Google Ventures' Bill Maris Investing in Idea of Living to 500 | Hacker News Reader

Google Ventures' Bill Maris Investing in Idea of Living to 500

bloomberg.com

83 pointsantr75 comments

Some other poster is talking about "hubris", "neopotism", or "tales from the aristocracy."

Are we so focused the 99% / 1% difference that we are too blind to see we're all in the same team, team Humanity?

Nothing is sadder that a live going away, knowledge, experience, etc all going to waste. Sentient creatures have a moral duty to live.

Extending our lifespan is also a necessary first step for serious large scale projects. I don't think we are ready with a 70 years lifespan to care about the consequences of our present days actions in 500 years, or to tackle serious projects such as building a Dyson sphere.

To all those who talk about how some people won't have access to that technology - yes, just like how they don't have access to antibiotics, cellphones or the internet in Africa.

We're not all on the same team. No way.

When a certain portion of the 1% seems intent on seeing the populace as cannon fodder (Kissinger's ideology), or as idiots to be manipulated into submission (Bernays's ideology), or as any of the other indsidious descriptions that the 1% use for the rest (welfare queens, leeches, etc.), we are certainly not all on team humanity.

This piece may as well be called "tales from the aristocracy." Every name mentioned in there except for Brin got to where they are through some combination of nepotism and positive stereotyping.

I bring this up because I find it especially amusing to watch these aging billionaires chasing after immortality. I imagine some ancient philosophers would have some zingers for these guys. The hubris is incredible.

(That said, the research into aging is fascinating and promising in many ways. I'm disappointed the article spend so little time exploring the substance of the research.)

If you think income inequality is bad now - imagine how much power/money/prestige/knowledge a 400 year old Sergey Brin would have. The rich getting exponentially richer.

We have a pretty strong reliance on the estate tax for situations like these. I imagine if longevity were discovered, that would change to another kind of wealth tax within 10 years.

That depends to a large extent of who will be in a position to influence those laws and at a guess the uber-rich would be very well placed for that.

Does the estate tax actually work in the US? Our equivalent in Britain appears to be a joke - anyone with a reasonable amount of money can just hire accountants to find some trivial way around it.

I think it's probably the most important tax, in terms of social equity - if you can easily pass down all your wealth from one generation to another, there are no wealth taxes, and capital reliably grows faster than the general economy, that is an obvious formula for the creation of an aristocracy - but I don't know whether it's compatible with the global financial system. Or perhaps it's just British politicians are particularly lackluster on cracking down on obvious avoidance schemes.

Not really. Estate taxes on large inheritances represent a tiny fraction of the overall federal tax revenue.

There are many techniques for circumventing/minimizing the tax. Law firms and accountants whose sole purpose it is to legally minimize this tax exist in every major American city.

Estate tax in the US only hits the upper-middle class. The rich avoid it entirely.

What makes my blood boil is that politicians that support raising the estate tax use trusts to avoid paying it. People like the Clintons:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/wealthy-cl...

They're not alone... The Kennedys, the Pelosis, even Noam Chomsky is set up to avoid paying the estate tax!

http://www.hoover.org/research/noam-chomsky-closet-capitalis...

You have a pretty wild imagination there.

The rich are making huge amounts of money compared to the rest of us now, and paying little taxes. What makes you think that longevity would change that?

People make this mistake all the time. The rich are paying the vast majority of all taxes paid, whether by income or property purchases. What isn't taxed is accumulated wealth and it should not be. The US has one of the most progressive systems in the world, one that harms competitiveness of businesses as well.

The simplest solution is to move from income to taxing spending. We have had the technology for tens of years where we can send people assistance, pension, and medical payments. Hence the technology to refund a percentage below the tax threshold exists.

I am loathe to use the name Fair Tax as it has been demonized by many, but note the bulk of this resistance is through political parties sponsoring groups and "think tanks" to do so. The reason is simple, a single flat/fair/etc tax on all purchases and service buys removes a lot of power from government. It would not be easy to switch too but in the long term it would remove the biggest burden to the countries economy which is the whimsy of those in charge.

