If someone came to us with a medicine and said, “Here, if you take this, you’ll add 10 years to your healthy lifespan,” most of us would take it now, wouldn’t we?Instead of being healthy for 10 years, we would get sick. Who would want to die soon after? So, without being hypocritical, I think the emphasis on radical life extension is completely misguided.
You mention the rapid deployment of social media and AI and the impact it has had on our world. Are there any early technologies that make you feel optimistic?
AI has a lot of potential to help in science. In my field, it has had a huge impact on protein structure prediction. This could be useful in areas such as genomics and cellular pattern recognition. I can imagine that AI could potentially be very useful, but unfortunately there is so much hype around AI that its biggest use is to extract more money from consumers. Yes, and that’s the problem. Particularly in Silicon Valley, the priorities of what’s good for consumers and what’s good for society aren’t aligned enough. Perhaps we might think that’s a good thing for consumers. “Okay, I can connect with my friends, I can have conversations online, and it’s all thanks to computer technology.” But there are also many downsides, including social isolation and the spread of misinformation. The problem is that people in Silicon Valley in particular, and tech people everywhere in general, tend to jump in without considering all the potential consequences. If you go slow, you can deal with the consequences as they arise. If you rush to write things down, things will happen that are out of your control.
One of the problems with aging is if older people make great strides, and I’m not saying they will, but we all start living to 95, 100. Everyone just starts living longer. It will change society in many ways, and we need to prepare for it. How should we deal with an aging society? What about intergenerational equity? What about sales? What about regeneration? What about economic inequality? The rich already live more than 15 years longer than the poor and spend more of their lives in good health. So not only do poor people live shorter lives, but they also spend more of their lives in poor health. Now, if inequality widens further, we can see how it actually becomes more disparate as the rich accumulate power. And as they grow older, they will accumulate even more wealth and pass on more wealth to their descendants. You can also build a two-tier system like this. I think people need to be aware of these things.
I’m curious if you have any other ideas besides eating well and exercising—
sleep. Americans always seem to forget about sleep, but sleep is extremely important for things like repairs and maintenance. Something else I didn’t mention is simple tests like blood pressure, cholesterol, lipids, blood markers like hemoglobin, other inflammatory markers, and markers for diabetes. They are all very important. And if we catch these symptoms early, we can make beneficial interventions that can help us live healthier lives as we age, like the way I take my blood pressure medication. That is, even if you are a stroke patient and have recovered, your life is still not as good as it would have been if you had not had the stroke. And so are heart attacks.
These are very obvious measures that are already available. We did not talk about social markers such as having social connections, a network of friends and support, having regular social interactions, and having a sense of purpose in life. These are also very important for healthy aging. So there’s a lot we can do, but it’s not easy. All these things are harder to do if you are poor. Poor people don’t have time and can’t eat very good food, no matter how cheap it is. You may not have time or a place to exercise. And they often do not get enough sleep, because at the same time he works two or three jobs. Therefore, all these things are easier for rich people than for poor people. So how do we as a society make society more just? That’s the question.
I have to ask: why do we die?
Well, that’s interesting too. This means that millions of cells are constantly dying while we are alive, and we are not aware of it. And some of them have to die because it is part of the normal function of living. That is, they are programmed to die at a certain point. At the same time, paradoxically, when we die, most of our cells are still alive. In fact, the whole organ is alive, so it can be donated to a transplant patient.
So what does it mean for us to die? Well, we’re not talking about cell death.when we say humans die, We’re talking about the inability to function as a coherent, conscious individual. It means that we suffer a series of damages, a series of defects that accumulate as we age. And at some point, critical functionality is affected, leading to severe system failure. For example, when a person becomes truly frail as they age, they develop heart failure. When heart failure occurs, there is a loss of blood to the brain, and the brain stops functioning and is no longer able to function as an individual. The inability to function as a coherent whole is how I define death.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
