#E35 Transcending the Limitations of Evolution Begins When Mindsets Shift With David Wood
About David Wood
David Wood is the celebrated author of "The Death of Death" and "The Abolition of Aging", a visionary futurist who chairs the London Futurists, regularly contributes to its newsletter, and heads the independent futurist consultancy, Delta Wisdom. With foresight fed from a diverse background in technology, David Wood humanizes radical tech disruptions and transformations that change – and could potentially alter - society and humanity.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
(01:10) Briar: It has been a whirlwind since I last saw you in Dublin where we were at the Dublin Longevity Conference and I was just saying how much fun those longevity people are.
(01:20) David: It's not just about having longer lives, it's about having bigger lives, life expansion rather than just life extension.
(01:28) Briar: So tell our audience a little bit about your background because you've got such a fascinating journey into futurism, if you will.
(01:36) David: I was a futurist before I knew I was a futurist, I worked in an industry that was building the future of smartphones, mobile computing. We didn't quite know what would happen if people had computers in their pockets, computers in their hands, but we envisioned it. We figured out what kind of apps people would need, what kind of keyboards people would need, and that's what a futurist does, envisioning the future and then helping to build it. And eventually I realized that although smartphones were changing the world, remarkably, there were other trends that are going to change the world even more remarkably, things like AI and things like reprogramming, not our apps on our phones, but our biology, that we could have better biology than our original program with its bugs and defects and shortcomings.
(02:27) Briar: And tell us a bit about the concept of transhumanism, because you mentioned that you were a futurist potentially before you even knew you were a futurist. And about a year ago now, I was speaking to somebody and they turned to me and said, you're a transhumanist. And I was like, oh, okay, what's a transhumanist? So I think it's very interesting if you could tell people a little bit more about this topic.
(02:51) David: You're right. I think a lot of people are transhumanists without realizing that they are transhumanists. We call them de facto transhumanists. Transhumanists say, evolution is not the end of our rise as an intelligent conscious living feeling creature, we can do better than what evolution has given us. We can use science and technology to enhance ourselves, augment ourselves, and transcend. There's that word Trans again. Transcend some of the limitations that previously people took for granted and said, hey, you've got tuberculosis, that's just life. Hey, you are aging. That's just life. Hey, you're a bit stupid. That's just life. And we say, no, let's use science and technology and medicine guided by values, guided by thoughtfulness to enhance our lives far beyond what people previously thought might be possible. So it's not just a matter of living another five years, it could be a matter of living indefinitely as long as anybody wanted. It's not just a matter of being a bit smarter, it's potentially being thousand times smarter. And all that entails, it's not just a matter of having a few new experiences. We could have whole new senses, whole new levels of consciousness, accessing levels of consciousness, which previously occasionally mystics and saints and seers glimpse but hardly experienced for long. Now all of that's on the table.
(04:15) Briar: So if someone wanted to be a transhumanist, where would they start in today's world?
(04:22) David: There's an excellent book on Introduction to Transhumanism. It's an edited series of articles by Max Moore, and Natasha Vita-More, the Transhumanist Reader is what it’s called.
(04:33) Briar: I've enjoyed that book. Yes, yes, it's good.
(04:35) David: It's a nice flavor of the variety of transhumanism. To be clear, we sometimes joke at transhumanism as a broad church. We cope with all kinds of different characteristics, all kinds of different backgrounds. There are some people in transhumanism who identify as Christians or as Buddhists or as atheists. There are some who are more inclined to free market philosophy. Some are more inclined to a planned economy, but broadly we share the same view that we can do better than what we have picked up from evolution and from our culture. So that variety is nicely handled in that book. There's a lot online of two. There's the humanityplus.org website, which has lots of good information and all the time there's new sites available. I advise people to listen to the London Futurist podcast where we talk. Calum Chace and I, the co-host, we talk from time to time not just about futurism, but transhumanism too, which means, as I said, not just envisioning a future but saying, Hey, this is a good direction to move in. Let's make it happen. Let's figure out the obstacles, let's be smart, let's be focused. Let's build what I call a sustainable super abundance.
(05:49) Briar: And definitely check out David and Calum's podcast. It's really excellent everybody. So yeah, do enjoy that as I have. You spoke a bit about obstacles and what would you say are the biggest obstacles that humanity is presently facing?
(06:05) David: Well, there's a lot. One of them is the belief that we can't do anything about aging. One of them is the belief that aging is good, that death is good, that somehow death gives meaning to life. And if we didn't have death, then our lives would be boring or empty. It's a whole bunch of so-called longevity myths. And once upon a time it was rational to be irrational about aging and death. It sounds a bit strange, but what it means is there was nothing much that people could do. So you had to come to terms with it. You had to accept what cannot be changed. That's one of their most wise pieces of philosophy. Give me the grace of God to accept what I cannot change. But on the other hand, that same famous prayer, the serenity prayer, which Reinhold Niebuhr popularized goes on to say, gives me the courage to change what I can change and gives me the wisdom to know the difference and what can be changed is now different from before.
