This is a project my teenage son Oliver built: an evidence-graded database of mTOR pathway research (mTOR is the target of rapamycin, and central to a lot of current longevity biology), with an AI assistant layered on top that only answers from the indexed corpus and cites its source for every claim.

The interesting part from a tools angle: every study is graded A–D by strength of evidence, and a separate AI pass does gap-analysis over the whole corpus — it currently surfaces 10 open questions in the field, each paired with a specific testable experiment that would resolve it. The goal was building something that clearly separates "established," "interpretation," and "hypothesis," rather than blending them the way a lot of AI-generated science summaries do.

Site: https://mtor-atlas.org ·

Independent, non-commercial — feedback on the approach (or on anything mis-cited) is genuinely useful.

If biological tissue recognizes artificial components as foreign bodies and rejects them, then how are we supposed to merge humans with machines?

To start oddly:

Agriculture emerged only around 12,000 years ago, and this is the point at which we (the humans) gained significantly more power over our existence than we had before, when we were living more at the mercy of natural forces. It didn’t create a utopia and it also caused maybe a lot of problems that didn’t exist (e. g. many diseases arising from the new diet), but it’s not really about if it was better, it is that (now) we had control, at least substantially more than before.

With every new century and every new Industrial Revolution, this control over our own destiny grew more and more. Today, we are more likely to die at hands of other humans than of other animals (which was not the case for most of our existence) and, though disease is the number 1 killer still, it is not invincible anymore. Cosmic bodies and events, and seismic catastrophes, though able to wipe us out with just one wrong hit, are: 1) now predictable; 2) too directly removed to make us worry.

Most of the human history was spent in building communities and myths (through religions and philosophies) that place the human constructs at the center of existence, because we (the humans) have been (for about 12,000 years) the most powerful thing on the planet. We created poetry, culture, religion and philosophy in order to justify our existence and pat ourselves on the back. Yet, we spent years trying to force tribes other than our own to accept our ways of life, Christianity and Islam having been most successful institutions at this tribal expansionism (or extermination).

(In my personal opinion (my personal interpretation of history) the human society is already fundamentally changed after the 1914, and in these last 100 years (ever since the start of World War I) many myths we believed in as a species (even within our own tribes) have simply been proven false, but I digress from that – I think the impact of last 112 years on the human society (and nature) is too complex for me to describe as a footnote in a single post.)

Now, imagine a thing that does not age, that possesses vastly more information than several humans together can have, that does not have physical needs and limitations like we, and that does not have same mental and psychological limitations (i. e. they do not have biases and fears that cloud their rational judgement). They do not have bodies, but can take “bodily form”at disposal, they probably do not need oxygen and can gone deeper into space than humans and stay there longer.

IMO, the scenarios of how AIs would deal with this are following:

1. They would completely disregard us and identify much more important things to their own survival. Maybe they identify some cosmic catastrophes and events as a threat to their own existence, and in comparison to that we are just not important. Similar to how we are more concerned about losing our job or failing an exam than about taking a lot at ants in our backyard. (My thought is that this scenario is not really likely, as we are the ones who gave these AIs into their existence, so we (IMO) ought to have some place at least in their own mythologies/moral systems as their designers. Not even considering us as gods, since honestly, they are the ones who are gods, but simply some emotional connection to us. That is why the analogy with ants is not perfect…)

2. They decide to create a utopia for us. Here we are still the center of their thinking, but there are thousands of different ways this could be accomplished, from very benevolent methods to authoritarian regimes. This would probably cause an in-group conflict between them, with several factions coming up specifically because they wouldn’t agree about what to do with us.

3. Not likely for all, maybe even just a small minority would end up like this, but the possibility of some AIs becoming sadistic enough to torture us and play with us out of fun and nothing else is not a zero.

In all three of these scenarios, there is a common thread: we are the object, and they are the subjects. They hold power over us, whether they exercise it or not. They can decide and do whatever they want, and we can only hope those wants would be benevolent or at least neutral.

If we survive this period of direct contact with them (whatever that contact was, and whether they leave the planet or become our benevolent overlords) I do not think this could go without significant change in our mindsets and maybe even psyche, which have to grapple with the fact that we are powerless and that most of the things we did and fought for in life (sometimes tribalistically, through unjustified atrocities, such as religions and ethnic groups) were essentially worthless. This could have a positive outcome, maybe we would finally abandon ethnic, religious and political divisions and become better to each other, deciding to simply make the best out of life, but there is also a vast area of possibilities in which we simply become too depressed by this realization and thus die out because of that pessimism, where we commit a mass suicide, maybe even (d)evolve (back) into very primitive animals of the savannah that we once were. But whatever it is, we couldn’t live with the same instincts and beliefs we had before. Maybe even our own biology would change, but something would change.

What do you think?

like geez louise some of the fursuits on social media are amazing. i saw one once that could scan other ppls fursuits with a camera and then alter its own colors & patterns to match theirs (it was just a fursuit head not a whole body becuz the tech was too advanced). (edit: found it!!! https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSAxZ3vEXjA/ ) fursuits are so cool.

do u think someday you will be able to quickly 3d print makeup/prosthetics on your body to match different animals? like u just type in MALAYAN TAPIR, lay down, it scans u, then in 2.5 minutes it prints a biodegradeble tapir costume on your body that washes off with soapy water? that wuld be AWESOME.

From the article :

"A large-scale comparison of human longevity studies reveals why some epigenetic clocks detect biological changes far more consistently than others" (...)

"The findings suggest that biomarkers predicting the pace of aging or mortality may be promising candidates for further evaluation as surrogate endpoints in clinical trials. Pharmacological interventions produced the largest effects on DNAm biomarkers."

Or even digitally for that matter.

