I am creating this thread to discuss a medium-term R&D project that some of us in SingularityNET and Mozi Health and OpenCog and iCog are pursuing together just now, building on a bunch of prior related work…
The basic idea is to apply our AI tools in an integrated way to make a frontal assault on the aging problem…
Make, by hand, a sort of graph indicating the various feedback loops and causal pathways that are critical to aging – i.e. a more rigorous version of John Furber’s beautiful chart here, Systems Biology of Human Aging - Network Model
Each link in this graph should then be explicitly associated with one or more research papers or abstracts, and one or more biological datasets as well
We then take 2) as a cue for NLP investigation, i.e. we ask ourselves “exactly what level and kind of bio-NLP information extraction would we need in order to be able to extract the links in the graph 1) from the associated papers or abstracts”
We make the needed tweaks to our OpenCog/SingularityNET/Mozi NLP pipeline so it is capable as described in 3)
We run the pipeline over a larger body of papers/abstracts and see what additions/alternatives it finds to the graph from 1)
We analyze the datasets identified in 2) using OpenCog’s MOSES and other appropriate tools, and import the results into OpenCog Atomspace
OpenCog’s PLN inference is then used to integrate the results of bio-NLP on the identified research papers and abstracts, with the analysis results from 6)
SingularityNET, as it matures, is used to deal with the numerous datasets, result sets, and different NLP and AI-analytics and bioinformatics algorithms used in taking care of all of the above…
Aging is cured, we all live as long as we want to, yay! {OK well there may be some intermediate steps between 7 and 8 … but at least we can get some very interesting hypotheses and insights this way, driving new experiments and thus getting more data to feed into the AI network, etc. …}
Very interesting. @bengoertzel, it might be fruitful to pull Aubrey de Grey into the dialogue as he, as you are probably aware, started out in the field of artificial intelligence (Man-Made Minions Ltd.) and is well-versed in both fields. This is a tremendously appealing initiative.
The above is quite general purpose and does not commit to any hypotheses regarding what may be the underlying causes or dynamics of aging, but in fact we do have some specific hypotheses we are following up …
I have been investigating for a long time the potential role of mitochondria in aging, since working on this paper back in 2005, AI for Understanding and Curing Aging … where we showed that mutations in certain regions of mitochondrial DNA were very strongly correlated with Parkinsons Disease (and we found, but did not publish, similar results regarding Alzheimers) …
It seems to me that analyzing the Mito-Age dataset (http://www.mitoage.info ) of cross-species mitochondrial DNA data – together with relevant aspects of the nuclear DNA of the same species – could be quite informative regarding the energetic basis of aging…
On the other hand, Alexander Fedintsev and our SingularityNET Director of Biomedical Projects Denis Odinokov and others have emphasized the potential strong role of stiffening of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in aging, and this fascinates me because I know there is so much signaling (both chemical and biophotonic) going on in the ECM … indeed this ECM-based signaling appears likely to me to be related to how acupuncture and other aspects of traditional Chinese medicine work…
ECM is part of the story, mitochondria are part of the story – there are many interlocking feedback involved in aging and we need to unravel and model many of them using available data and AI tools, and then work in close collaboration with laboratory biologists to run experiments suggested by our AI tools to gather yet more data, and then we have a good chance of solving the problem…
This can be very big business-wise but even more interestingly it has real potential to dramatically minimize involuntary death…
@Bryan Yah I know Aubrey quite well for a long time, but he has often been a little skeptical of how critical AI is for longevity research… he sees more urgent need for basic lab work along the directions identified in his book…
BTW for basic background here is a brief talk I gave on “AI Against Aging” 7 years ago or so… https://vimeo.com/18143134
I am not sure death is necessarily a disease or a bad thing. It might be as well just an evolutionary advantage, because organisms that reproduce quickly and let the older versions die are more adaptable and successful in nature.
But the more adaptable we (or our superintelligent future versions of us) can be with our “intelligent design and self redesign” the less sense I see in dying.
As far as I know, all methods to avoid death can be divided into three technical routes: mind/consciousness preservation, gene editing, and other medical methods trying to treat the “disease” of aging.
Further, there’s two types of mind/consciousness preservation, one is uploading our complete-case data to the Cloud, including consciousness, memory, bio-data and many other parameters; the other is saving the brain, the head or entire body in a frozen manner, and attempting to thaw and revive safely in the future. Such as Nectome, a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company.
There’s also two types of attempts of gene editing, one is searching for longevity-related genes in the human body; the other is searching for longevity-related genes of various living organisms or artificially constructing the longevity genes. Such as George Church’s dog trial.
The noteworthy studies of the third route include Peter Thiel’s Ambrosia, and a biotechnology company called CohBar, who’s working on mitochondria based therapeutics to treat diseases.
Thank U @ibby for reminding me this topic! I’m presently working in Anbound Consulting, which is China’s “RAND Corporation”, and I actually graduated from a business school, so not a technical guy. Hahaha
Longevity and anti-aging is a special business area and human needs. There’s reason that it’s suitable as a starting point for the construction of a decentralized R&D collaboration network as SingularityNET. @bengoertzel
For almost any technology, if multiple parties cooperate in R&D, sharing data and the latest breakthroughs at any time, and there are reasonable incentive mechanisms, the speed and success rate of R&D will be much higher. But under normal circumstances, companies and governments want to monopolize the market, so they’re more likely to monopolizes data and user channels.
As for longevity and anti-aging, since we all hope to make a breakthrough sooner rather than later so as to enjoy it ourselves, it may be easier for different companies, institutions or research teams to cooperate on. Thus, the business area of longevity and anti-aging is suitable as a starting point for SingularityNET.
