I’m on the plane on my way to Seattle so i don’t have the book in front of me but I’m reading an interesting book by the same author of the Singularity who outlines his belief that if we can live until around 2024 that we’ll enter an age where dying becomes very rare.
His position is that between now and 2024 we’ll reach a level of biotechnology where the big killers – cancer and heart disease will be well on their way out thanks to our exponentially increasing understanding of our living systems.
The reason he makes this case is that his believes, and makes a pretty good case for it, that in the last decade or so we have moved from medical “discovery” to medical “design”. That is, thanks to the vast information technologies we have today that are growing non-linearly that we are quickly coming to understand the specifics on what causes diseases and create molecules that deal with them.
I’m not sure about whether we’ll have that by 2024 since cultural and governmental roadblocks will likely slow down the process.
But everything he mentions seems pretty doable such as drugs that target cancer steam cells, being able to grow cloned tissues, drugs that are much more targeted towards specific diseases because we now have the ability to make these substances rather than discovering them out in nature and see what they do.
After 2024, things begin to migrate to nanobots being injected into us that take care of our bodies far better than anything else. Maybe the borg were on to something after all.
So the trick is living until 2024. I’ll get to that next. 