I didn’t mention longevity research because I have mixed feeling about it. I support it heavily and will likely donate money to SENS in the future, but donation is not investment, and personal conviction is different from mass action.

The crux of my conflict is whether there is greater utility in putting money toward longevity or strong AI. I’ll assume, to start, that any strong AI created will be friendly. It seems reasonable to me that if we were to make an intelligence that is roughly as capable as a human, that we could very easily make an intelligence that is at least slightly better than a human. The conversion of intelligence into an information technology would, I predict, lead to a super-intelligence that is vastly better at solving problems than even all of humanity combined. If this is true (and such an AI is friendly), it seems to me like indefinite lifespan would be solved without any additional work by humanity.

So the questions then remaining are: Is the construction of a human-level intelligence possible? Will it happen soon? And is it worth fixing aging before hand, so that people don’t die/suffer in the meantime?

I’m going to, for simplicity, say that an “explosion of intelligence” like I described earlier will happen in 50 years if I don’t “invest” in it. I’ll talk about timeframes later. And for now, let’s pretend that longevity escape velocity (LEV) occurs 25 years from now without any of my investment.

Now lets say I buy 5 years of “progress” in longevity, so it happens only 20 years from now. I think it’s likely that within the first few decades of LEV, most of the change in life expectancy will come from wealthy old people in prosperous nations. I just saved and improved many lives, but not a whole bunch… probably under half a billion. Infectious and lifestyle diseases, accidents and wars still exist, and those who can’t afford treatment still die when they get old, even when AI shows up.

Now lets compare this with a 5 year acceleration of strong AI. Not only might superintelligence solve longevity, it might do it so well that it’s cheap and can be given to even the poorest. In addition, it’d (if friendly) probably negotiate peace treaties (perhaps by solving scarcity), cure other diseases and if Aubrey de Grey is right, prevent accidents.

This means that if the rate of acceleration per unit of investment is equal, I’d be weighing improvements to the lives (and avoidance of death) of the half-billion elite, versus the curing and protecting of the entire planet for an additional 5 years. I’ll pay for AI, thank you.

Right here is where I’d be balking, if I were reading this. I’ve made a number of assumptions, so I’ll try to go back over each one:

Who says the same amount of money buys the same amount of progress for both technologies!?

If AI is “cheaper,” my argument is even more sound, so I’ll address if the same investment unit buys AI progress only a fraction of the same acceleration as longevity. At some point it just makes sense to put money toward longevity and not AI. If, for example, strong AI can only be made by an uneducated kid in 2063, then no amount of research will speed that up. I have no reason to think this though. It seems to me that more money in a field typically means more people thinking about it, including students and amateurs. Both fields seem like they could benefit from more mainstream funding, and even at a 5-to-1 ratio, I think I’d prefer AI. (That is, I’d still invest in AI if it meant 1 year of acceleration, rather than 5 years of acceleration for longevity)

You can’t pay money to make technologies show up sooner!

You can’t?

Kurzweil has no game plan, while SENS is already in action!

Kurzweil is not the king of intelligent machines (even if he is the celebrity), so a better example might be “<Current leader in general AI> has no game plan”, which I cannot say. Remember that my example works even if strong AI happens several decades after longevity breakthroughs occur.

Who says strong AI is even possible? Or that it’d be any smarter than a human?

Nobody can be sure that either are possible until they happen. I happen to believe that human intelligence comes from nothing more than a system of organic machinery, so in theory that behavior would be able to be simulated. It seems to me that if we can simulate a human level intelligence, it’d be fairly simple to tweak the machinery (so to speak), and improve it, even if only a little at a time. I tend to think that you wouldn’t need to replicate the human nervous system verbatim as much as the general patterns of learning, but either way works.

Why would a super-intelligence be “friendly”? Why not ambivalent or aggressive?

Because we’re the ones making it. Making something that powerful is inherently dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in it. If anything, it means we should invest in the research, so that it’s done right, and not sloppily. I don’t see anything in this argument that makes researching AI any less attractive.

The timeframes are wrong because of X, Y, Z.

If super AI comes before longevity breakthroughs than that’s even worse for those who invested in longevity. If the time between the technologies is smaller than it seems like longevity gets less important as it becomes increasingly available to only the rich, etc. So what if AI is possible, but it shows up in a couple hundred years, while anti-aging happens soon? It’d probably be best to invest in longevity then, yes.

Conclusion: it seems to me that it’d be better to focus on longevity iff: super-intelligent AI is impossible, is only possible far in the future, or is not easily aided by having money thrown at it.

P.S. I wrote this in a fairly stream-of-consciousness way for a facebook comment. If anyone wants to point out edits that’d make it more akin to a paper, that’d be sweet. I’ll probably rewrite it a year from now when I can see just how stupid I’m being.

Related link: Aubrey de Grey on the Singularity and Longevity Escape Velocity