Some of the best outcomes from the AI revolution are going to have to do with longevity.
But some of us may be thinking about this the wrong way.
We’re tempted to spend time thinking about the singularity, and how we’ll possibly be able to port our brains onto machines, to allow us to live forever.
That’s a strange kind of science fiction idea that may actually be viable in some form, soon, but we’re neglecting to think about a much more practical means of longevity, and that’s using AI to bring the data, and the right persuasion, to outcomes.
The Longevity Series: What’s New
I’ll explain – in a recent series of TED talks that I worked on,you can hear a number of individuals talking about how people live longer, and live a better quality of life.
Columbus Batiste, a board-certified cardiologist, uses examples from his own experience and lays out data showing the need to manage stress, and talks about how to regulate your lifestyle in order to avoid chronic disease and the effects of poor heart health.
Christopher Gardner from Stanford shows his audience how Americans eat too much meat, and how we should change our diets in fundamental ways to get different results.
Federica Amati talked on this topic, too, going into detail about what she called and eat well plate and how that helps us live longer. Amati is a medical scientist and nutritionist who is Head Nutritionist and Head of Science Communications at ZOE, and a research fellow at King’s College London. She lectures in Nutrition at Imperial College School of Medicine.
Making the analogy to hygiene, Amati talked about the legacy of handwashing and modern medical science in saving lives.
After we learned to wash our hands, she explained, we were less vulnerable to various kinds of disease. Then we got antibiotics as another front-line defense.
Now, she suggested, we should be looking at diet the same way we looked at hygiene centuries ago. Our diet, frankly, is killing us, and as Amati notes with some amount of passion, there are things we can do about it.
The Power of Persuasion
What does this have to do with AI?
In a number of blogs that I wrote, I was talking about how you harness the data with AI and present it, in order to show people where they’re going wrong and how to improve.
But then I got a real wake-up call from brand new commercials promoting Google Gemini as installed on a smartphone.
A number of voices show listeners how AI is going to help with the day-to-day lives of smartphone users.
You can hear a guy saying: “I don’t want to go to the gym,” and the Gemini model’s response: “why don’t you just go for 10 minutes and see how it feels?”
Here, we’re seeing a very different impact of AI. It’s a persuasive impact. The AI knows what the good outcome is, and it’s sort of coaxing the person into doing what they need to do. It’s sort of the same thing as a life coach, or therapist, or your good friend, trying to persuade you to do something that’s in your best interest. And that’s something that AI can do.
Putting these into consumer technology means people will be able to afford these personal assistants and coaches, and we’ll be getting the rewards of that shortly, as well as the inevitable confusion that comes with slapping this powerful tech into everyone’s hands.
So rather than just showing us the data, AI can help us to decide to make better decisions. The question, of course, is how are these decisions going to be evaluated objectively?
In other words, we all know that it’s good to go to the gym, but when you get into politics, etc., you can have a lot more controversy and discord.
However, in terms of promoting better personal decisions, we may be very close to seeing personal LLMs on edge devices-impact our lives in a big way. That in turn may help us to really live longer, without bionic implants or cybernetics or anything else, just through the power of information.
