@Lavander I would vote that an intervention which can be applied only to people below a certain age, but which otherwise "cured aging" would be sufficient to resolve YES

@MartinRandall If cryonics counts, wouldn't that mean that we've cured all diseases?

I don't think counting uploading makes sense either, but I am struggling to concisely articulate why. I guess it would be like "curing" a house fire by getting your family out. It's "cured" in that the worst associated harms were prevented, but your house still burned down.

I feel like cryonics would only count if you could then unfreeze people and they would then be cured of aging by the fact they have been frozen.

@askdf Curing aging means you'll never die of natural causes.

@askdf I would think it depends on how you're extending life and in whom. I think "cure for aging" have to involve either 1) the ability to halt some biological process which we strongly believe is related to aging and eventually contributes to death (e.g. cell senescense, oxidative stress, whatever aging theories are running around), or 2) some intervention which, regardless of mechanism, extends life for all humans by some substantive amount (e.g. a decade).

@MartinModrak I think the AGI / ASI considerations aren't a red herring, because this would presumably resolve YES if there was a very convincing solution to aging, which an AGI could explain thoroughly. If the wizard had a track record of doing many things that are similarly hard to curing aging, and then claimed to cure aging with a very convincing proof, I'm pretty sure that would count for a positive resolution.

@Nikola To be clear, basically all of my probability for this market comes from AGI / ASI coming before 2030. I think AGI is more than 50% likely to cure aging within 2 years, and P(AGI pre 2028) is 21% according to Metaculus. I think ASI is more than 80% likely to cure aging within weeks, and according to Metaculus, ASI is 70% likely to happen within 2 years of AGI. So this should be at a minimum around 14%.

@MartinModrak I'd give <9% to "AI credibly argues it has solved aging before 2030". And I disagree with those Metaculus markets, or at least the implications. The "Time Between AGI and Superintelligence" one has a lot of ambiguity, which I asked about here.

@Jotto999 Even if the AGI -> ASI market is ambiguous, just the AGI market implies around 10%. I guess the crux is how reliable the metaculus AGI market is for P(AGI pre 2028).

@Nikola "...just the AGI market implies around 10%." I disagree -- even if those milestones were hit before 2030, I disagree that takeoffs speeds in the vicinity of those milestones would mean aging has much chance of being credibly cured before 2030.

As a show of confidence, I've added another limit order for NO at 15%.

"Let's say a wizard appears today with a wand and anyone who touches the wand immediately stops aging. We would still need to wait at least a couple years to verify that the people who touched didn't actually age."

@MartinModrak What if the cure also undoes decades of aging? I was under the impression that cures for aging would be likely to do that. So you could apply the magic wand to old people and see that they become young and in good health.

@tailcalled You're right that fully-thorough cures would be rapidly-evident. But such a high standard is much less likely pre-2030, compared to the incomplete-treatments where it may not be immediately obvious.

Related: I don't see us scaling AI enough in so little time, to solve the utter rat's nest of a problem that is aging. I am still well-below the market's 12% for 2030. I might endorse such high odds for 2040.

@Jotto999 Have you read Gears of Aging? Especially the final post, Core Pathways of Aging?

@tailcalled Not yet

@tailcalled Agree that undoing aging would be quickly evident, although I think that's basically pure sci-fi - I can't think of a plausible way to do it that's not functionally magic (e.g. swarm of nanobots reparing cells, handwave, handwave, something). And even in that case there is still the possibility that everybody whose age was decreased gets untreatable cancer/dementia/... in 5 years or something (both cancer and cognitive problems are IMHO quite plausible side effects of processes that regenerate cells), rendering the treatment much less beneficial.