Estate taxes are just evil. You got me when I earned it, how dare you take it from family just because you decide it was no longer ours once one person dies. Hence a consumption tax replacing all these taxes would be far better.

> People make this mistake all the time. The rich are paying the vast majority of all taxes paid, whether by income or property purchases.

This is true, but when you compare the percentages of the taxes that they pay to the percentage of the income that they enjoy, you'll find that they are paying a smaller percentage of the taxes than they are enjoying the benefits of income. And that's reported income: there are plenty of legal loopholes that allow the rich to legally avoid reporting large portions of their income.

> What isn't taxed is accumulated wealth and it should not be.

I agree with this, but this is used as an excuse for not taxing investments as highly--which doesn't make sense. Income is income is income--it shouldn't matter if that income comes from work or capital gains.

> The US has one of the most progressive systems in the world, one that harms competitiveness of businesses as well.

The US is one of the least progressive systems in the developed world. Sure, we're more progressive than Somalia, but that's to be expected.

> The simplest solution is to move from income to taxing spending.

The richest spend the smallest percentage of their income and therefore would be taxed the least percentage. I'm not sure what mental gymnastics you're doing to make this make sense in your head but it doesn't make sense anywhere else.

Also, income tax doesn't dis-incentivize anything: there will always be an incentive to make more money. But a spending tax would dis-incentivize spending--which would be terrible for the economy. For someone who earlier was complaining that our tax system hurts the competitiveness of business, I'm not sure what makes you think a tax system that encourages dragon-like hoarding of wealth would hurt the competitiveness of business: it would, if anything, mean that people simply avoid doing business at all.

> We have had the technology for tens of years where we can send people assistance, pension, and medical payments. Hence the technology to refund a percentage below the tax threshold exists.

Okay, this could work, but why would we tax people just to refund them?

> The reason is simple, a single flat/fair/etc tax on all purchases and service buys removes a lot of power from government.

That's true, but it moves that power squarely into the hands of large corporations that are even less answerable to the people who their actions affect. I don't like governments any more than the next person, but I do like them more than giant corporations whose only morality is greed. At least a democratic republic has incentives to appear somewhat moral some of the time. Corporations have no such incentive.

> You got me when I earned it, how dare you take it from family just because you decide it was no longer ours once one person dies.

Ah yes, it's really important that we keep the wealth in the hands of a few people who were born into it. We wouldn't want to incentivize work, innovation, or progress, now would we!

Somehow I doubt something like that would come to pass. Just look at the ineffectual polarization on eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthy.

And if this is the kind of problem they're wielding that power/money/prestige/knowledge to solve at 40, imagine what they could be working on at 400.

If you're going to say that people ought to keep dying, by the billions, as they are today, go ahead and say that; don't dance around it.

For every Sergey Brin, don't forget that there is also a Rupert Murdoch and a Donald Trump.

Do you really want an immortal Rupert Murdoch running around in 2550?

If it means that I can also be running around in 2550? Fuck yeah I do.

If I'm going to be long dead? Well, I guess that'll be someone else's problem.

I agree that radical life extension will result in increased inequality and an ageless aristocracy. And that would be a problem. It's just much less of a problem than "everyone I know and love (and me) dying."

I don't really want a mortal Rupert Murdoch running around now.

That dude is so close to evil they based a bond villain on him.

"If you're going to say that people ought to keep dying, by the billions, as they are today, go ahead and say that; don't dance around it."

People ought to keep dying, by the billions, if that is required to keep the organism of humanity alive and healthy.

Cells in your body have programmed senescence - when that mechanism fails (cancer, etc.) the entire organism (you) is at risk. What if the species-level analogy is true ?

I hope that's not the case because I, personally, would like to live a few hundred extra years. However it is ill conceived to frame the debate as a simple dichotomy between bright shiny extropians and grumpy luddites who are happy to die.

> People ought to keep dying, by the billions, if that is required to keep the organism of humanity alive and healthy.

