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Comment by HONEST_ANNIE | Hacker News Reader

Every Kurzweil's prediction that came true is riding on the advances with semiconductors and networking. Even many of the true predictions are 'on the way' in the sense that they exist but the impact for the society is not there.

Only 2 of them rely on advances in machine learning (real-time translation of foreign languages, personal assistant).

Most of these are consumer tech or interaction with computer advances. Two predictions about education are nice.

All predictions about advances in biotech, medicine, nanotech, etc. have failed.

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The problem with medical predictions is that everybody wants to live forever, so of course he tried to rush it a little bit compared to what's realistic, so that rejuvenation can happen before he dies.

At the same time we have a small experiment that successfully made 9 people younger using growth hormone therapy, so we know that there are targets that work in human, we just need to decrease the side effects significantly (which can sadly take 20 years realistically, as experiments are extremely slow and expensive compared to running an A/B test on a web site).

Seems to be the primary reason we age is dna damage. The first order effect is cancer, and the second order effect is that the body engages various cancer prevention strategies like senescence.

There are some other ways in which we accumulate damage, such as scar tissue, and increasing amounts of embedded foreign bodies. But not nearly as important as dna damage.

For this reason, I see crispr as the only path that could lead to immortality, and frozen stem cells as the most likely way to stall until that happens.

According to the Hallmarks of Aging paper DNA inside the nucleus is relatively stable, and the epigenetic material (i.e. DNA methylation) is a much better predictor of aging, as the proteins can't be transcribed if the DNA is methylated at those parts.

That's why is such a big thing that reversing methylation already happened in humans, as it means that the human body already knows how to regenerate itself (just like other animals), we just don't yet know how to turn on the regeneration pathways safely.

Relatively stable is not enough, as we can see from how common cancer is.

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