Interview: Are We Smart Enough to Solve Aging?
"The Biosingularity Is Near" in Video Format with Elias Schlie
I was recently at Zelar City, a pop-up village in Berlin that’s focused on making death option. One of the things I was happy and privileged to get to do there was to participate in a podcast with Elias Schlie, an up-and-coming YouTuber who is interviewing various people in the world of life extension and bio/acc. I think it turned out quite well, and is certainly the most comprehensive case for human intelligence enhancement that I have yet made in an audiovisual format.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction: What if we are not smart enough to solve aging?
1:00 - My background: Education, digital nomadism.
3:08 - Pop up cities and why they are better than both big cities and villages; comparing Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Zelar and their prospects.
11:10 - I explain why intelligence is important (“what you need when you don’t know what to do”); why rich countries are rich and poor countries are poor; and how smarter people will help increase innovation across the board, including further accelerating intelligence and solving aging and other hard and important problems.
16:46 - Why not just work on AI? Importance of having a backup plan.
19:47 - How can we increase human intelligence? Embryo selection for IQ.
21:46 - Higher average IQ, better health, and beauty lifts all boats - but there are trade-offs when selecting for other aspects of personality. The risk of uniformity/psychological monocultures. Regulation through prediction markets? Optimize for economic success or “interestingness”?
32:38 - Embryo selection is slow. What about adults? Gene editing? Nootropics? Biomechatronics?
36:59 - Bandwidth problems.
38:54 - Why focus on embryo selection? (It’s already completely safe and feasible).
40:36 - Could it all just be education levels? Debating causality.
49.57 - What are my plans for Sophia DAO?
51:50 - Minor Errata: I inadvertently gave the impression that UK Biobank only has educational data - it does also have short cognitive function tests (13 questions in 2 minutes), but this falls well short of a proper IQ test.
54:15 - The importance of influencing media and culture: As with pro-deathist messaging, there’s a lot of pretty dumb anti-IQ enhancement propaganda (e.g. Gattaca, Brave New World). To the contrary, we need fantasy and other products with inspirational pro-Biosingularity heroes!
1:01:08 - What do we do with eternity?
1:05:22 - Current investment/manpower in AI research, biogerontology/life extension, and psychometrics/intelligence enhancement.
1:08:52 - Nootropics are to nooceleration as supplements are to life extension, and Neuralink as its equivalent of pacemakers.
1:10:32 - Possible benefits of holding the Sophia DAO token and tentative plans.
1:12:30 - Conclusion. (Note: Obviously I changed blog name from EHC Zone to the current Karlin’s Blog).
1:13:51 - More comments on Zelar’s prospects and Berlin’s surprising status as a major DeSci hub.
Please do have a listen and (if interested) subscribe to Schlie’s channel.
Apart from going into much greater detail on the philosophical connections and synergies between human intelligence enhancement and life extension, you can view it as essentially an audio version of my classic article The Biosingularity is Near.