Until we have a widely available means of curing mortality, such statements are idle speculation (though it does detract from efforts to come up with such a cure). Once we do, however, attempting to suppress that cure would be nothing less than mass murder. So if that is a problem we end up needing to solve, let's find a better solution that doesn't involve mass murder. And let's not stop efforts to find such a cure because we're afraid of such a problem.

I think you have a more reasonable outlook on this than most; it's good to approach this as a problem that legitimately needs evaluation, rather than being completely dismissive of it.

> I hope that's not the case because I, personally, would like to live a few hundred extra years.

That'd be a good start, especially if it gets us to the point where further fixes become available. A few billion would be better, though. :)

Mass murder is what our society does to the poor, albeit slowly, on an everyday basis today, if "mass murder" can be defined as simply allowing people to die when we could help them.

I wasn't referring to lack of action, but to actively preventing people from taking advantage of a means available to them to avoid death, out of some belief that death was necessary.

Extremely simplified, but scenarios you described will effectively cause civilization's progress to slow (and probably stall) because the very people that have the means to invest in prolonging their lives are the very ones that should not be living forever. For humanity's sake anyway.

The science is promising and moving rapidly. This was announced just yesterday for example:

http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.htm...

One of the first mainstream groups to pick up and run with one of the SENS repair based therapies, senescent cell clearance here, and already just by mining existing drugs - something that should be marginal at best - they are showing more benefits in normal old mice than has been generated in the past decade of messing with sirtuins and so forth. Repair of damage is clearly the way to go.

----------

The scientists coined the term "senolytics" for the new class of drugs. "We view this study as a big, first step toward developing treatments that can be given safely to patients to extend healthspan or to treat age-related diseases and disorders. When senolytic agents, like the combination we identified, are used clinically, the results could be transformative. The prototypes of these senolytic agents have more than proven their ability to alleviate multiple characteristics associated with aging. It may eventually become feasible to delay, prevent, alleviate or even reverse multiple chronic diseases and disabilities as a group, instead of just one at a time."

Senescent cells - cells that have stopped dividing - accumulate with age and accelerate the aging process. Since the "healthspan" (time free of disease) in mice is enhanced by killing off these cells, the scientists reasoned that finding treatments that accomplish this in humans could have tremendous potential. The scientists were faced with the question, though, of how to identify and target senescent cells without damaging other cells. The team suspected that senescent cells' resistance to death by stress and damage could provide a clue. Indeed, using transcript analysis, the researchers found that, like cancer cells, senescent cells have increased expression of "pro-survival networks" that help them resist apoptosis or programmed cell death. This finding provided key criteria to search for potential drug candidates.

Using these criteria, the team homed in on two available compounds - the cancer drug dasatinib and quercetin, a natural compound sold as a supplement that acts as an antihistamine and anti-inflammatory. Dasatinib eliminated senescent human fat cell progenitors, while quercetin was more effective against senescent human endothelial cells and mouse bone marrow stem cells. A combination of the two was most effective overall.

Next, the team looked at how these drugs affected health and aging in mice. "In animal models, the compounds improved cardiovascular function and exercise endurance, reduced osteoporosis and frailty, and extended healthspan. Remarkably, in some cases, these drugs did so with only a single course of treatment." In old mice, cardiovascular function was improved within five days of a single dose of the drugs. A single dose of a combination of the drugs led to improved exercise capacity in animals weakened by radiation therapy used for cancer. The effect lasted for at least seven months following treatment with the drugs. Periodic drug administration of mice with accelerated aging extended the healthspan in the animals, delaying age-related symptoms, spine degeneration and osteoporosis.

The authors caution that more testing is needed before use in humans. They also note both drugs in the study have possible side effects, at least with long-term treatment. The researchers, however, remain upbeat about their findings' potential. "Senescence is involved in a number of diseases and pathologies so there could be any number of applications for these and similar compounds. Also, we anticipate that treatment with senolytic drugs to clear damaged cells would be infrequent, reducing the chance of side effects."

