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