AI Could Double Human Lifespan in Five Years - Popular Mechanics
|
Sat, 24 May 2025 12:53:23 EEST
|
|
Date: 2025-05-22 -- Popular Mechanics reports on the bold claim by a tech CEO that artificial intelligence (AI) could double the human lifespan by 2030. This raises the question: is this the dawn of immortality?
If humans were to reach the age of 150 – referred to as the "escape velocity" from aging – we could precisely choose how long we wish to live.
By Darren Orf. Published: May 15, 2025, 1:39 PM EDT
Source:
Over the past two centuries, humanity has experienced a longevity revolution. In 1824, the average life expectancy for Americans was approximately 40 years. Today, this figure has nearly doubled, largely due to dramatic improvements in infant mortality. Thanks to modern medicine, this increase in childhood survival, combined with extended life expectancy, means that most of us will spend twice as long on Earth as our great-great-great-grandparents.
This astounding biological transformation has, of course, occurred mostly without one of the most crucial tools in modern medical research: artificial intelligence. AI's greatest selling point is its ability to process incomprehensible amounts of data to uncover novel solutions, treatments, or even cures that the brightest scientific minds might never conceive. Research has indicated that AI is likely to become an indispensable tool, whether studying cellular senescence, telomere shortening, cancer, mitochondrial dysfunction, genomic instability, or other causes of aging and death.
But what if AI were more than just a tool? What if it were instead the lead author of the next chapter in human longevity? This idea has led some technologists – particularly Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, an AI company based in San Francisco, California – to the controversial and, to some, "hilarious" conclusion that AI will not merely continue the longevity revolution; it will supercharge it.
"This might seem radical, but life expectancy nearly doubled in the 20th century (from ~40 years to ~75 years), so it’s 'on trend' for a 'compressed 21st century' to double it again to 150," Amodei wrote in an October 2024 blog post. "There are already drugs that increase rat lifespans by 25-50% with limited side effects. And some animals (e.g., some tortoises) already live 200 years, so humans are clearly not at some theoretical upper bound," he continued.
By January 2025, Amodei had doubled down on his claims. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he asserted that AI could double human lifespan in just five years, a simply bewildering timeline, but one he says is well in line with AI's trajectory. As Amodei details in his blog post, once humans reach 150 years of age, our species could achieve "escape velocity," meaning people could, in principle, choose how long they want to live (though he concedes this may not necessarily be "biologically possible").
Amodei is not alone in this audacious prediction. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, best known for his predictions regarding the impending singularity, has similarly stated that AI could hit the pause button on aging as early as 2032 through two means. The first is the use of AI-powered medical nanobots that can repair damaged cells and deliver drugs directly to affected areas. The second is the ability to back up our brains to the cloud using AI – which may not even be possible, considering we still have many questions about the human brain and how it operates.
"WE EITHER DO SCIENCE OR WE DON'T – UNFORTUNATELY THIS FIELD SEEMS TO ATTRACT ITS SHARE OF QUACKS."
The words "revolution" and "AI" are common bedfellows when discussing medical research. A March 2025 article in the Harvard Gazette likened the advent of AI in medicine to the dawn of the internet age or the completion of the Human Genome Project. In other words, it's a big deal.
But using AI for cancer screening, managing diseases, or developing new therapies to improve human health – i.e., adding years during which a person is considered healthy – does not necessarily extend the biological lifespan of the species. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, states that there is simply no evidence that AI is capable of modulating the biological processes of aging. Around the same time Amodei published his blog post, Olshansky published a study in Nature Aging detailing the unlikelihood of a longevity revolution.
"The longevity game we’re playing today is entirely different from the one we played a century ago. Now, aging gets in the way, and that process is currently immutable – though scientists are working hard to find a way to modify aging itself," Olshansky says in an email. "The burden of proof is on the AI scientists to show that they can modulate the human body and its functions. I could argue that drinking lemon water twice a day will make you live to be 150, and you wouldn't be able to prove me wrong."
Simply put, even if AI miraculously added to human lifespan in five years – how exactly would we know? Verification and testing would likely take a century to see if these claims would ever come to fruition, and AI companies have yet to demonstrate if they can extend lifespan in any measurable way. Today, humans are living longer than ever in our 300,000-year history, but moving past that threshold will require far more than predictions and unsubstantiated promises.
"Right now, AI is just a buzzword, and there is no evidence it will lead to radical human lifespan increases," says Olshansky. "We either do science or we don't – unfortunately, this field seems to attract its share of quacks."
SOURCES:
Popular Mechanics
Nature Aging
Harvard Gazette
Published in Alternate News.
 | - |
 https://vunet.net |
|
:
">Contact Us.
|
Tagit
human lifespan in (3),
www popularmechanics com (2),
this field seems (2),
the dawn of (2),
that ai is (2),
that ai could (2),
share of quacks (2),
seems to attract (2),
science or we (2),
lifespan in five (2),
that ai (5),
human lifespan (5),
the human (4),
lifespan in (4),
popular mechanics (3),
longevity revolution (3),
life expectancy (3),
five years (3),
could double (3),
blog post (3),
the (38),
that (15),
and (13),
years (8),
human (8),
could (7),
will (6),
this (6),
not (6),
lifespan (6),
|
|