Why hubris? Many people want to chase after longer life, but only some have the means and time to do that effectively. And we've advanced to the point that the thought they might actually pull it off is not so far-fetched.

This actually raises a good question. I don't think anyone disagrees that if immortality is possible, humanity has s responsibility to figure it out. All truths are revealed eventually, etc.

You're right. Google is one of the few entities with the resources to throw at this problem. But what responsibilities does that place on them?

If google discovers a "cure for aging" (for a convoluted example), how do they select who gets to use it? Does google enjoy 100% autonomy in dictating how its used, since they discovered it? Or should the government step in and subsidize manufacturing so every citizen can access it? What about developing countries? Are we going to have 450 year old Americans and only a few 450 year old Ethiopians?

This is jumping into the realm of bioethics. Google or a billionaire would be ethically obligated to share any beneficial solution for immortality, but they're not technically obligated to do so.

One hope is that finding effective solution for aging and death will require so much time and manpower that partial solutions will end up being known and shared, even if heads of the program would want things to be secret for some reason. So I don't think we should fear Google turning into Ilaria.

You point out to very important questions I don't know good answer for. I'd happily read more on the topic. There are certainly many dystopian scenarios that could play out (one hope would be if the progress was gradual enough that the curer will spread worldwide - say, there would be little incentive to withold the +250years drug from Ethiopians when the Americans already have +350years drug, etc.).

In my previous comment, however, I objected to the use of word "hubris". It sounds a bit like "how dare you play God, you mere mortal!" which isn't a very healthy attitude for actually solving the problems of humanity.

As with any technology, in the beginning, it is usually very expensive and only affordable to the rich. Eventually though technologies become cheaper and more and more people can afford it. It was the same with cell phones. I imagine this would be the same.

The patent system, as flawed as it is right now, was designed to encourage investment. The compensation for that investment is a limited time monopoly. Eventually though the technology becomes fair use and anybody can use it. That is one possible outcome.

But I think this technology will be very important to people and they will revolt if they don't get access to it--life and death scenarios tend to do that to people. The amount of social unrest and bad will generated by any company who withheld said technology would be so great that I think they would be forced to come up with a more philanthropic solution.

Also, based on what I know about the senescence research, it will not be one solution but likely thousands of discoveries that are discovered by a myriad of parties.

That is a much easier problem to solve than actually fixing (or replacing) biology, and it'd be a lovely problem to have.

Pick any emerging tech in history and you'll find plenty of hits about how it will only be available to the wealthy.

Air travel, cell phones, computers, air conditioners, and so on.

Still, if all those rich, well connected people are going to continue funnelling investment into former coworkers and friends of family, it's probably better for us mere proles that those former coworkers and family friends receive the investments to solve difficult medical problems rather than to build adtech or trivial social apps to flip back to their friends at Facebook. At least we'll be the customers for the medical solutions - any that actually succeed - rather than the product...

I wouldn't bet on us mere proles not being the product - one promising route to rejuvenation is by transplanting tissue or tranfusing fluids from younger people into older people.

Though still far fetched a brain transplant, or body transplant depending on your perspective, is not out of the question. Why fix all of the problems of an aging body when you can just grow a new one? It has also been suggested that a partial brain transplant may be sufficient to transfer a living mind to a new body.

You are assuming that we would be able to afford such. As it is some people can barely afford medical care and even if insured when it starts becoming too costly for the insurer they can drop you and have done this. Immortality would be reserved for those that can afford it(the "one percenters").

That's even a low threshold. I'd suspect that immortality would only be affordable to the "Point zero one percenters".

There are quite a lot of caveats and perplexing social questions that would arise from a feasible immortality treatment.

I think that's a bridge we should worry about crossing when we come to it. Until then, full speed ahead.

I don't find it amusing. I find it admirable. Aging is the number one cause of suffering and death in old age. This research has the ability to help alleviate the most important issue of our lives (literally). Vitriol is unwarranted.

> Aging is the number one cause of suffering and death in old age

Correction: aging is the only cause of old age.