Whereas most of history, people were doomed to aging and death is no longer possible. And we have to snap people out of that culture which has all kinds of excuses. There's this famous saying from Latin Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and honourable to die for your country. People saw youngsters being killed in war and instead of saying it's a disgrace, it's terrible. People sort of reconciled and said, oh, it's wonderful. They might be in some exalted place in the afterlife. There was a way to make the terrible a little bit more bearable. And now there's a much better way to deal with that, which is to apply science and technology, rejuvenation, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nano surgery, genetic reprogramming, a whole bunch of things are possible that weren't possible before. So we have to change that mind-set and that mind-set is holding us all back.
(07:59) Briar: It's very interesting that you bring this up. I made a post on LinkedIn possibly about two months ago, saying that I would preserve my body should there not be a solution for me to combat aging and death when I'm 80 years old. And it was just amazing how many people attacked me. They told me I had a massive ego and that's why I wanted to keep living. They said the whole death gives life meaning. What will we do once no one's dying and the world is already overpopulated? Like it was just fascinating to see how many excuses were out there. And the more I sort of did research into history and things like this, we used to die of tooth cavities back in the 1800s. We used to die at 30, 40 years old. That was normal. So why are we sitting back and saying, oh yeah, it's normal to die? I don't know, 70, 80, 90. And it's normal to get these old age diseases such as cancers and Alzheimer's and dementia, which we're just seeing quite frankly, quite a bit of these days.
(09:07) David: These chronic diseases of aging are on the up in part because the things that used to kill people like tooth cavities or tuberculosis or influenza, they've been set aside on the whole, not completely, but largely. So more people live longer and therefore the troubles that arise when more damage is accumulated in our body just by wear and tear. And when that wear and tear can't be easily repaired as it is when we're young, our bodies are very good at, if we fall down and skin our knees, they repair quite quickly. If you fall down and skin your knees in your middle age, you might be hobbling for quite a while and if you're in your 80s, it might be your death because it sets in ways all kinds of other things. So that's why these diseases are more prevalent and I'm not going to accept it.
In this year alone, and I've had three colleagues younger than myself who've died of cancer in their fifties in the prime of their life. They did not want to die in their fifties. I didn't want them to die. It's not egotistical or vain to want to live longer. I say life is good. People want me to live. I want other people to live longer. Are we going to run out of room on the earth? Maybe eventually, but not for the short term. What drives the population more isn't the death rate. It's the birth rate. And with declining birth rates in many parts of the world, the population isn't rising that fast anymore. It's in some countries actually shrinking. If it wasn't for immigration in some countries it would definitely be going down. In some countries like South Korea, I think the average woman has less than one child now. So it's definitely going down.
So overpopulation isn't a short term issue and we can, in any case, be much more efficient in how we use the resources of the earth. As time has gone on, we've got better and better at using the earth. Even in about the year 200, there was a writer who complained that there were too many people living on the earth, but we got better at getting more food from that, better at getting more energy. And we can get a lot better. Again, in particular is something quite big. I think we can get better at growing meat. Currently we grow meat in a very inefficient and actually a barbaric way. We have large parts of land dedicated to growing crops, which we then feed to animals, living sentient animals so that we can eventually slaughter them and eat them as meat. And far better is to use some of the same improvements in biology, synthetic biology, which will also help us live longer. The same underlying techniques will allow us to cultivate meat without any sentient beings being involved. This will make much less use of land, much less use of water. It will have fewer greenhouse gas emissions. And yeah, it will support a much larger population. We can be better at living in wonderful skyscrapers, more area above the earth. Skyscrapers don't need to be bleak and eventually not in any hurry we can move to space.
(12:09) Briar: Oh, space. I was actually thinking, or I was saying to someone the other day about how excited I would be to live on Mars and then they rightly pointed out to me how much I hate dust. So perhaps not right now on Mars, but maybe once it's a little bit more developed. Tell us about space travel. Where do you see this going in terms of humanity's future?
(12:32) David: It might simply be space stations. We might create artificial dwellings in space, very safe. We're putting more and more in space the whole time, orbits around the earth. Increasingly we're going to be harvesting energy from solar panels in space. In space there's no night space, there's no clouds. These things can pick up energy from the sun all day long and then selectively beam it in safe ways down to the earth. So we're going to put more in space for that. We're going to put more in space in due course for people if they want to live and with some kind of simulated gravity as well. There's various ways to do that. So that's one way in which we can experience it. It's going to take a long time, of course, to reach planets, going all the way to Mars and back is a multi-year mission. Much more time consuming than going to the moon. So people are going to have to have a different mind-set. If they really do want to visit the moons of Jupiter, which many people say would be wonderful, we're going to have to devote a lot of time to it if they go there physically, which involves a whole different kind of timescale than we're used to. So it'll be probably post singularity, post the transition into a whole different way of being for humanity.
