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The future of artificial intelligence was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week. And while that’s to be expected, given the huge sums of money at play now that Big Tech has staked its future on generative AI, there’s also an air of desperation to some of the predictions coming out of the conference. As just one example, the CEO of AI company Anthropic claimed on Thursday that human lifespans would double within 5 to 10 years, all thanks to artificial intelligence.
Dario Amoedi made the prediction during a Davos panel titled “Technology in the World,” where the moderator noted that Amoedi seemed to have the most optimistic predictions for the speed at which the world would change as a result of AI deployment.
“It is my guess that by 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things,” Amoedi said. “I see a lot of positive potential.”
Amoedi said those changes would take place in areas like the military, workplace tech, self-driving cars, as well as biology and health—the last topic being important because he believes it will lead to much longer lifespans.
“If I had to guess, and you know, this is not a very exact science, my guess is that we can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years if we really get this AI stuff right,” Amoedi said.
“If you think about, you know, what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to ten years,” Amoedi continued. “So that’s kind of the grand vision. At Anthropic, we are thinking about, you know, what’s the first step towards that vision, right? If we’re two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that.”
How realistic is this prediction? Well, Amoedi prefacing everything with “this is not a very exact science,” should tell you everything you need to know. Doubling human lifespans in such a short period is laughable on just about every level, and you don’t need to be an expert to understand why. As Gizmodo recently explained, only 3.1% of women and 1.3% of men born in 2019 are expected to reach the age of 100. Doubling human lifespans would mean regular Americans would be living to something like 160 years, several decades beyond the lifespan any person has ever achieved.
Stuart Jay Olshansky, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke with Gizmodo back in October about the limitations of technology to radically increase human lifespans.
“There’s a lot of money being invested in this right now. There’s a lot of good science going on. There’s also a lot of embellishments and exaggeration, which is something that we need to be cognizant of,” said Olshanksy. “And I wish folks would stop exaggerating and telling people they’re all gonna live to 100 or 120 or 150—these sorts of claims of radical life extension associated with any of these interventions.”
Olshansky and other researchers believe that while technology gets credit for the longer life expectancy we’ve seen in the past century, it could have a hard ceiling.
But it’s easy to see why rich people in the world of tech are so obsessed with living forever. Everyone dies, no matter how much money they have. And when wealthy guys like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson realize that all the money in the world can’t stop the inevitable, sometimes they go a little bonkers in their quest for eternal life.
But who knows? AI has genuinely accomplished some neat magic tricks in recent years like AI generated videos, even if the thing that makes it possible is just plagiarism. And ChatGPT also shows off some neat tricks, even if it can’t yet apply reasoning and logic like a human. Could tech companies use AI to change life in significant ways? Sure. But when it comes to doubling human lifespans, we’ll believe it when we see it.