I'd also repeat that the AGI discussion in my view tends to be too optimistic about what intelligence alone can achieve. To act successfully in the real world you need to experiment in the real world. And real world is messy and takes time - there's a limit to how fast you can make cells grow/concrete cure/chemicals react/manufacture of a tool/... Yes, more intelligent entities will likely design better experiments, but without the contact with real world, AGI will only provide better armchair speculation. Expecting AGI to immediately completely change our world would be like expecting a group of time travellers from today to be able to bring ancient Greece into industrial revolution in a couple years - the bottleneck won't be high-level ideas: it will be infrastructure and acquiring all the detailed skills needed to build and handle the infrastructure and would take decades or centuries even in the most optimistic scenario. (sidenote: software also requires experimenting, which puts limits on how fast AGI can improve itself and may even cause the improvement to plateau very quickly, but that's a different discussion)

@MartinModrak Have you read Gears of Aging and especially Core Pathways of Aging?

@tailcalled Fine -- what is the major thrust of it?

@tailcalled I did a brief skim. Looks like a relatively well done armchair speculation on the topic (no problem with that, I am also armchair speculating here, but the amount of insight you can get from armchair is limited). It also seems to completely focus on cellular level, which appears too reductive. The body also has larger scale structures, which would likely degrade even if you solved the cellular-level problems, because entropy doesn't like you. Many/most of larger scale structures are setup under specific conditions in the embryo and have no biological pathways to be rebuilt (most notably the nervous system, but AFAIK this is includes almost all organs/systems. The exceptions being liver and blood supply).

@MartinModrak An obvious example of degradation that is not at cellular level is the skeletal system. If you mess up your knees/back/... in your teens it won't ever completely resolve even though your body is still at its peak cellular health.

@Jotto999 The core point is probably reasonably captured in the "Foundations" section of the "Core Pathways of Aging" post. Tons of variables in the body change as you age, but most variables in the body would quickly equillibrate back to normal if they had been changed, so those variables cannot be considered causes/constituents of aging, but are instead symptoms of aging. So if you can fix the small number of variables that determine where the other variables equillibrate to, you can fix the other variables.

@MartinModrak I suppose that is a reasonable point.

@tailcalled Sounds easy, but I'm incredibly skeptical so many different problems are solved by 2030.

FWIW, I'm emotionally very invested in this endeavor -- as a teenager I was super into Aubrey de Grey. But today I consider the problem far harder than he made it seem, with his 7 deadly things taxonomy. There are just so many ways for things to get screwed up, and unless you have mechanisms to fix literally all of them, you get cumulative aging.

@Jotto999 I mean a big part of the point of Gears of Aging is that the body does in fact have mechanisms to fix almost everything that can go wrong.

Anyway I created a prediction market for Gears of Aging:

@JakobBrunker longevity escape velocity for what percentage of humanity?

@Nikola I think you're missing a few possibilities here. Most notably (IMO) that the AGI provides a solution, but that we aren't able to verify that that solution is actually correct before the 2030 deadline.

There's also the possibility that AGI exists, but is unable to bootstrap itself to significantly superhuman levels in time. Either because we deliberately try and limit the growth of early AGI, or because we produce an AGI that simply isn't generally intelligent enough to bootstrap quickly.

@Nikola Well that's exciting to think! thank you!

@AmitAmin It just has to be proven. Right now, a "YES" resolve would mean that at least 20% of the population would agree that the 'aging' problem has been solved. Though, I think more thorough discussion should be had in this Market's comments.

@AmitAmin I must also add that I am actively working toward bringing forth a cure by connecting people that can affect this outcome and also changing the stigma of anti-death in the general population.

@DanielKilian The 20% criteria is interesting. It's nicely in-between discovery and years of fighting for FDA approval. But with an end date only 8 years away, can we can avoid false-positives with just 20%? Then again, as you said, anti-aging has such a huge stigma, so hyping the population on a fake/partial/over-optimistic anti-aging cure should be much harder than hyping useless supplements.

I hope you succeed! The life extensionists I've talked to seem to brush over the negatives caused by eliminating death, but I do think it would overall be a positive change.

@AmitAmin Thank you for the discussion! If you are willing, would you provide a few names that I might follow on twitter? Also, I may make another market in the future with a further out timeline. Full disclosure, my personal goal is to benefit by this anti-aging cure.

@DanielKilian One or more markets that are further out seems good. Haha, I'm willing, but I don't use twitter, so I have no names to provide.