The Link Between Artificial Intelligence Life Extension

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i intend to live forever

or die trying

in when i was born i was born

with a genetic challenge and so

members of my family had a thing called

polycystic kidneys and basically what

that is

is a kidney that ends up having

fluid-filled cysts and ultimately

your kidney fails you either go on

dialysis or you get a kidney transplant

my grandfather died at 40 years old from

polycystic kidneys

back in the 50s so

i go to wild cornell medicine

new york presbyterian hospital great

bunch of doctors

and i uh in 2008

get prepared for a kidney transplant

i got a special kind of transplant it

was called an

incompatible transplant

and it was amazing it was amazing

because what they basically could do

is give me a transplant an

organ from somebody with a different

blood type

now typically going back 10 years before

that that was impossible

right you would automatically get the

transplant you would reject the

transplant that would be end of it but

what they do what they did for me

is they create they remove the

antibodies

from my blood through a process called

plasmapheresis and then they

just jammed in a bunch of immunoglobulin

and then they put you on a protocol once

you’re done with the transplant and you

stay on this medicine

and that’s amazing that was amazing to

me

now when you think about the first

kidney transplant happening

in 1954 that was the first

transplant and you think about the

period right after that from 1996 to

2000

where they were able to not only do

transplants

but to incompatible blood type

transplants

and then my transplant in 2008

that’s an amazing period of time where

it went from my grandfather dying

at 40 years old in the 50s to me being

10 years out in a transplant

and having just like an awesome life

feeling great

doing great it’s awesome today

they do almost no compatible

transplants anymore

and the reason is they’ve gotten so

advanced in the last 10 or 11 years

on advanced kidney swaps that it’s no

longer required so just think about how

awesome the science is around that

this talk is really intended especially

for

a lot of the people in the audience and

i can imagine a lot of you are

relatively young this is going to

certainly add

two years to your life if you think

about things in terms of how this

information is presented

and most likely many of you especially

the younger people that are here from

high school

many of you are going to live to well

over

100 years old and so what i want to talk

to you about today is the link

between artificial intelligence and a

longer life

this is what i would refer to as the

ultimate paradigm shift and why is it

the ultimate paradigm shift

if you think about it what is more

powerful

to most people than living a longer

productive life

there is nothing more powerful when i

first got out of college

i went to work at new york presbyterian

hospital

and there two or three years before

the shah of iran had stayed and he had

spent

millions upon millions of dollars just

to renovate a floor

so he could receive his cancer treatment

and it dawned on me

there was nothing more important to him

and in spite of all the money he had

he wouldn’t be able to expand the

longevity

for his life and his wellness

setting that aside it’s going to be a

one

trillion dollar industry by 2030.

so you just imagine how powerful that is

um what what’s driving this thing

to make you be able to live beyond a

hundred the first is genome science we

all know

the challenges associated with the human

genome we all know about the advances

that have occurred

second is big data and big data is

around the data that you collect about

individuals and

third is all of the devices that you can

use today from a wearable standpoint

to track this information in real time

dynamically

what i’m going to talk to you about is

how that intersects with artificial

intelligence

and they’re a big companies that are

focused on

providing this information now right if

you think about alphabet

many of you know the the parent company

of google

novartis illumina these are companies

that are bringing

this technology to the cusp of enormous

unprecedented increase in increases in

wellness

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and so a lot of stuff is being written

now about how ai can

become the type of breakthrough that

scientists

have developed to add 20 years on

average to your life expectancy

there’s a lot of research associated

with that

and what’s interesting about the

research

is that people who live past 100

get sick much later in life and for a

shorter period of time

so what do we do to create technology to

understand

how to solve for that based on the

realization of people living

longer lives the first is find out their

secrets

and then develop drugs that mimic the

ability for them

to respond better over life

and then deliver that to the rest of us

the second is

sort data now machine learning is the

kind of thing where you take data

you put it in a machine the machine

learns you train it

you look at it you do what’s called

backward propagation you look at the

back

of the results of the data you see where

you went wrong

but what they’re suggesting today is to

use machine learning to sit with

scientists

to work together hand in hand to

innovate

and replicate as long as the machines

are running

third is to look at the similarities in

terms of dna

of those that live longer and then

obviously devise a plan

for how you can identify and block

a molecular pathway

scientists have built a number of ai

models to analyze data

now one of the challenges of data and

the analysis of data

is the hipaa regulations we all know

about that but they actually have built

some very advanced technology to be able

to assess an individual

from the time they’re born and then

assess what are the risks of them dying

young so

for example the university of nottingham

is doing a lot of work in that area

and what they’ve realized is by doing

this kind of math

medical knowledge will double will

double

every 73 days by 2020

as compared to every three and a half

years in the past

the second is as i mentioned earlier

this genomic sequencing

has come down so dramatically in price

that the abilities that afford you the

opportunity

to do something genetically is is is

much faster approaching

that we found from an artificial

intelligence perspective

is this notion of iq why is it a

challenge

they have done a number of studies and

they have been able to correlate

iq with

longevity and so that is now a big part

of what’s coming out and what they refer

to as cognitive

epidemiology uh there is

obviously a the research is clear

there’s a strong link

iq and and it’s and it’s proven

with an iq of 100 just 15 points

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they did this test and what they did was

