let us key everything to an author's Google login, which then opens up the possibility of other systems using that data easily. It let us display the author's profile picture (which was the primary "boon" to get authors to participate), and connect their works to their G+ profile so they could easily advertise everything they'd done. It helped in marketing and using the product, because basically nobody outside Google (and only like 4 people inside Google) actually understood the author-closure stuff.
Understand, also the historical context behind this. 2011 was the year of "Open systems lose." Android (the open-source operating system) was playing catch-up to iOS (the closed one), and arguably only caught up because they were willing to close off much of it. Facebook had used GMail's "download contacts" feature to populate their own social graph, and then systematically cut off every attempt to crawl their own, also disallowing users from exporting their friends list to Google. OpenSocial had been trying to gain adoption for 3-4 years and failed so badly that Google+ was necessary. OpenID was dead-on-arrival, and Facebook Connect was taking over the web. Google had just sunk two years into providing real-time search of Tweets, only to have Twitter pull the plug on the deal and sink the project.
So in hindsight, it's difficult for me to say that the execs made the wrong call. I was kinda ambivalent at the time - I wasn't pleased, but I could see the reasons behind it and agreed to help out with the implementation. A number of my teammates were furious and quit the project, moving to other departments.
The stack ranking element is also open to abuse and capture by outsiders i.e. only so many L3 to L4 slots available in any cycle as some hr been counter is getting a bonus for reducing the pay quanta.
It was even worse at British telecom where there might be only 20-25 MPG 4 (L4 or r 5 in google terms) slots every 18 months or so for all of Systems Engineering (a division with more employees that goggle has now) - competition to just get past the paper sift to an actual interview as brutal.
Its interesting my boss said well if you get an interview we think you can do the job its just deciding who gets a promotion or not
Regarding the bean counters, keeping promos down doesn't help their budgets as much as you might think. The bonus you get for "exceeds expectations" brings you approximately to the "meets expectations" total compensation of the next level up.
Or so I've been told anecdotally ... personally I have yet to be promoted or experience a bonus cycle where I hit exceeds...
I imagine it's a whole lot easier to pass campaign finance regulation than it is to transform a population of hundreds of millions of people into an intelligent, knowledgeable, rational group.
You mean restrict who can vote? The public wouldn't go for it. Which is good, because if people were okay with having their right to vote taken away, we'd be in a much bigger mess.
But that doesn't mean that we have to appoint from within industry. There are probably many academics who would be just as qualified or more than former industry lobbyists. Moreover, these people would probably be more than happy to return to academia and research after serving their tenure.