(13:42) Briar: Tell us about post singularity. Some people are saying this singularity could occur as soon as 2045. I believe Ray Kurtzweil said that, that as a number, when do you predict Singularity's going to happen? What's it going to be like when we're thinking a post singularity world?
(14:00) David: It could be a lot sooner than 2045. The reason I say that, and the reason many other people have changed their minds in the last few years is we have collectively been surprised at how much more capable than new AI systems are. The so-called large language models like ChatGPT, the generative AI, like midjourney and other foundation models, they have surprised many people, first of all, by occasionally the mistakes they make, which are weird. Why don't they know that people should have five fingers on a hand instead of six fingers, but also because of the remarkable positive things that they do working out just from a picture, how to code a website so that it behaves like that picture just by seeing the picture. In many ways it's developed faster than expected. That's why people have revised. So people used to think it might be 60 years before the singularity saying it's, well it could be 30 and people used to say it was 30 and now saying it might be 15.
We don't know. And the reason we don't know is two things. First of all, we don't know how special and clever we humans really are. It might be that quite a few simple things will be sufficient to catch up with human intelligence. And it turns out it was easier than people thought to play chess very well. It was easier than people thought to make wonderful music. Previously both these things were thought by philosophers to require vast depths of general intelligence. It turns out you can do these things without general intelligence and maybe we are not so special as We like to tell ourselves, at least from an intelligent point of view. And secondly, we don't know how fast new inventions in AI will accelerate things. And one thing that can accelerate the improvement in AI is AI What I mean is people use, for example, the systems of ChatGPT 4 to help them design ChatGPT 5. And maybe when ChatGPT 5 is here, it won't even need the help of humans that design ChatGPT 6. It will just figure out by itself, hey, I could be a lot more efficient that doesn't think I, but this system could be a lot more efficient if it such and such changes were made in the architecture. So we could get there a lot faster than 2045.
But I beware anybody who says it's going to happen this year, on this day, on this month, and this hour, we don't know enough about it. So rather I say we have to be ready. And secondly, we have to look for early warning signs. So-Called canary signals, which are indications that actually the software has done more than we expected. And we've had canary signals in the last year after the release of ChatGPT in November last year, and with GPT4 in, was it March this year? So it all happened very quickly.
(16:41) Briar: It does seem like it is moving very quickly. And I think it was interesting to see how few people even talked about AI or technology and how so many more started speaking about the future and things with the hype of ChatGPT. You spoke earlier about aging and how this is something that we could eradicate. Governments put so much money towards nuclear bombs. Like I was reading statistics, they put trillions towards nuclear bombs and they put mere millions towards solving something like aging. Also in response to sort of the AI hype per se. And you are talking about how we should be looking out for early warning signs to do with AI and singularity and things like this. But why is everything so backwards when it comes to these things? Why aren't the governments putting more money into solving aging now so that we can save money on curing people? And why aren't governments thinking, okay, AI is a potential threat, here is what we need to do so that we're guiding a positive future for all of us.
(17:55) David: You're right that if we invest wisely in treatments for aging, we will actually save so much money. This is called the longevity dividend. The idea is that a stitch in time saves nine. If you prevent the growth of cancer early, you don't have to have very expensive and very painful traumatic cancer treatments later on if you deal with somebody's pending heart disease or diabetes or dementia before, again, there's so much benefits to be realized. Now this argument is quite old and in the past people said, yeah, that sounds nice in theory, but actually there's nothing much we can do to prevent these diseases. Yeah, maybe a little bit of changes in diet and exercise and sleep and a few other things, but that might just push things back a few years. Now more and more scientists have got together and they are saying it's time.
We've got plenty of good ideas. We're not short of ideas anymore. We've got quite a lot of understanding of mechanisms, epigenetic reprogramming, genetic editing with CRISPR improvements in senolytics to deal with senescent cells and so on. There's a whole bunch, maybe at least 20 good ideas and more scientists got together and are now saying to the government, this is by something that the LEV Foundation has helped push as a consequence indeed of what happened at the Dublin Longevity Summit. At that summit, quite a few of the speakers got together and said we should make a consensus public declaration. And if people go to dublinlongevitydeclaration.org, they will find quite a long document written by a few leading longevity scientists poured over and edited and modified by about a dozen others who had their contributions and then signed now by more than a hundred leading biologists and by several thousand other public supporters and activists.
(19:50) Briar: Yes, I've signed this everyone, so jump on board and sign it
(19:53) David: Fantastic, fantastic. Indeed. We want to show the governments there is a public swing of desire for this. It's possible and it's something the government should put more focus on, and governments eventually do listen. Some governments pick up the early signs and some politicians get ahead of the curve when they see it themselves. So I think politicians are mixtures of people. They're like the rest of us, sometimes stupid, sometimes clever, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes selfish, and sometimes they behave very badly in an adversarial situation. They get their tribal demons brought to the surface and that's ugly. But sometimes they can actually be quite smart, especially once they've lost office, especially once they've transitioned to the House of Lords, the upper chamber in the UK. They can be thoughtful and positive.