There's a minority of deaths from car crashes and accidents. By yeah, effectively, it's aging that we should be concerned about.

The end of aging is easily one of, if not THE most, profoundly philosophical issues for mankind. Not dying will fundamentally change human society. Our entire social setup depends on the guarantee that people will eventually die. This is why you go to college in your 20s, have kids in your 30s and retire in your 60s.

Simply put, if we change human mortality, we will change human perception of time. That will bring along changes I can't even fathom.

Still, these technologies would eventually come to the masses. It's been happening in almost every vertical you think about.

Why do you find it amusing that "aging" billionaires (people in their 40's) want to invest in medical research? Steve Jobs died at 56. Andy Grove has Parkinson's. The co-creator of the Simpson's died yesterday at 59.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/03/09/391924652/sam...

You probably won't cure death but hopefully there's a small chance that if you get some really bad news, you'll have invested some of your money into something other than the next social network or killer app company.

One indirect consequence of Apple designing an expensive smartphone for discriminating one-percenter hipsters with cash to burn is that Third Worlders can now buy smartphones about as capable as Apple's original model for less than $100. Yes, it sucks that that jackass Larry Ellison never made a charitable contribution to any cause besides his own prolonged existence. But longevity for billionaires means longevity for us. This isn't Elysium.

> “The analogy I use is this,” he says, holding up his iPhone 6. “Even five years ago, this would have been unimaginable."

That's... a strange thing to say. In 2010, the iPhone6 was "unimaginable"? At the time of the iPhone 4, the iPhone6 was unimaginable? Really?

It's hard not to think of Ricky Bobby:

"No one lives forever, no one. But with advances in modern science and my high level income, it's not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300. Heck, I just read in the newspaper that they put a pig heart in some guy from Russia. Do you know what that means?"

That leaves you with 450 years of unenployment for many engineers.

As funny as this is, no not really. It would take your 100 years and spread them out over 500 (as it slows aging), so that would leave you with 250 years of unemployment :)

Or 450x new projects and job openings, depending how you look at it.

Of course, a 22 year old engineer won't stand a chance of getting hired over a 222 year old engineer. :) at that point they may as well be called wizards.

>Of course, a 22 year old engineer won't stand a chance of getting hired over a 222 year old engineer.

Now that made me stop and think... what I could be in 200 years from now?!

Topsoil.

Oh god.

Imagine having to work with an engineer who, some-fucking-how, has repeated their 1st year of web development 200 times.

What about Mars?

In 50 years we will have AI that far exceeds even the best engineers today.

It's good that big names with big money are investing in fighting aging, but it's not so great that the end result could be an entrenched eternal aristocracy. I'm not so sure we have to worry about that just yet, though. I'm a big proponent of research on aging and cures thereof.

As far as the article itself, the SV-standard corpulent optimism seems to run strong in Maris, and when it comes to biomedical stuff, it's an indication of ignorance. I read that Maris worked in a lab before he got the gig at Google; that's great, but it means he should know better than to casually bullshit around about living to be 500 years old being a realistic goal because Google is weighing in. Maybe it will be ultimately proven to be a realistic goal, but for the people alive now, reliably getting to 100 or 115 using anti-aging technologies is far more likely than living to be 500.

Biomedical research and development is messy, fault-filled, slow, and never truly finished. I guarantee that "disrupting" organic degeneration as a result of accumulated damage is several orders of magnitude more difficult than making a dominant search engine. Gaining a rudimentary knowledge of aging systems beyond what we already have is going to take years, not to mention several paradigm shifts in how aging is considered. That said, I think that science is up to the task-- in particular, private R&D is going to be carrying a ton of weight when it comes to aging research because of how lucrative any product would be.

I'm pretty sure that research on aging will have a lot of unintended positive side discoveries, likely relating to cancer and immunology. Hopefully the hype from Google causes more people to pile on their support, getting us there faster. It's going to be a really interesting 20 years-- there's a good chance anti-aging technology could remake society.

In this case piling on more support will not help. Like most things that require fundamental research for progress quality trumps quantity. By support I'm assuming throwing more people at the problem.

