Future Current

Gregory Stock is a biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. He has written extensively on the implications for society, medicine and business of the human genome project and associated developments in molecular genetics and bioinformatics. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today’s revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.

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Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation and Tanya Jones of Alcor Life Extension

The free public event preceding the Understanding Aging conference organized by the Methuselah Foundation was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.” Held in Royce Hall at UCLA on the evening of June 27th, 2008, the event aimed at putting the postponement of aging more firmly on the political and social map than ever before. There, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey offered his own underlying arguments for why aging can and should be the target of current-day regenerative medicine.

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The Methuselah Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit organization committed to the acceleration of progress toward a cure for age-related disease. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has formulated a wide-ranging plan for the comprehensive and eventually indefinite postponement of age-related physical and mental decline, named Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is the organizer of an ongoing series of conferences and workshops that focus on the key biomedical research relevant to SENS, the most recent of which was entitled “Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications.”

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Aubrey de Grey is the Chair and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to combating the aging process. In this talk presented at the February Silicon Valley transhumanist meetup, he outlined the several most notable developments in funding and research taking place at the Methuselah Foundation in late 2007 and early 2008.

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Aubrey de Grey is the editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research, a medical journal which publishes cutting-edge work on anti-aging therapies in the laboratory and clinic. At the “Securing the Longevity Dividend” event in Chicago organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he argued the scientific feasibility of anti-aging therapies by exploring the concept of longevity escape velocity and sharing interim results from research funded by the Methuselah Foundation.

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Professor of Epidemiology of the University of Chicago, Jay Olshansky helped to introduce the concept of the Longevity Dividend: pursuing the sum of health, social, and economic benefits attained from a seven year delay in aging. A leading proponent of research into increased human longevity, he gave a presentation at the “Securing the Longevity Dividend” event in Chicago organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. There he argued for the necessity of reducing health risks by slowing the biological process of aging.

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George Dvorsky is the Deputy-Editor of Betterhumans, co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, and the producer of the award-winning Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He is the co-director of the Cyborg Buddha project, and the winner of three 2008 Blogisattva Awards. At the July 23, 2007 Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies conference called “Securing the Longevity Dividend,” he discussed various popular arguments for and against radical life extension.

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Public critics of radical life extension have made such various claims as “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death,” and “The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.” Ronald Bailey, who servers as science correspondent for Reason Magazine, set out to refute these assumptions in his talk at the 2007 event held by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies entitled “Securing the Longevity Dividend” by noting the wealth of research suggesting that the trend toward increasing lifespan has resulted directly in greater overall wealth and social good.

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Patrick Hopkins, Anders Sandberg, and Mark Walker at Transvision 2007

Anders Sandberg Ph.D. is a Swedish neuroscientist and futurist. He occupies the roles of James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and research associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. In his talk at the July 23, 2007 Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies event entitled “Securing the Longevity Dividend,” Dr. Sandberg brought up four possible scenarios surrounding the public reaction to the emergence of radical life extension.

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We usually think about growth in linear and exponential models… but the biggest impacts come from discontinuous change, and history is a chain of discontinuities. At the Artificial Intelligence and Society event hosted by the University of Santa Clara and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Melanie Swan presented on potentially disruptive technologies for the 21st century: synthetic biology, metaverse technologies, robotics, fabbing, quantum computing, intelligence augmentation, personalized medicine, artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, affordable space launch and anti-aging therapies. A multidisciplinary introduction to thinking critically about the ramifications of accelerating technological change, the presentation is one of several open source projects available on her personal website.

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Anne Corwin is an engineer and technoprogressive activist based in California. She is an intern with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a volunteer for the Methuselah Foundation. She is also the author of the blog Existence is Wonderful and produces the associated podcast, Existence is Wonderful audio. In this talk with Accelerating Future’s founder Michael Anissimov, she spoke on how futurist topics like neurodiversity, life extension and self-modification are relevant to discussion today.

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Will forty-five years of work and then centuries of leisure one day become the norm? Will we face mass unemployment, mass leisure or overpopulation? Sharing insights from his upcoming book Future Imperfect at the 6th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dr. David Friedman navigated through the many potential consequences of an extended lifespan.

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