So two former leaders of parties here, Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister for three terms I think, and William Hague, who was his opposite number for a while, the leader of the Conservative Party around about 2000, 2001. The two of them have got together and have written many things quite thoughtfully about, first of all, let's say address aging via addressing the aging process itself rather than just patching things up later when it's too late. And a number of them are also saying, let's address the existential issues posed by AI. And this has got to the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the UK. He has been persuaded that time needs to be spent on the risks of catastrophe. Indeed the risks of existential disaster. I think the difference is a catastrophe might just kill millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. An existential disaster would wipe out all of humanity or push back in a way that would never be able to recover from. So they're both horrible. And Rishi Sunak has been persuaded as worth convening a meeting on this in part because his advisors have seen what ChatGPT can do, how much quickly it's progressed.
And they've seen the dangers of a race. Because In a race when Google wants to get out first and Microsoft wants to get out first and the Chinese don't want to be left behind and lots of other countries don't want to be left behind. Sometimes in races you cut corners, sometimes you don't listen to what your safety experts say. Sometimes you cover your ears as Lord Nelson Famously did he put his telescope to his blind eye so that he wouldn't be told not to engage in a particular battle. And sometimes people get away with it, but the view is that if we make mistakes with these new systems, it's a mistake that we might not be able to recover from.
It's a little bit like this is in the movie Oppenheimer, but it's a story that's well known before they set off the first nuclear explosion in the New Mexico desert. Some people thought the heat would cause a different reaction to take off, that the atmosphere would start fussing, would go on fire, and that this might spread to the whole earth, it might be the end of civilization. And the various scientists said, well, I guess this is a possibility. And they studied and studied it and eventually convinced themselves there was no way this would happen. There wouldn't be enough heat, but it was appropriate to pause and do that calculation. People are saying the same thing. Now, if we start off the intelligence explosion, not the nuclear explosion, but the intelligence explosion, there might be more things happening than we expected and it might wouldn't burn up the whole atmosphere, but it might cause a catastrophe or an existential risk.
So Rishi Sunak has gathered, I think it's going to be about 150 people from technology companies, politicians from around the world, leaders from civil society, and a few journalists too. They're meeting in a historic venue of Bletchley Park, which is in Buckinghamshire, a bit close to Milton Keynes. It was famous because it was the site in World War II where Alan Turing and many others helped to develop effectively one of the first computers to decode the encrypted messages that the Germans were sending in the military war. Arguably the breakthroughs there reduce the length of the war by a few months. Now they're going back to that same location to discuss maybe we should put more focus on AI safety. And by the way, also, let's be clear of what the true benefits could be so we can direct the research not into what's commercially attractive necessarily. Nothing wrong with being commercially successful, but it doesn't always align with what makes best progress for humanity as a whole.
(24:32) Briar: Very interesting when we're talking about again, this post singularity world, sometimes people talk about an AI God, so to speak. Is this something that you think could be a possibility, an AI ruling the world?
(24:50) David: Well, the phrase I like is ruled over by machines of loving grace. If we get it right and it's going to be hard if we get it right, the AI will know so many things. It'll effectively be omniscient, it will know everything. It can be known, it will be omnipotent, it will be very powerful. And if we get it right, it will be omnibenevolent as well. It will care for the wellbeing of humans. A bit like some people thought that the traditional deity was meant to be, although that deity apparently, it lets people suffer a great deal. Now, can AI craft a better world for us to live in, a world in which we have many challenges, will be excited, we'll be involved in exploring, we'll be entertaining, we will be researching, we'll be doing other things, and the AI will craft that for us. That is a very desirable future in my view. But if we give so much power into any one entity, what's the phrase? Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That's a risk. So before we give too much power into an entity that we don't understand fully, we need to be absolutely sure what's going on.
(26:10) Briar: It's hard to imagine an AI being, so to speak, ruling us. And when I'm thinking about AI or even digital twins and things like this it's very interesting to think about consciousness. Obviously as humans, we are conscious and I've tried doing research into what consciousness entails, and there's not a hell of a lot of information out there regarding human consciousness, thinking about AI consciousness. And obviously AI couldn't necessarily be conscious, but at the same time, it will act in a way that potentially it would be coming across as conscious to us. And then of course, that raises a lot of questions around laws and say, you've got a digital twin and I don't know, my digital twin is using my wardrobe or stealing my boyfriend, or doing whatever, like who's right, who's wrong, sort of thing. It's fascinating to think about.
