Sandberg181206
From Translook
Anders Sandberg gave a lecture on life extension technology and associated ethical issues, titled "Keep on raging against aging", on December 18, 2006, in uvvy island in Second Life.
About 30 people attended the talk in Second Life, and a few others attended on IRC via a gateway. The lecture audio was delivered via a SHOUTcast streaming audio server. Used with Winamp and the SHOUTcast Source DSP plugin for Winamp, the SHOUTcast system permits piping voice to an audio stream that can be set as media URL and listened to by all participants. The performance of the streaming audio server and the quality of the audio stream were quite good, though some microphone volume issues on Anders' side and the annoying lag of about one minute.
We have been discussing for months on how to give a text lecture in Second Life but Anders (newcomer to Second Life as Anders Nadir, but known as one of the smartest persons on the planet) discovered the right technique immediately: he had everything written down and pasted from his document into the chat session. So, this lecture was delivered simultaneously by voice and text.
Some excerpts of the lecture, from the Mprize site:
The scientific study of the causes of ageing, biogerontology, is a young science that developed after WW II and was still often ridiculed by researchers from other field as late as the 1970's. What possible use could it have?
Ageing is natural, and it was said that we needed to treat the many diseases of old age, not aging itself. The field was associated with generations of quacks, alchemists and other suspect characters seeking the elixir of youth. Even today when the field is mature and produces a steady stream of scientific discoveries most researchers are unwilling to speculate on where our knowledge may lead us. They often point out that we do not know any scientifically proven ways of even slowing ageing in humans. But that is just part of the story.
...
Experts have time and again estimated limits to this trend: the curve has to stop somewhere. So far they have been wrong. On average their predictions are proven too pessimistic just five years after being made. This is unsettling, since it suggests that the models used to plan our pension systems and health care likely underestimate how long the people of the future will live. If the current trend continues for 60 more years the average lifespan in 2066 will be around a hundred years. But there are reasons to think this is an underestimate, because ageing itself is now under attack.
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The new consensus in biogerontology is that ageing is not inevitable.
That bears noting, because it goes again so much established wisdom. Even if one does not expect radical life extension it suggests that the length and possibly shape of life can be changed deliberately. And given human motivation, it is likely that it will.
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In the past there was little chance of actually doing much about ageing, so it would actually have been rational to accept limited lifespan as any other inevitability. But given the current technological state it seems that the opposite is true: it would be irrational to not want to at least fix the negative aspects of ageing.
Older text from before the talk:
It is not a coincidence that the oldest remaining literary epic is the one about king Gilgamesh’s search for the herb of immortality: the dream of eternal youth is as old as mankind. But what has so far mainly been wishful dreaming is increasingly becoming medical and demographic reality. Today life is routinely extended and ageing slowed in lab animals. We live in a rapidly greying society where the average lifespan, health and vigor would have seemed nearly divine to king Gilgamesh, whose subjects had a life expectancy at birth around 25 years. As researchers increasingly see ageing as something mutable – and hence potentially treatable - we have to start considering how to deal with the changes it will cause in society and our lives.
Extending lifespans is something many do not take seriously. It is in the realm of wishful thinking, science fiction and health gurus. But if one is concerned about the current demographic trends and the somewhat long-term future, then one ought to at least consider progress in extending lifespans as one possibility to take into account. In his report "Keep on raging against ageing" Anders Sandberg, research director of Eudoxa and transhumanist par excellence, will make a moral and scientific case for life extension.
Anders Sandberg, PhD, Science Director of Eudoxa, has his background in Computer Science and Psychology from Stockholm University and completed his doctoral thesis on Artificial Neural Networks at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Currently he is postdoctoral research assistant at the Oxford University ENHANCE Project and Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He has a widespread international network and an extensive experience as a writer and lecturer both in Sweden and abroad. Being the true Renaissance man that he is, he combines his knowledge on natural sciences with liberal arts in order to explain the emerging technologies and its consequences.