I think it could be useful. It's true that for that kind of problem, you want to throw more money at the best people, no strings attached, and let them keep playing around until they solve it - but all other research you can get will act as a support team. The field of biology is so big and messy, that you'll likely need tons of researchers and algorithms running experiments, sorting through data and writing down the findings, so that the best of the best can have all results they need available to devise a working solutions.

TL;DR: make the support T-shaped.

Quantity begets quality. I'd rather give 50 researchers 10 million each than give 500 million to one researcher. It's unlikely a single person is going to solve such a complex problem alone.

That principle (from The Mythical Man Month) applies to team size. If you have multiple independent teams competing they will not have that increased overhead.

This is not merely a biomedical problem ("solving" aging). As others indicate there are societal issues, but one thing that doesn't get mentioned is the new problems that living a long time will uncover. Modern medicine has nearly doubled human lifespan, but we now have disease, like cancer and heart-disease that was effectively unheard of before it. What kinds of new ailments will living to 500 uncover. Will people even _WANT_ to live that long? I'd take the word of an octogenarian with more weight than a 20-something on that issue.

Counterfactual. An octogenarian in an old man's body might be ready to die. An octogenarian who looks and fucks like a 25 year old? Maybe not.

Perhaps, but I think that if this comes to pass, we're going to have people who look and fuck like octogenarians for more than half their lives.

One solution to damage clean up is free and available to everyone right now. It's actually more popular with the extremely poor than the affluent. It's called fasting.

http://jdmoyer.com/2012/02/01/death-will-eat-itself/

https://www.qiagen.com/us/spotlight-pages/newsletters-and-ma...

If you think real estate in SF and the valley is bad now ...

Seasteading FTW!

I think we are going in the wrong direction once again, this won't solve the problem of death at all, instead it would merely prolong life, but all studies show that the leading cause of death is in fact life.

Trillions of dollars are already being spent worldwide each year with the supposed goal of eradicating life, but I think it's all just a conspiracy involving the military industrial complex.

I'm sure that if we really wanted to we could end all life and thus death once and for all today using the means we already have at our disposal and have had for over 5 decades now.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

This was an interesting read about humanity's perception of mortality.

if a cure for aging was discovered, how would we deal with the population getting too large?

perhaps mandating that people who take the drug can't have children?

Bill Maris looks like a white Tyler the Creator.

Maris is a buffoon.

It doesn't matter. Cancer will get them anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-everyone.... Unless they figure out a way to digitize themselves in which case maybe something else will get them.

Mutation is the engine of evolution so in essence the folks looking to live for 500 years are trying to get rid of "the engine of evolution". Lofty goal when put that way.

The whole of modern civilization is a way to power down the engine of evolution - for instance, short-sighted people or someone who catches a nasty infection surviving to have children. If you take moral cues from natural selection, you're going to face the creation of a very bleak world.

It's not about morality. It is the fundamental nature of the cell to mutate. The fact that multicellular organisms have managed to get this far is quite amazing but you'd be foolish to think those cells are anything more than selfish self-replicating mutation engines. So really at the end of the day all life extending research is about changing the fundamental nature of the cell which is an impossible goal.

Why impossible? A cell is but a complex nanoscale machine. There's nothing fundamental about it that says it's The Right Way. But if you mean the fundamental nature of evolution process, its mathematics, then well - we don't have to change it, we just need to harness it. Just like we didn't change the explosive nature of gasoline, we harnessed it for our purposes.

We're no longer in the domain of gene-based evolution anyway - our minds are smarter than it, and thanks to our ability to write things down, we advanced into cultural-level evolution, which works orders of magnitude faster than the biological kind. There is no law of nature that says we can't just decide we like living and then enforce our will on nature.

Not only to power down the engine of biological evolution - also to outpace it. There is no fundamental difference between DNA-based process and "writing things down and passing them to the next generation"-based process, except that the second one is orders of magnitude faster. Humans are no longer in the domain of biological evolution.

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