(27:08) David: We do need to think about these things. And you're right, people's ideas on consciousness, including my ideas and consciousness are all over the place. It's a slippery thing to pin down. I think the best book that's been written on this recently is called Sentience the Invention of Consciousness by a veteran researcher called Nicholas Humphrey. He has quite a plausible account, in my view, as to what sentience or consciousness really is. It's not just being self-aware, because lots of software's already self-aware. It can be aware of what's happening inside its own processing. It can recommend, or even in some cases carry out changes in itself. So there's a cognitive self-awareness, a cognitive consciousness there. But we have the view that there's something more than just being intellectually aware. Sometimes there's a feeling there. Sometimes you can learn things without being aware of how you've learned it. That's subconscious. But other times there's definitely a feeling. And what is that feeling? And it looks like maybe developed quite late on in evolutionary history, according to Nicholas Humphrey. It possibly is related just to warm blooded birds and animals because you need a certain high processing load in the brain.
So I think there's quit e a good analysis and certainly whether you buy all of that or not, I think it's fair to say there could well be very intelligent AIs, very intelligent digital twins that aren't conscious in the same way that you and I and the viewers are conscious with internal feelings they may perceive, but they may lack sensation. So do we want our AIs to have sensation? Got to be careful because there may be side effects of having sensation. Again, Nicholas Humphrey writes that because people could feel it gave them a feeling of being special, they transcend nature and maybe it encouraged them to do things that were more likely to make them survive even through tremendous challenges.
And also because they could feel internally, they could work out what other people are likely to be feeling internally and they could therefore be more successful in social relationships. And one thing that has made us humans and made other animals, what they are is the ability to manage networks of relationships. Who knows what about what, who feels what about who, who might be deceiving somebody, who might be having a relationship with your boyfriend or girlfriend, but pretending not to be having a relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend. Elaborate systems there, which were made better by having this introspective feeling ability. So do we want our AIs to have that one argument is, well, there may be pains involved, which are not just super intelligence, but super pains. Do we want to invent something that has a super pain? If we have an existential crisis, imagine what kind of existential super crisis and AI might have.
So we should be careful before rushing in. And secondly, it might be the case that if we do give an AI an inner monologue like this, a feeling, not just an intellectual discussion, it might be more inclined to make its own decisions different from what programmed in It might say, well, I know this, but my feeling is something different. And it might therefore say, you know what? You humans, I don't care so much about you anymore. And it would be better for the operation of the AI if the temperature of the earth were much lower and if the atmosphere wasn't full of oxygen. Because Oxygen rusts, let's say make the atmosphere entirely nitrogen, which would be good for the AI perhaps, and possibly very bad news for others.
(30:53) Briar: It's all very interesting, isn't it? I was thinking about how if I have a digital twin or an AI or something like this, I'd be able to get twice as much work done. Potentially. I could have my AI in New York, I could be in Dubai. But then even though we would start the same over time, we could become very different people based on our different experiences that we're having and their preferences and things like this as well. And when we're, when we're thinking about digital twins and AI, do you think that, well, we're already seeing it, I guess to a certain extent with apps and things like this. You can plug stuff into your phone and it helps solve things like your phone is essentially an extension of you. But in the future, do you think there'll be a digital twin that'll be helping you action things.
(31:41) David: We already have that to an extent. It's not just a neocortex, which is what distinguishes humans from many other animals. It'll be like a neo neocortex. It's this extra layer of intelligence. And if that intelligence knows us very well, it's able to give us particular advice, which sometimes my phone tries to do. Sometimes my phone says, normally you go here at this time of the day. Would you like to go here at this time of the day? Or something along these lines. And it's getting better the whole time. Increasingly, it will know when you look at an email, ah, you shouldn't pay attention to this. It may appear genuine, but it's not genuine. It already tells you sometimes don't click on this link. It might say it's from your bank, but it hasn't actually got the exact right letter A in there instead of the standard Latin A, it's got a Cyrillic A instead.
So it notices this increasingly, it will do things because it knows us intimately. And that could be frightening, it could be wonderful. It depends whether it's truly on our side or whether it's actually trying to make money for the company that owns it. Because if it knows us and is trying to generate advertising revenue, it might actually make us more angry or more depressed. Because in these states, we're more likely to be foolish and buy things we shouldn't buy or vote for people we shouldn't vote for or fall in love with people that ordinarily we should stay well away from. So it's important that this digital twin personal assistant is on our side. It knows us. Doesn't need to be conscious as well. Probably not. Maybe it will know us well enough. It doesn't need to be conscious, it just needs to have all that information at its fingertips.
