Roko Mijic argued that pausing AI development could bring treatments for aging sooner; replies challenged his reasoning
Roko Mijic argued that pausing AI development could bring treatments for aging sooner; replies challenged his reasoning
On October 19, Roko Mijic wrote on X that pausing AI development could preserve people's ability to set medical priorities. Others in the thread proposed a different sequence of events: continued advances in AI could provide the means to find treatments.
In his October 19 post, Mijic proposes considering AI in terms of who controls what it produces. In his scenario, companies will direct resources toward data centers and recursive AI self-improvement, in which a system helps create more capable versions of itself. If people lose their economic and political influence, that economy will lose its incentive to pay for treatments for aging, cancer, and other diseases. In Mijic's model, a pause preserves people's ability to set medical priorities.
“At some point, pausing AI development actually brings a cure for aging sooner.”
The author of the boneGPT reply proposes the opposite causal sequence. He links a cure for aging to advances in AI capabilities and argues that a pause would deprive people of the future ability to solve this problem.
“Pausing now means aging will never be cured.”
In another reply, a participant explains this prediction in terms of computing power and recursive self-improvement: in his view, these make difficult technical problems, including curing aging, easier to solve. Another participant suggests a third possibility: the owners of a future AI economy will pay for treatments for aging themselves because they want to extend their own lives.
In a September post, Mijic had already linked the benefits of rapid AI development to effective rules and institutions. The October debate adds a question to that position: whether preserving human influence over resource allocation or increasing AI's computational capabilities would bring treatments for aging sooner.