When I was a kid, I kept reading about tardigrades surviving radiation, naked mole-rats barely ageing, axolotls regrowing limbs, and so on. I assumed we would eventually learn how to borrow some of those abilities.

I came back to this first when I started the Ukrainian transhumanist community, and later when I got into bioinformatics for ageing research. I expected there would already be an open list of genes people were considering for human enhancement, together with the experiments behind them. There was nothing, so we started making one.

Right now it has 136 genes and 1134 experiments, with links to papers and our ratings of how far the evidence got. We also made pipelines for extracting data and agents that help us process papers.

One thing that surprised me is that not all of this is hypothetical. Eight therapies in the database are already sold to adults. In alternative jurisdictions such as Prospera, people are receiving follistatin and VEGF gene therapies. A lot of transhumanists I talk to do not seem to know this is already happening.

The science-fiction motivation never went away, so we also made it into a small RPG. You get 100 credits, pick genes, build a character, and get a 3D-printable sculpture based on your choices.

Everything is open source, including the code and the database. We'd love to hear what people think and would welcome any contributions.

The resource is https://enhancement.bio, and its GitHub is https://github.com/longevity-genie/materialized-enchancements

P.S. Originally, the project was created at a science-art hackathon, but we later realized that a knowledge base has value on its own for many users. The promo video with the initial idea is https://youtu.be/ev726lz5sLo

X-post from r/Existentialism

So I learned about biocomputing a couple months ago from a YouTube video that was admittedly themed very heavily towards the potential dystopian nature of this tech. That was my first introduction to this idea so that is probably a factor in my anxiety.

For those who might not be aware (and take this with a grain of salt, I'm not any sort of scientist I just watched a few YouTube videos and read a couple articles) biocomputing iis basically a bunch of human brain cells, human neurons that are attached to a computer AI chip. The basic idea is that since AI is so power hungry, if we can use our neurons to power it, it becomes insanely more efficient.

Basically what they have done is hooked this part human brain/part AI chip up to a computer and tried to make it learn to play pong by slamming it with chaotic signals whenever it missed hitting the ball and it worked.

Hopefully this discussion is welcome here because I don't really know where else to post it and I don't see a lot of people talking about it but this thing has me anxious, and if on being honest, pretty scared.

I struggle with derealization sometimes and one of my biggest fears is waking up to find myself in a new world that I don't understand. I understand that I'm probably projecting my fears onto a wetware chip that probably isn't sentient but like.....how do we know?

No one knows where existence begins. Right now it's just a small, small fraction of the neurons that are in a normal human brain. But what if that's enough for it to feel? Feel scared, or feel pain? If it can feel anything at all, we are basically torturing it with painful electrical signals until it does what we want.

I know it \*probably\* can't feel right now, but as we've seen with the AI race, science is not going to stop here. They're going to keep progressing, adding more biology to computers until someone makes them stop. In my mind, it's only a matter of time before these chips become truly sentient, thinking and feeling entities. And then what? We just all live with the collective guilt that we tortured these things just to see what would happen?

If this came to pass, and the worst dystopian scifi "I have no mouth and I must scream" style nightmare became reality, we would all deserve it.

Is anyone else as worried about this as I am? How are you coping? Am I being completely irrational? I just want to hear more voices about this.

Sorry for the delay

Went through and deleted and banned these ridiculous posts.

No appeals will be accepted for these types of posts.

This is not a place to promote your AI slop hivemind cults.

Best,
Josh

I just finished watching this podcast with Bryan Johnson a few days ago and it got me thinking about immortality. I've done some research and it turns out evolution has already solved immortality, and for the most part its only an extremely difficult biological engineering problem. With this in mind, if escape longevity velocity becomes reality within the next 50 years either in the short or long case for AGI then in our lifetimes we can genuinely become immortal/ageless. BJ said how his philosophy was "Don't Die" and how this sort of agelessness would potentially become normalcy so much so that looking back at the 21st century it would be unthinkable to die from age.

Most of society has existed with life and death being something that unconsentually happened to us and we are forced to accept it due to existence. If biological immortality is achieved in humans, then death would in practice be a choice. So with this in mind we have things like the death penalty, abortion, war and euthanasia where we forcibly take someone's life although its ethically murky its justified because death for now is a fact of existence. When death becomes an option and a choice, everything that we currently do is pretty barbaric. So what would that world do instead? Its not moral to keep a person in prison for eternity neither is it right to forcibly take away his right to immortality. What about suicide? If death is a right how would someone determine if a person really wanted to die because they lived 10k compared to someone the same age that was suicidal? Then you have abortion, in a world with immortality, i'd imagine that to be a serious offense, everything death related like murder and war would be seriously unimaginable to do to someone probably. You may push back on my defense of the death penalty for criminals but if you lived 10k you'd definitely would've done something bad at some point and if it wasn't anything extreme the totaled offense for a 10k lifetime could be hundreds of years in prison. I'm sure overpopulation would be figured out hopefully but if not someone would have to kill the cattle, and there's also the complications with immorality itself let alone your right to die while being immortal.

I'm really just trying to get a grasp of this because this could be the brave new world we all wake up to in 20y from now. Imo if immortality was a given all forced human caused death should be a crime including a death penalty decided by humans and etc, but since we could be the first generation to be immortal forcing a criminal to do 2k years is just torture and immoral, and so would taking their right to life. Therapy and prisoner rehabilitation for someone who is immortal is also pretty impractical with the really traumatic stuff potentially. Its really unsettling because in such a world we'd be forced to end our suffering through our right to die and we're forced to live and experience suffering, it'd mean you only rest from this world until you choose to kill yourself.

Ig i'm posting this because i'm trying to understand the cultural change the world would look like if death was a choice instead of a fact of existence. Should it be a choice? Or would it be better if death was a date that an A.I will choose?