(33:22) Briar: Obviously in today's world, we carry around our phones and our hand and it's disgusting how much time I spend on my phone. Granted, a lot of it is work, but I think it's like 10, 12 hours. Like it's bad. But again, a lot of it is work. So I just want to just want to highlight that to everybody listening and thinking, that's a horrible amount of time to be on my phone. But do you think that in the future, like surely we will not have this kind of disconnect per se, between our virtual and our physical worlds? Like we're trying to spend so much time in these digital worlds, whether it's social media, whether we're entering data on Excel, whether we're sitting at our laptop or hunched over our iPhones. When will we start to see this convergence where our physical and virtual worlds will start to intertwine? Do you think this will be via augmented reality? Will we have neural links? Like what's your thoughts about this?
(34:16) David: There'll be many stages. We haven't yet got widespread use in everyday life of smart glasses. It's taken a lot longer than most of us thought. I look at some of the slides I wrote in 2010, and I certainly expected smart glasses to be around a lot sooner than they have been because it turns out it's harder. The battery life is good, the field of vision is not very good. They have been used in some commercial industrial occasions where they have actually been useful, but they haven't yet taken off. But I think we're going to get there. Apple's Vision Pro, I think that's what it's called. It's a new headset. It's remarkably expensive. They've decided that it's worth paying all this money to build a powerful enough hardware and software. A bit like the iPhone was remarkably expensive at the time, and they covered up the cost. Well, the cost was covered by a good business model, which is that you paid for your data over two years and that covered the cost of the phone. So I think we are going to get there and in due course people will be wearing some kind of headset, which means that as we walking around, it will remind me who people are. And at my age, often I get people coming up to me who are convinced that I know who they are, and I do recognize their face, but I'm struggling to work out.
(35:35) Briar: It's because you're famous, David, they recognize you from your podcast.
(35:38) David: Well, it's also because I don't think I'm very good at remembering faces. Sometimes I talk to people one day and I meet them a week later and I've forgotten who they are until they remind me. And then logically it all comes together. But that little thing in my brain should be able to say such and such a thing person, this is their name. This person is really fascinating to spend time ask them about such and such. Or another one might say, your experiences with this person in the past have been a waste of time. Yeah. Don't be misled into a long conversation with them. Much the same as we talked about our intelligent assistance guiding us not to click on links. It might guide us away from people. And it's not labeling them as groups, it's just saying an individual person, this is not the person that you need to spend time with just now.
And choosing who we spend time with is important. You say you regret sometimes you think you spend too much time on your phone, but it can be nourishing, it can be uplifting, it can be informative. It needn't be negative. And if you say, well, the alternative is spending time with people, well then, that can be good, but it isn't always good. So our intelligent assistant should guide us. And sometimes the phones themselves will say to us, you probably spent a long, long enough now on the phone. That's a really positive thing for the phone to say.
(36:59) Briar: At least I'm not watching twerking Tik Toks, at least I'm spending time researching and being productive and things like this. And I don't know if you heard, but recently I quit reality TV cold Turkey because I don't even know how I got sucked into it. But I was watching a lot of love is blind and keeping up with the Kardashians and really all of this nonsense in all honesty, that was just such a waste of time and was such a distraction. And it really got me thinking about attention. And it got me thinking about dopamine hits and how spending time on social media or watching these shows give me that cheap dopamine hit. I have to do nothing for it to get that hit. But then it got me thinking as well about how so much of society is doing this and we're not necessarily working. We're not putting that time towards achieving something meaningful or a long-term goal or cooking or starting a business or whatever it is that we want to do. And we're not holding out for that real dopamine, so to speak.
(38:06) David: It's a real problem. It's one of the causes for people becoming mentally depressed. There is a short term hit, but it doesn't actually build us up in the longer term. And there are all kinds of other things. And I am guilty of spending too much time looking at chess puzzles. My social media has discovered that if it sends me a chess puzzle, I might enjoy it. And it is fascinating. But if I spend too much time on it, I'm not doing the other stuff, which I would prefer to do. I used to watch math puzzle videos in the same way because I'm a mathematician at heart. And it can be fascinating to come up with a neat solution to a beautiful mathematical puzzle. But I gradually weaning myself off that not going to cut my links forever. BecauseI look forward to getting back into mathematics and into chess and into music in the future.
But too much of it is in balance. So how do we cope with that? As you said, people need to have more of an experience of the good stuff as well as just of the fake stuff or the superficial stuff. And it's when we have that richer, positive experience, occasionally then the appeal of the thin veneer goes away. So it's important for people to have that positive vision. And if they don't have a positive vision of a better future and some partial experience of how that better future may be, it's sort of inevitable that we're going to spend more and more of our time on junk food, junk entertainment. And sadly, we will decay and we will be prone to all kinds of manipulation.
(39:36) Briar: I think one of the hard things about living in today's society is that we are yeah, privy to so much information. It's not like we just put down the newspaper or we turn off the news on the TV. We're constantly being bombarded by the media. And when it comes to the media, clicks drive revenue and what creates clicks? Fear. And I think this is one of the most challenging things for me at least regarding technology and being a transhumanist and things like this is maintaining that positivity, getting people to be excited and to be curious about the future. Because of course, with change comes opportunity, but unfortunately, because the media is so driven by fear, a lot of what we see is super dystopian all the time.
