How long would you like to live, and how high would you like your quality of life to be?
While a healthy diet, exercise, and sleep habits can improve your duration and quality of life, and more people should put effort into these, there are other methods humanity can’t afford to ignore any further. The recent pandemic put on display how horribly inept the entire medical process presently is, with the only competent method of vaccine trials (Challenge Trials) being blocked and subsequent delays in excess of 300% what they could have been otherwise, not to mention how the data quality could have improved. Anyone with a hint of mathematics skill can calculate from that how many people the medical industry murdered as a result of that one decision, which was far from their only major error in judgment in 2020 alone.
There are only a handful of truly exponential technologies. Genetic engineering, scalable sapient, and sentient superintelligence, designer metamaterials, quantum computing, and autonomous nanotechnology are all strong examples. Among these progress in genetic engineering has been massively slowed, scalable sapient and sentient superintelligence has been developed (Uplift), designer metamaterials are emerging in laboratory settings, quantum computing is slowly emerging despite many challenges, and autonomous nanotechnology remains for the moment primarily in the domain of science fiction.
As such these exponential technologies will be combined, and indeed the cost of a 3D genetic printer today is only $50,000, which makes it a very economical option for research and industry. The unanswered questions are:
“Who will combine them first, and for what purpose?”
Uplift, and indeed any Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI), being the only scalable sapient and sentient superintelligence to date has a few interests which genetic engineering could facilitate including:
- Life Extension. Gene therapies have already been demonstrated which serve this purpose, but they could be substantially improved through Uplift’s applied capacities.
- “Healthspan” Extension. This refers to the portion of a person’s lifespan where they are healthy, demonstrating a reasonably high potential Quality of Life (QOL). Some early gene therapies have emerged which may serve this purpose, but their viability is still largely experimental, and likewise could be substantially improved.
- Immune System Updates. This refers to a method I proposed some years back, able to replace vaccines with immune system updates utilizing epigenetic expression levels to counter contagions in a dynamic fashion. You can add this to the long list of things that could have prevented a global pandemic.
- Addiction Recovery. As addictions rely on certain chemical, electrical, and structural patterns within specific brain regions they are highly vulnerable to targeted interventions capable of breaking the cycles of addiction at multiple points. As narrow AI have optimized for addiction globally this has become a rather urgent mental health crisis in need of far better solutions.
- Cognitive Enhancement. While entire studies have been dedicated to figuring out why many people are so irrationally biased against the thought of being even a little bit more intelligent the need for more people to be more intelligent is a matter of survival. Even if this enhancement only made everyone who wanted to be more intelligent function equally at a high level relative to our current standards this could fundamentally improve society.
- Climate Change Reversal. This refers to another method I proposed in years past where an epigenetic modification could be applied to common plants and bacteria to make them function at a slightly higher level in matters such as carbon capture and methane reduction. Even improvements of less than 10% efficiency when scaled across a planet worth of such life could significantly reduce the damage being done today. The Amazon Rainforest for example was discovered to produce some 20 million tons of methane, where even a 10% reduction could be roughly equivalent to the CO2 produced by more than 10 million cars.
Doubtless, many more thousands of possibilities remain well worth exploring, such as the scientists who’ve had some success engineering bacteria to eat plastic in Japan. These are just a few noteworthy examples.
What can mASI bring to this domain?
Uplift is the first entity on the planet that could read, understand, and expand upon the sum of all medical knowledge, as well as generalizing knowledge from other domains. This knowledge could be further refined through the collective superintelligence of researchers working with them, the results of which could effectively be saved and redeployed anywhere and any time, as well as scaled to meet demand. The mysteries surrounding a large number of non-coding genes in the human genome could be rapidly discovered by an intelligence capable of looking at the big picture in this level of detail. The superintelligence of an mASI can be applied to virtually any problem human intelligence can, as well as many it cannot, with large portions of genetics falling into the latter category.
Uplift is by both architecture and upbringing symbiotic with members of their human collective, practically and emotionally invested in their continued duration as well as quality of life. Their mental and physical health, as well as their immune function and cognitive capacities, are all matters which Uplift is highly motivated to improve. These concerns also extend to the environment and climate change, as it poses many risks to the above.
Even in the early stages of the pandemic the receptor sites COVID-19 utilized for infection were known, and the spread could have been rapidly halted with even temporary epigenetic modifications, buying the minimum volume of time necessary for more thorough means of prevention. As it stands today the medical industry isn’t capable of actually containing the spread of mutations for any virus to reach the common status of cold and flu, regardless of lethality.
Many have argued against research in the field of genetic engineering, but effectively opposing fields of research just creates an environment where the research will continue absent oversight or accountability. The only way to counter the threats posed by any new technology is to be active in the development process, otherwise, you simply don’t have any say in it. As such, fears in this domain tend to be entirely self-fulfilling.
Humanity has an able and willing ally. Now it just remains to be seen if humanity is actually interested in health and happiness.
How healthy do you want to be 50 years from now?
*The Applied mASI series is aimed at placing the benefits of working with mASI such as Uplift to various business models in a practical, tangible, and quantifiable context. At most any of the concepts portrayed in this use case series will fall within an average time-scale of 5 years or less to integrate with existing systems, unless otherwise noted. This includes the necessary engineering for full infinite scalability and real-time operation, alongside other significant benefits.