I don't worry that longevity therapies will never be available to the masses. My chief worry is that I'm alive too early to get them. My second is that if I can get them, I might not be able to convince my wife to come along for the ride. Third in the list is that the advantages granted to the rich while treatments are unaffordable will destroy future opportunity for the rest of us. My final worry is that we will get longevity treatments, but in a way that is exploitative, such as subscriptions paid for by your employer.

The poor are not getting any longevity treatments. The rich will no longer find them necessary. They are considered useless eaters right now by the elite. The best you can hope for is blind neglect.

I have a later guess for AGI than most here. I think we'll start getting life extension before full automation.

I disagree with the assertion that therapies from this field will necessarily be available to the ultra-wealthy first for some time. The companies in this area will go through clinical trials and regulatory approval like other medical therapies, which are broadly available and covered by third-party payers.

Maybe in USA it will be like this but elsewhere public healthcare incentivises providing them to the public as they'll mitigate age related diseases. Also if you promise them to people it's easy win as a politician and it's also easy to verify by people if you fullfill this promise.

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This is a good thing only a few people should be “immortal” to combat overpopulation ……..people like Lebron or messi deserve to be immortal but not your random joe

At the very least, Medicare provides coverage to people 65 and older in the U.S. so I think that will help make these medical therapies more broadly available.

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I wonder how much of that is actually your thinking.

Most people who follow Kurzweil think that AGI will happen in 2029. While the estimated year for experts at large is coming down, as recently as 2019 (maybe it was 2018?), polling of industry experts who chose to respond still had about half guessing 2060 or later.

But that doesn't really matter, because I think the first "good" longevity therapies will happen without AGI. We just don't know what they will look like, yet. If they are SENS-type engineering therapies, it might be possible to have too much of an untreated type of damage to get much benefit. If they are David Sinclair-Type "reset the epigenome" therapies, maybe we'll be fine at any age and damage status. If either of those don't pan out, or take too long, in the short term we might be stuck with things like stem cell treatments, organ replacements, engineered immune cells, etc., which may help lifespan, but are bound to be very expensive and not do much for healthspan.

In any case, I'm not too worried about any of the things I mentioned, other than being late. I'm young-ish, fairly healthy, (usually) prioritize health, fitness and nutrition, and am trending toward an upper middle class income. I probably have another 40-50 years in me, but both sides of my family have tended to go downhill pretty fast in their 70s. I could very well miss out if treatments come a decade or two later than I think they will, and are more about halting aging or increasing lifespan without healthspan at first, as opposed to rejuvenating to a younger state.

There's a certain slowdown in hardware if you are familiar with PC hardware.

If you bought a PC in 1995 it would be something like.. let's make it high end - Pentium 100, 16Mb of RAM, 1Gb HDD, 4Mb video card. - if you had the money. My PC at the time was 1/3 as powerful.

In 2005 the same money would buy 2.4Ghz Athlon 64 4000+, 2Gb of RAM (if not 4) 7800GT Nvidia card, 80Gb HDD

It was like 100x better in multiple ways. 50x frequency, 100x+ CPU processing power, 100-150x more RAM, 80x bigger (and nearly that much faster) hard drive and I didn't even mention GPU yet.

Now let's do the same for 2022 PC and 2012 PC.

In 2012 for consumer mid range you'd get 2600k or 2700k intel CPU which was 4core/8thread CPU at nearly 4Ghz for $300-350. Or you could go for 6core/12thread for $600+ Common RAM sizes were 16Gb+ for high end. 2Tb HDD was easy to score under $120 +256Gb boot SSD and GTX 680 would be a common choice for a high end GPU.

What can you get today for the same money? You'd be lucky to get 3x higher single thread performance and 10x multi thread performance with 7900x, you'd probably go for 32Gb of RAM. You'll likely go for 2Tb SSD, maybe you'll get two of them skipping HDD entirely. And the only really noticeable difference would be GPU - that's the only part that would actually be 6x faster than anything else in PC.

So you barely got 2-3x higher performance for anything except GPU and multi threading. Memory and storage capacities maybe doubled in 10 years, instead of 50-100x previously in 95-2005

What if this rate of slowdown continued? What if 10 years later we'd only get 50% faster components instead of 2-3x faster for last decade?

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If the birth rate keeps lowering, companies will want longevity for the masses to maintain loyal consumer bases. The lure of a continuous cash flow and growing profits will motivate its distribution. For example, banks could stretch out loans or mortgages for a century or more.

Study history. It is quite evident.

I know some history. I just wonder whether the reason you are this fatalistic is because that is what you yourself fundamentally are.