(40:24) David: Indeed, that's an argument for having media funded publicly rather than by commercial revenues. Of course, there are lots of media that are funded by commercial revenues that manage to transcend some of the tendencies you've spoken about. Many parts of the world, the democracy has been worsened because of some media that has messed up with too many people's emotions saying, look at these immigrants, how terrible they are. Look at these bureaucrats from that political party or from that country or from Brussels, how terrible they are. And exaggerating in part because it got a readership and got clicks. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister in a previous life, was a correspondent for, was it The Telegraph? And he admitted making horror stories up. Why? Because it got readership. It got people to pay attention to him. And we must not reward that kind of behaviour.
There should be penalties for misdirection, penalties for misinformation. And people are frightened when you say that because they say, oh, we're not allowed to have free speech, are we? Well, it's going to be complicated. I think people can say things, but when they're deliberately making things up and distorting it, when they're pretending that an audio clip has come across authentically, whereas they've doctored it to make it much worse and make a politician sound more bullying and nasty than he or she really is, I think people should face penalties for that. And because it's misleading us all in the wrong way. So let's have trusted media. I think in the UK what the BBC is doing with this BBC verify project is very important.
(42:01) Briar: I think it's interesting with the media and something that I've discovered upon speaking to many people about longevity and aging and things like this is that it seems to be the crux of why potentially governments aren't putting more funding towards this and things like this is because as a society we need to be talking more. We need to help influence and let them know that these decisions are important as we discussed at the start of the show as well. How can we start getting the media more involved? I obviously know that Brian Johnson has been very active in the media and I think it being quite good at potentially getting some more discussion going about longevity. But what are your thoughts about this?
(42:45) David: I think we need to try many approaches. Different parts of the media are responsive to different kinds of stories. So there have been some people on October the first they announced something called Longevity Day and they had protests in cities around the world. They're saying, let's have governments paying attention to anti-aging solutions, prioritizing it. There weren't hundreds of people, but there were in quite a few cities around the world, tens of people gathering. And people who see that might think, Hmm, I should do that as well. So perhaps in subsequent years there'll be larger groups.
(43:20) Briar: I think it's definitely up and coming. I even think from five years ago, weirdly longevity is now people are starting to talk about it more and I think it will hopefully be the next thing that will start to get a bit more hype just as artificial intelligence has and the Metaverse recently as well.
(43:40) David: We also need more short stories. We need more pop songs, we need more films and soap operas, Netflix serials in which longer life isn't always seen as a bad thing in which there is positivity to be gained by people having new leases of life. The number of films in which that is a theme is very few. Cocoon is one example people point to, but almost every other film in which there are characters who live immortally, these characters are viewed as being morally flawed and decadent and despicable. So we need more positive stories about how there's nothing wrong with living beyond 80, nothing wrong with living beyond 120. These are very positive things that could take place when we combine the wisdom of old age with the energy and vitality of youth.
(44:35) Briar: Let's talk about your book, the Death of Death, which I've recently gotten from you. So I'm really looking forward to reading it. Tell our readers a little bit about what it's about.
(44:47) David: The Death of Death has nine chapters and each of the chapters addresses a question that typically comes up whenever there's a suggestion that people might live indefinitely long and therefore death might be killed. First is, isn't it natural that everything in nature closes down all species age. And we point to lots of examples of species, simple species, more complex species that don't age. And this takes people by surprise. There are trees that are thousands of years old and they are no less healthy than when they were hundreds of years old. There are naked mole rats, it's an interesting species, which--
(45:26) Briar: I've seen a picture of them. They're really funny if you google them.
(45:30) David: So all kinds of special features of naked mole rats, but they don't age in the sense that when they are 35 years old, they're no more likely to die than when they are five years old. Whereas we humans, the older we get, we become more likely to die. And also if you try and give them cancer, they're very resistant to cancer. If you try and give them osteoarthritis, they're very resistant. So there is nothing inevitable in nature about aging. And there are plenty of examples of indefinite lived species. Chapter two is about, well, okay, different species live different lengths. That's all there is to it. We humans aren't going to have our aging changed. So we point to examples where species already have had significant changes to their longevity. The kinds of things that when we look at mice and giving them various treatments, they can live longer.
