If humans fail to invent immortality I will likely be dead by this point. If they do invent immortality then I will be alive to pay out so you know win win. Immortality - humans cannot be killed by natural means (old age, disease etc etc) but can die from extreme scenarios - murder, accident. We can transfer our minds to the web as long as we maintain our consciousness. It does not matter how immortality is invented - AI can invent it because we invented AI - as long as it is invented.
Might start doing yearly updates for this cause it's gonna be running for a long time:
2025 March: I'll be honest I'd forgotten all about this poll until today. Am surprised to see that it's so high in favour of immortality. Then again there's still 75 years until 2100 so it makes sense. Hope everyone who has traded on this poll will be around for me to settle it. See you next year all.
1,000I remain doubtful on this. While everything looks promising as of now, we may just about to fight a tough war on aging, like what happened to the war on cancer half a century ago.
And I think there are reasons to we may actually just about to fight a tough war on aging, because:
To attain immortality, curing aging is a prerequisite.
It has been demonstrated that aging is a complex process affecting genetic networks, and altering one(or few) gene won’t stop it. And considering that aging is not just a problem of genetic networks. This means there's a possibility that the problems that need to handle could grow exponentially, potentially cancelling out advantages brought by AGI and even ASI.
Non-technological approaches like lifestyle are out of question, such approaches clearly have limits.
Genetic-related approaches are likely a part of a cure for aging, and all techniques to directly edit genes share certain problems like off-target effect and destabilization of the whole genome, and there does not seem to be an effective and safe way to solve this problem yet. Theoretically you need to work only on certain key cells like immune cells, for example, it has been suggested that gene-edited CAR T-cells could be used as senolytics clearing out senescent cells, but problems related to gene editing remain even if we only work on a limited amount of key cells responsible for de-aging.
Another genetic-related approach is not to directly edit the genome but to change epigenetics i.e. reprogramming, but the known ways to do it, like the use of Yamanaka factors(i.e. Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc), can greatly increase the risk of cancer, and the approach of using OSK factors(i.e. Yamanaka factors minus the carcinogenic c-Myc) does not seem that promising as initially thought(at least no news about the new application of OSK factors yet when this comment is written); besides inducing these factors may still end up involving direct gene-editing, which means problems related to gene-editing approaches may also be a concern to this approach as well.
Induced stem cells like iPS cells suffer from safety issues related to the gene-editing processes, a safer choice is to use naturally-created stem cells like embryoic stem cells, but such cells are not widely available and may never become widely available.
3D printed organs rely on the use of stem cells or gene-edited cells, especially in case we want to de-age the biological age of the 3D printed organs, and as a result, de-aging by transplanting 3D printed organs with de-aged cells will rely on stem cells or gene-editing techniques, and as a result, it will not be a way to bypass the restrictions on such approaches listed above.
A safe and inexpensive approach is to not directly transplant cells or such, but use exosomes. However, the effectiveness of exosomes is unknown and might have been exaggerated, and you need an repeated application of exosomes to keep the effects. In other words, there might not be a way that is both safe, effective and inexpensive.
Still another genetic-related approach is to tweak on the telomere, but again, the increment of telomere length is associated with the risk of cancer.
The inherent problems of genetic-related approaches indicate that we may need to always closely supervise the safety of edited cells, which could reduce the availability of such techniques and could greatly reduce their application potentials on curing aging.
Approaches relying on drugs is another likely part of a cure for aging, but drugs, or combinations of them, have not shown to be more effective than lifestyle approaches, which hinits that drugs may not help much in anti-aging.
The use of nanomachines in organisms remains speculative; besides, certain types of nanomachines are just unrealistic and will always remain in the realm of fantasy and science fiction.
Aubrey de Grey's approach of attaining longevity escape velocity is that you can reverse biological aging by 20 years with the 1st gen therapy, waiting 20 years and get another reversal of 20 years with the 2st gen therapy, and so on. A major issue of this approach is that technological advancement itself is a subject of the law of diminishing returns.
So considering the law of diminishing returns, what if it turns out that the 1st gen de-aging therapy reverses aging by 20 years, but the 2st gen de-aging therapy reverses aging by 30 years on those who never got de-aging treatments and reverses aging by 15 years on those who had got 1st gen treatments, and 3st gen de-aging therapy reverses aging by 40 years on those who never got de-aging treatments and reverses aging by 10 years on those who had got 1st gen treatments, and you always need to wait about 20 years for next-gen therapies?
@JessicaEvans Fair question. I'll say that as long as humans can think and their consciousness is maintained in some way that counts.
"In 2100, will there be or have been biologically immortal humans or EMs" is how I interpreted this.