Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a wealthy elite. This is far from the case. If you look at the SENS approach to repair therapies [1], treatments when realized will be mass-produced infusions of cells, proteins, and drugs. Everyone will get the same treatments because everyone ages due to the same underlying cellular and molecular damage. You'll need one round of treatments every ten to twenty years, and they will be given by a bored clinical assistant. No great attention will be needed by highly trained and expensive medical staff, as all of the complexity will be baked into the manufacturing process. Today's closest analogs are the comparatively new mass-produced biologics used to treat autoimmune conditions [2], and even in the wildly dysfunctional US medical system these cost less than ten thousand dollars for a treatment.

Rejuvenation won't cost millions, or even hundreds of thousands. It will likely cost less than many people spend on overpriced coffee over the course of two decades of life, and should fall far below that level. When the entire population is the marketplace for competing developers, costs will eventually plummet to those seen for decades-old generic drugs and similar items produced in factory settings: just a handful of dollars per dose. The poorest half of the world will gain access at that point, just as today they have access to drugs that were far beyond their reach when initially developed.

Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today.

[1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

[2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist

I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test)

> They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to this kind of behavior.

That's what I'm saying, consciousness is not a "kind of behavior". There is nothing behavioral about your inner experience as a conscious entity.

Are you Aubrey de Grey?

>I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. [...] How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie?

Because p-zombies are self-contradictory. The definition of a p-zombie is a contradiction. It's like saying "suppose 1 = 2 and 1 != 2. Call this a p-zombie quality."

When you suppose that the behavior of a thing is separate from the reality of a thing, you are failing to account for how the words 'behavior' and 'reality' acquire meaning -- through observation. They cannot be different because the processes that establish their meaning are identical.

To suppose that a p-zombie could be different from a person, yet measurably identical in all aspects is a contradiction.

>How are you defining consciousness?

There is a big difference between meaning and definition. I don't have to define consciousness, I only need to know what it means. I only need to identify the use-cases where it is appropriate.

>There is nothing behavioral about your inner experience as a conscious entity.

Yes there is: behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity.

I'm doubtful of the prediction that humans will eventually become useless or superfluous. Common jobs today that only humans can do will undoubtedly be accomplished by machines in the future, but that doesn't mean humans will become obsolete.

As long as the universe and time exist as we know it humans will never be perfect. And just like humans, AI will always have bugs, as its root creator will always be a flawed human. Whether there are unintended consequences of those bugs is another story. But since a human can never create AI to create AI better than a human, AI can never render the human mind obsolete.

Any AI not created with bad intentions will mostly be created to serve, defend, or improve our way of life and survival. These things work to support our purpose not destroy it.

But as Harari says (before he starts predicting), "it's impossible to have any good prediction for the coming decades."