the biggest form of backward propagation

you could imagine they started with

students

in 1932 they administered an iq test to

them

and they basically waited for them to

get old and once they realized that they

got old they looked at the people with

the 15-point iq advantage

and they realize that that was a 21

greater chance of that person surviving

now the real question is what does that

mean

right what does that mean is that

basically that

people are smart enough to recognize

that if they exercise and don’t smoke

and wear a seatbelt

that 15 points correlates to a longer

life or is it based on

what i was referring to earlier in terms

of this uh genetic

propensity and these people in the space

of epidemiological research

are really coming up with those answers

and so you know there’s many studies of

people it’s like

common sense right you some group of

people who live in greece or

live in italy the average age is a lot

higher than normal

it’s based on a mediterranean diet we

kind of get that

you know we understand that if you smoke

you have a higher risk of death and

you want to kind of make sure you don’t

smoke and these are pretty

simple things but the thing about iq and

what my company focuses on is partially

on iq

is that it raises enormous ethical

standards and can

really generate significant social

injustice i mean if you think this is

the absolute paradigm shift

if you think that the richest people in

the world are going to want to live

longer

what kind of ethical challenges does

that deliver

right it’s going to be extremely

expensive at first i mean if you think

about

universal health care whatever side of

the political

equation you’re on if you think about

health care think about what it would

mean to somebody to be able to add years

to their life and what that would pay

for that

and so these disparities are going to

continue to be a big challenge so i

refer to it as

inequality and mortality and some of the

dilemmas

are really really challenging dilemmas

right so for example are we committed to

extending life

indefinitely if we can uh

what are we how are we committed to life

saving will everyone have an equal

chance

uh there’s enormous number of questions

that are that arise

uh is the loss of a child and the

passing of an elderly person the same

thing so just imagine

how challenging this is going to be to

get your

hands wrapped around the biggest

opportunity here is to educate the

public that

iq for example predicts outcomes and

mortality to a certain extent but it’s

not a destiny

it’s not the panacea and

also understand what iq means right we

have

one kind of way of thinking about iq but

there’s also ethical iq and that’s an

approach to dealing with issues

and developing studies on

intelligence that may not have to do

with the traditional way that somebody

takes an itq test from a pattern

perspective

meaning my company works by building

a bunch of artificial intelligence

models that are culture fair and really

what culture fair is an equivalent to

wisdom

right you can see somebody older you say

wow they’re really smart

it may not be in the traditional sense

that you think but that wisdom

provides insights and by the way that

wisdom provides insights

that transcend language right a lot of

times people fail iq tests because of

the language background

so when you’re thinking about a world of

122 year olds there’s enormous

promise associated with the change in

these lifespans

now think about this statistic if you if

in the united states we were able to

cure cancer

cure cancer the average life expectancy

would increase by two and a half years

yet if we were to able to focus on

things like heart disease stroke and

diabetes these are things that we can

control to a certain extent life

expectancy would increase

by another 14 years so you’re thinking

about 16 years

of those 16 years that your life

expectancy can increase

only two of those years are related to

cancer

obviously when we’re talking about ways

to help yourself there are things

associated with caloric

in restrictions watching how much you

eat

so for example there’s a recent study

that said if uh

a rodent were

reduced its number of calories it could

basically

equate to the equivalent of a 90 year

old

resembling today’s 50 year old

if you think about it in those terms if

they were to apply this to humans you’re

talking about an

enormous expanse and increase in the

number of years

that you can live

one of the challenges in health care is

not to try to cure

an individual disease but think about a

far greater impact

overall on public health by focusing on

aging research and applying common sense

approaches tied to data

now when we uh we believe strongly that

ai

and research are joined hip and thigh

and what that basically means is

the ability to calculate with math

things like what is your real age

there are two principal parts of

artificial intelligence the first is

machine learning and that’s basically

where you take data

you analyze the data you learn from the

data

you apply that learning and the machine

gets smarter it’s basically the

equivalent

of an exponential number of data

scientists in the room crunching numbers

and the second is a thing called natural

language processing a little less known

but it’s basically taking the signals

that human beings

emit video

audio the way they speak how they speak

and taking that information

turning that into an insight about that

individual and applying it to their

wellness

to their meaningfulness in life to their

capacity to do better in the world so

meetingbot works on all of this

as you know i mentioned earlier genomics

if you think about genomics

think about the fact that the cost to

sequence

the genome was 100 million

dollars seven to 18 years ago

and it now costs a thousand dollars

so that’s the intersection of math with

uh processing power

when you consider

that the most advanced ai models

correctly identified the risk of

76 of patients dying prematurely

by using ai versus prior methods of only

44

that kind of gives you a sense for what

the math is all about and how powerful

that math is

so with meeting mod there are a lot of

companies out there that

do what we do right they do it slightly

different we use

artificial intelligence to understand

people’s words

build models to help them understand

themselves better

and apply that to their careers things

related to

making sure the data is transparent

making sure it’s open we want to share

that data with everybody

but one thing i’d like to have you think

about when you go to a doctor how often

does the organization collect your words

dynamically if we were able to take the

words that you use

process those words it will give us

enormous insights

about who you are what you’re feeling

and we can apply that math

via natural language processing to

understanding

exactly what’s affecting you and apply

that longitudinally

so in summary right follow the money

this is going to be an enormous change

that’s going to create significant

challenges for the world

uh ai is changing everything this notion

of immortality is something you’re going

to hear about

and bias is going to become a social

crisis

unless we acknowledge the importance

of being fair and equitable to everyone

so i leave you with a quote live as if

you were to die tomorrow

learn as if you were to live forever and

this is the first time in history where

there’s

two things that intersect together and

are not desperate thoughts

give the gift of life thank you very

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[Applause]

much