Five Areas I Wish EAs Gave More Focus

Strongly agree on life extension and the sheer scale of the damage caused by aging-related disease. Has always confused me somewhat that more EA attention hasn't gone towards this cause area considering how enormous the potential impact is and how well it has always seemed to perform to me on the important/tractable/neglected criteria.

~100,000 people die from age-related diseases every day. ~100 billion people have died in our history. (Read that again.) Aging causes an immense amount of suffering, both to those who suffer from it for years, and to those who must grieve. It also causes irrecoverable loss, and is perhaps the greatest tragedy that is treated as normal. If every person who dies of preventable diseases like malaria is a tragedy, I do not see the difference in those dying of other causes also being a tragedy. Even if you do believe extending the human lifespan is not important, consider the alternative case where you’re wrong. If your perspective is incorrect, then ~100k more tragedies happen for every day we delay solving it.

I agree that longevity research is worth closer attention by EA, but this argument needs work. And we need the right argument to merit EA attention.

What is life extension research?

Let's define three types of related research: life extension research (LER), ordinary biomedical research (OBR), and public health research (PHR).

In OBR, scientists induce specific diseases or injuries in model research organisms to study a causal pathway or treatment. In LER, they do not induce any specific disease.

In both PHR and LER, scientists study the relationship between environmental factors, behavior, biology, and health metrics. PHR examines environmental or behavioral changes to promote health metrics. LER examines biological changes to promote health metrics.

If life extension research isn't uniquely trying to extend life, what's the argument for focusing on this specific area?

It's plausible that by achieving a health-promoting environment and behaviors via PHR, and hammering down specific diseases via OBR, we could prolong health and life indefinitely.

So far, this hasn't happened, but it's possible that precision medicine is the answer to all our problems. By breaking diseases down into more subtypes, and equipping ourselves with tools to personalize each patient's course of treatment, we can much more reliably treat diseases as they occur. Perhaps we can also systematically tackle the individual symptoms of old age, from thymic involution to arthritis to wrinkles. By becoming excellent at treating each one individually, we can achieve big gains in healthspan and lifespan.

LER takes a complementary approach. It's widely accepted that normal, healthy living still subjects organisms to forms of damage, and that this damage accumulates over the lifespan.

What's more controversial is whether we can find enough tractable interventions to slow or reverse this damage. Biochemical pathways, genetic architectures, and tissue structures are ludicrously complicated. Intervening in many of the pathways considered root causes of aging, such as accumulated genetic damage, has so far provent to be incredibly hard even in research organisms in basic and preclinical studies, for both scientific and regulatory reasons.

To make LER an EA cause area, we need an argument that there's a lot of concrete underexplored and potentially tractable interventions we could be studying, or that the cause is even more important than the death count makes it seem.

Just this year, a flood of funding poured into longevity research, from government and billionaires. So we need to identify life extension research that's not adequately covered by these funding sources. Is there simply still a lot more room for more funding? Are billionaires thinking too short-term? Is government too conservative? Are we worried that if the big gains from life extension come from privately held companies, that we'll wind up missing the big gains from life extension because they'll end up in the hands of the few?

An alternative to a tractability-and-neglect based argument is an importance-based argument. There's a lot of pessimism about the prospects for technical AI alignment. If serious life extension becomes a real possibility without depending on an AI singularity, that might convince AI capabilities researchers to slow down or stop their research and prioritize AI safety much more. Possibly, they might become more risk-averse, realizing that they no longer have to make their mark on humanity within the few decades that ordinary lifespans allow for a career. Possibly, they might even be creating AI with the main hope that the AI will cure aging and let them live a very long time. Showing that superintelligent AI isn't necessary for this outcome might convince them to slow down. If we're as pessimistic as Eliezer Yudkowsky about the prospects for technical AI alignment, then maybe we ought to move to an array of alternative strategies.

Is the life extension research as AI safety intervention argument reasonable?

There's a common trend of shoehorning this or that pet mainstream cause area into EA. Are we just doing that here? One way we can check is by seeing if the argument proves too much. Can we argue that climate change, funding for the arts, or abortion access in the USA is a pressing AI safety intervention using the same argument? If so, and if we'd find that argument dubious, then we should also be dubious about LER.

