The Edge Annual Question 2009

The Edge Annual Question 2009: What will change everything? With answers from (among others) Nick Bostrom, Daniel Dennett, P.Z. Meyers, Gregory Benford, Aubrey de Grey, Lawrence Kraus, and friend-of-the-blog Austin Dacey. Via MeFi.

Aubrey de Grey on Colbert

Longtime readers know that one of my chief hobbyhorses is any crazy hint that I won’t actually have to die someday. So here’s Aubrey de Grey on Colbert last night, repeating the promise he made me:

Cross Alzheimer’s Off Your List of Things to Fear

This is amazing: researchers have discovered a treatment that dramatically reverses the degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s within minutes of injection.

1) Aubrey de Grey was right; we really are all going to live forever.

2) I smell a great potential origin for a superintelligent superhero. Or supervillain. Or zombie epidemic.

Via Boing Boing.

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I’m A Thousand and Four?

A glowing WaPo profile of futurist Aubrey de Grey, who has personally assured me that I will never die.

Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he’s not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years.

In 2005, an authoritative publication offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that de Grey’s plan for treating aging as a disease — and curing it — was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.”

…

In the end, they decided no scientist had succeeded in blowing de Grey out of the water.

But it gets more interesting as de Grey gets more and more Utopian:

“Of course the world will be completely different in all manner of ways,” de Grey says of the next few decades. His speech is thick, fast and mellifluous, with a quality British accent.

“If we want to hit the high points, number one is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won’t be spending all this unbelievable amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be available to spend on important things like, well, obviously, providing the health care to keep us that way, but that won’t be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can’t afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they’re kids, but also proper adult education and retraining and so on.

“Another thing that’s going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We’re sorry for old people because they’re going downhill. There will be no real moral or sociological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a periodic thing. You’ll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you’ll be sick of it and you’ll retire on your savings or on a state pension, depending on what the system is. So after 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you’ll want to do something else with your life. You’ll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on.”

Previously. Previously. Way way back.