Dogs can live longer with various treatments. So there's encouragement there. And if you look in evolutionary timescales, sometimes you can see the recent evolutionary history quite well. And when various creatures move into an island where there are no predators, instead of them typically dying quite young, they can live much longer. Not just because there are no predators, but their biology adapts to allow them to live longer too. So plasticity and so on, it goes over nine chapters. Each one addresses a common complaint. People will say, well, this might happen in due course, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. So we look there, my co-author, Jose Cordeiro and myself, we look at examples of how technology often changes slowly and then fast. This is the exponential curve. We can spend a long time apparently not getting anywhere, talking about things. And then relatively quickly there's big changes like with powered flight like living indefinitely has been a desire, a fantasy, a goal of people throughout history. They said, wouldn't it be nice to fly like the birds? And most of history, when people tried, they died, they got into weird and wonderful contraptions and the contraptions failed the pioneer of gliding Otto Lilienthal. He died in an accident because his glider stopped and fell out of the sky. And his brother said to him just as he was dying, he tried to comfort him. And the gliding pioneer said, stoically in German sacrifices must be made. And for a while it looked like you couldn't solve this. But then the Wright brothers made some engineering modifications. They were bicycle engineers, they knew about balance and they did lots of other experiments with different engines and steering mechanisms. They learned a lot from birds. But they were able also to apply new technology.
And just a few years after they had flown, then people flew the English Channel. And then shortly after that, people flew all the way across the Atlantic. And by 1969, just 63 years after the first power flight, people had gone all the way to the moon. So slow, slow, slow, fast, fast. And 63 years isn't very fast. I'm thinking we could go actually much faster with longevity. So that's what we covered on another chapter. And then we look at the obstacles, the arguments which we sort of touched on. The aging is necessary because if we don't age we'll get bored. Well, if people get bored, they're welcome to die. I don't think I'm not going to get bored anytime soon. Now I want to get back to all these maths puzzles and chess puzzles and music and all the fascinating people that I didn't have time to get to know, and all the places that moons of Jupiter that I'd love to get to know.
(49:03) Briar: Absolutely. It's very interesting what you were saying about, about history. And I love looking back into the past and thinking about how past lessons potentially shape the future, or at least give us some inkling as to how it might be. What are some other historical events that have happened in the past that you think are lessons we should be taking for the future when it comes to technology?
(49:28) David: So I look at a previous revolution in healthcare, which was the germ theory of diseases. Once upon a time people had little idea what caused diseases. They thought it was just bad luck. They thought it was the gods inflicting their own divine calculus on people or the karma for past lives. There was nothing you could do if you got tuberculosis or influenza or something else that killed many people. Used to be the third leading cause of death in many countries. Gastroenteritis, which is a tummy bug. Tummy bugs are bad, but they don't kill us. Whereas it used to be you got a tummy bug, you had diarrhoea and you died. And so people said there's nothing you can do about it.
People did sometimes think, well, maybe medicine might help, but medicine typically didn't help. You could put leeches on people to suck out their blood. It didn't help them if they had tuberculosis or these other diseases. And then people got better technology, they got microscopes, better microscopes, and they could actually see, ah, there's such and such a thing that is actually traveling from one body to another and is actually spreading the disease. And then people figured out, well, how to guard against it. And there were other technological inventions, vaccines, which had been around for a few hundred years in various forms where they got better and better. People were able to target them when they knew how the different bugs work, then antibiotics. And as a result, many, many fewer people die, not just from one infectious disease, tuberculosis, but from all the other infectious diseases by and large. Occasionally there's a flare up that takes us a while to catch up, but we've got that mechanism. It's the fruits of the second industrial revolution, the improvements in chemical engineering and improvements in microscopes, as I said.
In the same way, the things that kill most of us nowadays, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, chronic lung disease, they all have a common cause too. It's not bugs, little bacteria and viruses anymore germs. It is the damage of aging. And as technology progresses through the fourth industrial revolution, we will have better tools that will allow us to turn that idea into treatments. Things like nano-surgery, epigenetic reprogramming, CRISPR genetic editing and so forth. So let's learn from that revolution in history where people had to give up their old idea of being helpless and just accepting it and praying to the deities to please spare us that we've been really good, really there's much better things you can do.
(52:02) Briar: It's also super fascinating and as always, David, I love how you're constantly challenging what people say is the way it is. And it's, it's like, why No. Look back at history. Look at what we used to believe to be true and how we prove that that's not true. And I think that more people need to do a lot of this. They need to challenge their own worldview as to what's possible and what's not possible. Because everything is possible really.
(52:31) David: A richer view of history definitely helps. So I often say you get better foresight when you have better hindsight when you escape from this single dimensional telling of history that you might get at one stage. People have a vested interest sometimes in telling history from one vantage point only. It's better when you see it more broadly and you see exactly as you pointed out, that there has been a diversity of possible experiences.
(52:56) Briar: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure.
(53:01) David: It's been a real pleasure. You ask great questions and let's get this message out there. The world can change, but we have to talk to each other and we have to talk to our politicians, talk to the rich people we know, persuade them instead of spending money on researching ice cream flavours, instead of spending money possibly on football teams or their former colleges, send money to the likes of, for example, the LEV Foundation, send money to other people doing pioneering work in safety and beneficial use of technology because we can get to this better world faster if we do it together.
(53:37) Briar: Absolutely. Thank you so much, David.
(53:40) David: Thank you.