We can imagine the following arguments:

• Fighting climate change is crucial for AI safety. A lot of AI capabilities researchers might be afraid their most likely cause of death is from climate change, or believe that AI capabilities will be crucial for fighting climate change effectively. If we can show them that we can fight climate change wtihout relying on AI capabilities, maybe they'll stop!
• Funding the arts is crucial for AI safety. A lot of AI capabilities researchers might think the world is too ugly and dull, with artists rehashing old styles or producing work that's ever more abstract and unpleasant. They might be hoping that superintelligent AI can revitalize the arts and dramatically enhance our wellbeing on a daily basis through artistic enjoyment. But if we simply fund the arts a lot more, we can show them that the world can be a more beautiful place without relying on AI capabilities research!
• Pro-choice activism is crucial for AI safety. A lot of AI capabilities researchers might think that... OK, I have to admit I am having a hard time coming up with anything coherent here.

My gut check is that life extension is a much more compelling example of an intervention having AI safety implications as a secondary effect. I think the reason is that climate change is not likely to kill everybody, everybody has different opinions on what constitutes beauty, and there's already a lot of great art out there.

By contrast, life extension potentially impacts everybody, and there is no substitute for the benefit it would provide.

If death isn't the tragedy, then what is?

Right now, we haven't adequately worked out exactly how to specify our values. That sort of work is what Toby Ord describes as proper to the "Long Reflection." We're not there yet. We're on The Precipice, trying to create enough stability and long-term security to survive into the Long Reflection.

So we don't need to specify why individual death is or isn't bad, solve population ethics, or anything like that. In Ord's model, the key thing is for humanity and its capacity for future flourishing to survive and stabilize. If LER is an important way we can achieve that, then that becomes the most important argument in its favor as an EA cause area, at least from a mainstream longtermist perspective.

The tragedy of death during our current Precipice era of history is that the prospect of near-term old age and death terrifies individual people into doing terrible things and neglect altruism. If we typically lived in good health to age 200, then trying to cram in a whole high-achievement career, family, etc. into ages 20-65 would be a "live fast, die young" strategy. It only seems like mature adult behavior because nobody lives to age 200 right now.

Conclusion

I think it would help turn LER into an EA cause area if we emphasize the potential impact on AI safety and more generally on short-term values alignment with the longterm future. It would also help if we got very specific about room for more funding, identifying tractable concrete interventions left inadequately explored, and made strong efforts to explain the difference between life extension, ordinary biomedical, and public health research, and why LER specifically needed more attention.

As much as the LER -> AI safety argument strikes me as plausible and important, it's not nearly good enough in the form I'm outlining here. Needs more work!

Interplanetary Species Expansion

Any argument that sees climate change as an existential risk should also see the chance of being able to create a base on another planet as zero. The amount of work it takes to do geoengeering to make Mars habitable is a lot less than it takes to manage even the most extreme global warming scenarios. 

When we look at the economic effect that sanctions have on countries because of how specialized some technology happens to be, Elon Musks idea that 1 million might be enough for a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars seems questionable with near-current technology. 

The work that SpaceX does seems at the moment like a good project to lay necessary groundwork for doing anything on other planets. It's unclear whether there are currently other projects that would make sense. Once Starship is operational, other projects that use the technology might become more viable. 

I notice most of them fall into a few distinct categories. Global development/health, biotech, climate change, nuclear risk/global conflict, and AI Safety.

Life Extension

Life extension is inherently about biotech. It makes sense to put money resources into life extension than we are currently do, but the moment you believe that it's something qualitatively different than biotech you are likely not going to do very effective work in the field and try to search the key under the street light. 

Many agree that nanotechnology is expanding, even if it’s no longer in the news. 

Most of the expansion in nanotech is not about Drexler's self-replicating nanobots that are the x-risk people are worried about. 

Protein-folding advances seem to me the only thing that points into that direction and I'm unsure whether it helps to think in terms of nanotech risk instead of biorisk about them.

Re nanotechnology, you link to Ben Snodin's post [EA · GW] as agreeing that nanotechnology is feasible, and then ask where all the nanotechnology research institutions are, but fail to mention that Snodin recommends only "2-3 people spending at least 50% of their time on this by 3 years from now". I guess I agree that there should be more EA research on nanotechnology, but I think you exaggerate the amount of attention it should have.

Re coordination failures, there is one group focused on it, the Game B community, however they aren't EAs and I have little confidence that they'll make any progress. EA does have people working on improving institutional decision-making, which seems closely related, like the Effective Institutions Project. I think "solving coordination problems" more generally is not that neglected and/or tractable, given that there are strong incentives for a lot of people and organisations to do so already, but I may be wrong.