about i've been asked to take a long view and i'm going to tell you what i think are the three
from this long point of view some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers which is encouraging
it seems that there's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important the first is death is a big problem if you
look at the statistics the odds are not very favorable to us so far most people who have lived have also died roughly ninety percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now so the
death rate adds up to one hundred and fifty thousand sorry the daily death rate one hundred and fifty thousand people per day which is a huge number by any standard the
death rate then becomes fifty six million if we just look at the single biggest cause of death aging
i think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem once you think about it you see this is not statistical points these are
twenty four people have died since i've begun speaking people like it's roughly the population in this room has just died
now the human cost of that is obvious once you start to think about it the suffering the loss it's also economically enormouslywasteful i just look at the information and knowledge and experience that is lost
due to natural causes of death in general and aging in particular suppose we approximated one person with one book now of course this is an
a person 's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book but let 's suppose we did this
we are upset about the burning of the library of alexandria it's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember even today
but this is the equivalent of three libraries of congress burnt down forever lost each year so that's the first big problem
and i wish godspeed to aubrey de grey and other people like him to try to do something about this as soon as possible
that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big but it's a very neglected area but there have been four studies
one by john lesley wrote a book on this he estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century fifty percent
another author doesn't give any numerical estimate but says the probability is significant that it will fail i wrote a long paper on this i said
the risk is substantial everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees now if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point not very much so
one percent of six billion people is equivalent to sixty million so that's a large number if we were to take into account future generations
that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up then the figure becomes astronomical if we could
then even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number ten to the power of thirty two so if you take into account future generations as much as our own
every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant the only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk
because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other
you could hope to achieve and even if you just look at the current people and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct it would still have a high priority
now let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem because it's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp
think about some time in your life some people might never have experienced but some people there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic it might have been
at the moment of some great creativeinspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage or when you understood something you had never done before or
every once in a while we have these moments and we realize just how good life can be when it's at its best and you wonder why can't it be like that all the time you just want to cling on to this
the third big problem is that life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be i think that's a big big problem it's easy to say what we don't want here are a number of things that
we don't want illnessinvoluntary death unnecessary sufferingcruelty stunted growth memory loss ignoranceabsence of creativity suppose we fixed these things
we did something about all of these we were very successful we got rid of all of these things we might end up with something like this which is i mean it's a heck of a lot better than that i mean but is this really
if we can dream of is this the best we can do or is it possible to find something a little bit more
ways in which we could change things not just by eliminating negatives but adding positives on my wish list at least would be much longer healthier lives
greater subjective well being enhanced cognitive capacities more knowledge and understanding
unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits better relationships
an unbounded potential for spiritual moral and intellectual development if we want to achieve this what in the world
would have to change and this is the answer
we would have to change not just the world around us
but we ourselves not just the way we think about the world but the way we are our very biology human nature would have to change now when we think about changing human nature the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies
they do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition but for most people they don't really transform what it is to be human
in some way it's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use we have
skin enhancements clothing as far as i can see all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room
so that's a great thing mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial caffeine alcohol nicotine immune system
vision enhancement anesthetics we take that very much for granted but just think about how great progress that is like
brain reprogramming techniques that sounds ominous but the distinction between
what is a technology a gadget would be the archetype and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle
if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read you're actuallyliterally rewriting your own brain you're changing the micro structure of your brain as you go along
so in a broad sense we don't need to think about technology as only little gadgets like these things here but even institutions and techniques psychological methods and so forth forms of organization
can have a profoundimpact on human nature looking ahead there is a range of technologies that
are almost certain to be developed sooner or later we are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws
of chemistry et cetera it's possible to assume setting aside a possibility of catastrophe sooner or later we will develop all of these and even just
a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition so let 's look at some of the dimensions of
human nature that seem to leave room for improvement health span is a big and urgent thing because if you're not alive then all the other things will
to little avail intellectualcapacity let 's take that box which falls into a lot of different sub categories
they make us better at competing with other people they're positional goods but part of the reason and that's the reason why we have
better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with and to remember what you have learned
chatting with people all of these very likely are enabled by a special circuitry
that we humans have but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these we're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and to enjoy it
all of these would enable in principle be amenable to enhancement some people have a better musicalability and ability to appreciate music than others have it's also interesting to think about what other things are so if these all enabled great values
why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be imagine a species that just didn't have this neural machinery for processing music
and they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance like the one we just heard because of people making stupid movements and they would be really irritated and wouldn't see what we were up to but
maybe they have another faculty something else that would seem equally irrational to us but they actually tap into some great possible value there but we are just
literally deaf to that kind of value so we could think of adding on different new sensory capacities and mental faculties
to speed up able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do easier to achieve the flow state when you're totally immersed in something you are doing
choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person undiminished through time so that wouldn't have to love would never have to fade if you didn't want it
that's probably not all that difficult it might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this
it's been done in voles you can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it's naturally polygamous
just a single gene might be more complicated in humans but perhaps not that much this is the last picture
laser pointer a possible mode of being here would be a way of life a way of being experiencing thinking seeing interacting with the world down here in this little corner here we have
the little sub space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings beings with our biological capacities
it's a part of the space that's accessible to animals since we are animals we are a sub set of that and then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities
possible for humans as we currently are so then you move off to this larger sphere of human plus and you could continue that process
and eventuallyexplore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being now why is that a good thing to do well we know already that in this little human circle there
there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being human life at its best is wonderful we have no reason to believe
that within this much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about
and so to fix this third problem i think we need slowly carefully with ethical wisdom and
develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there
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