Why hasn't the Singularity gone mainstream (yet?) (advance, performance, analog)
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This is a excellent example as to why I will live forever and this will all start around 2020 and life 2.0 or the biotech revolution.
UCLA biologists have identified a gene that can slow the aging process throughout the entire body when activated remotely in key organ systems.
Working with fruit flies, the life scientists activated a gene called AMPK that is a key energy sensor in cells; it gets activated when cellular energy levels are low.
Increasing the amount of AMPK in fruit flies' intestines increased their lifespans by about 30 percent — to roughly eight weeks from the typical six — and the flies stayed healthier longer as well.
The research, published Sept. 4 in the open-source journal Cell Reports, could have important implications for delaying aging and disease in humans, said David Walker, an associate professor of integrative biology and physiology at UCLA and senior author of the research.
I'd dispute that anyone can be in a position to assert an impending reversal of aging when it's not even really understood what aging is in the first place.
We don't even really know whether the senescence of a multi-cellular organism is caused by the senescence of its individual cells or not.
If you simply de-activate the genes for cellular senescence in humans, you don't decrease the probability of dying at any given age, you merely shift it from some causes of death to others. You might be less likely to die of heart disease, diabetes, or kidney problems, but more likely to die of cancer.
The annual odds of dying of cancer are much lower for young people in their teens and 20s than for people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. However, cellular senescence is actually necessary to regulate cell division. A de-activation or reversal of cellular senescence in someone in their 60s will not decrease their risk of dying of cancer to the level of a young person, rather, the risk will actually go up!
I'd dispute that anyone can be in a position to assert an impending reversal of aging when it's not even really understood what aging is in the first place.
We don't even really know whether the senescence of a multi-cellular organism is caused by the senescence of its individual cells or not.
If you simply de-activate the genes for cellular senescence in humans, you don't decrease the probability of dying at any given age, you merely shift it from some causes of death to others. You might be less likely to die of heart disease, diabetes, or kidney problems, but more likely to die of cancer.
The annual odds of dying of cancer are much lower for young people in their teens and 20s than for people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. However, cellular senescence is actually necessary to regulate cell division. A de-activation or reversal of cellular senescence in someone in their 60s will not decrease their risk of dying of cancer to the level of a young person, rather, the risk will actually go up!
That is because you, and most people, do not understand that medicine is now a form of information technology thus advancing exponentially much like the penny on a checker board example.
This is a quote from Ray Kurzweil:
We are now an inflection point where these therapies are beginning to enter clinical practice, at least the more advanced therapies. It will be a very different era as these “biotechnology” therapies mature over the next ten to fifteen years. We will be routinely regrowing organs with the patient’s own DNA, rejuvenating our own organs in place (without surgically replacing them), turning off genes that cause disease and aging and adding protective genes. Viewed this way, this revolution will transform all of health and medicine and put human health and longevity gains on the fast track.
Computers will be able to diagnose and pick a treatment much better then doctors as a computer can read all of the medical papers that have ever been printed in just a few minutes. This will give patients a much better chance of surviving diseases like cancer.
The Mayo Clinic has taken a first step to making this a reality.
This is from Infotech lead:
Mayo Clinic will pilot IBM Watson to match patients more quickly with appropriate clinical trials. A proof-of-concept phase is currently underway, with the intent to introduce it into clinical use in early 2015, said IBM. “Watson assists us to develop an individualized treatment plan more efficiently to deliver exactly the care that the patient needs,” said Steven Alberts, chair of medical oncology at Mayo Clinic.
I was looking up more information on Watson and I found this about the medical community. This is just another reason why life 2.0 starts at 2020.
Medical information doubles every three years and by 2020 will double every 73 days, Rhodin said. As a result, a doctor can no longer rely solely on their own medical training, even with voracious reading of the latest medical journals. "We are human, and there are limits to what we can learn," he said.
That is because you, and most people, do not understand that medicine is now a form of information technology thus advancing exponentially much like the penny on a checker board example.
This is a quote from Ray Kurzweil:
We are now an inflection point where these therapies are beginning to enter clinical practice, at least the more advanced therapies. It will be a very different era as these “biotechnology” therapies mature over the next ten to fifteen years. We will be routinely regrowing organs with the patient’s own DNA, rejuvenating our own organs in place (without surgically replacing them), turning off genes that cause disease and aging and adding protective genes. Viewed this way, this revolution will transform all of health and medicine and put human health and longevity gains on the fast track.
Computers will be able to diagnose and pick a treatment much better then doctors as a computer can read all of the medical papers that have ever been printed in just a few minutes. This will give patients a much better chance of surviving diseases like cancer.
The Mayo Clinic has taken a first step to making this a reality.
This is from Infotech lead:
Mayo Clinic will pilot IBM Watson to match patients more quickly with appropriate clinical trials. A proof-of-concept phase is currently underway, with the intent to introduce it into clinical use in early 2015, said IBM. “Watson assists us to develop an individualized treatment plan more efficiently to deliver exactly the care that the patient needs,” said Steven Alberts, chair of medical oncology at Mayo Clinic.
I was looking up more information on Watson and I found this about the medical community. This is just another reason why life 2.0 starts at 2020.
Medical information doubles every three years and by 2020 will double every 73 days, Rhodin said. As a result, a doctor can no longer rely solely on their own medical training, even with voracious reading of the latest medical journals. "We are human, and there are limits to what we can learn," he said.
I think Valmond posted the best response to CPU speed so I will leave it at that.
Valmond did not address the issue of heat dissipation and speed of light problems.
And this still leaves aside the problems of increasing quantum and thermal noise as components shrink or the flatness of processing per unit energy since 2003 and therefore limits by energy consumption.
Also, this doesn't address the issue of more or less parallelizable computational tasks. Just because one calculation can be massively parallelized with very little serial constraint relevant to Amdahl's Law, does not mean the same applies to other calculations or algorithms.
Valmond did not address the issue of heat dissipation and speed of light problems.
And this still leaves aside the problems of increasing quantum and thermal noise as components shrink or the flatness of processing per unit energy since 2003 and therefore limits by energy consumption.
Also, this doesn't address the issue of more or less parallelizable computational tasks. Just because one calculation can be massively parallelized with very little serial constraint relevant to Amdahl's Law, does not mean the same applies to other calculations or algorithms.
Technical questions like that I will have to leave to people in the IT field. I can only say that so far they have not been a problem as computers have shrunk a lot all the way down to Google glass and even smaller as I have seen and posted articles on them small enough to fit in the human body. Plus people like Ray Kurzweil do not see that as a issue moving forward.
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