Abstract
“Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue.”
T
It is customary, in techno-visionary circles, to base one's expectations of the future on the principle of exponentially accelerating change. The often uncannily accurate timeframe predictions of Ray Kurzweil have engendered a culture of thinking and talking in exponential terms, even when it comes to the names of conferences. Like any one-word meme, this does not tell the whole story: some aspects of technological progress pretty clearly don't proceed exponentially, and indeed some (which, mercifully, include the rate of progress necessary to maintain longevity escape velocity once we reach it) don't need to be exponential in order to achieve needed goals. But today I want to highlight the opposite phenomenon: phases during a technology's development when progress is genuinely superexponential, as with the sudden acceleration in 2007 or so in the amount of DNA that could be sequenced for a given price. That is what justifies the title of this essay: precisely exponential curves don't have a knee, of course (except in eyeballing terms), but a superexponential period within a larger stretch of time is indeed a knee.
Inevitably, my sense that rejuvenation biotechnology has had a bona fide superexponential year is to a large extent subjective. However, my location at the eye of this storm gives me some basis for feeling that I'm probably basing it on good information. What is that information?
The single biggest item, to which I have only lightly alluded in previous editorials, is the truly breathtaking rate of proliferation of private-sector involvement in this space. That proliferation has been manifest on both sides of the fence – in the number of startups seeking investment, and equally in the number of investors seeking opportunities to get involved. A comparison with the situation just twelve months ago can be made in many ways, but for me the most straightforward is the task of organizing a one-day investor-facing event in early January in San Francisco on behalf of my friends at Juvenescence. In 2018, the task of identifying a dozen companies to showcase was easy for me – that was pretty much the total number of startups I knew of in the rejuvenation space that were in a fundraising mode, and I was pretty sure that not many others existed below my radar. But I'm engaged right now in organizing the same thing for January 2019, and the situation could not be more different. Even when restricting my attention to companies located in this part of the world, I am swamped with high-quality options; and literally not a week goes by any more when I don't become aware of another one. The takeoff has been as spectacular as for the dotcom boom.
What of the other side of the fence, the investors? There the story is just as bright. A year ago, I could count the investors who were overtly focusing much, and in some cases most, of their attention on the rejuvenation space on the fingers of two hands. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that I have lost count: every single conference I speak at (and that's more than one a week on average) I am approached by an investor who is eager to learn more about how to get involved. The acceleration is staggering. The dotcom boom is again the natural comparison, and again I think the trajectory is similar.
Furthermore, the explosion of private-sector involvement is by no means the only thing that has become dramatically different in the past year or so. One deficiency of this movement that I have long bemoaned is the shortage of spokespeople: though I reckon I'm pretty good at getting the word out on stage and on camera, I have always recognized that no one person's style of exposition can resonate well with all audiences, and thus that there is a critical need for greater diversity of messaging. And over the past year or two, that is exactly what has emerged. On the one hand we now have other charismatic orators with the ability to rouse audiences in ways that I could never do; Liz Parrish particularly comes to mind, as do the leaders of advocacy organisations such as LEAF. The practical effect is illustrated by the fact that historically, when I was asked to speak at an event and my schedule did not allow it, I would either have no one to suggest as a replacement or else my suggestion would be politely rejected on account of their lack of “star power”. Now, by contrast, I'm getting more invitations than ever and thus having to propose alternative speakers very frequently, and I can't even remember the last time that it didn't work out.
Finally I want to highlight the rise in the use of video to promote the anti-aging mission. A year or two ago, only a few people had taken to the Internet to express in film the message that the end of aging is both feasible and desirable, but this year the variety of such efforts was so rich that it was possible to actually run a competition to choose the best one, which received over a dozen entries. Independently, a rendition of Nick Bostrom's “Fable of the Dragon Tyrant” was created in April by the noted animator CGP Grey, and as of today it already has 90% as many views on Youtube as my TED talk from 2005.
I have often said, when asked to describe my personal goals for the coming years, that my overriding one is to become unnecessary: to see the rejuvenation movement grow to the point where it includes people who are – and are widely seen to be – better than me at all the things I'm good at that have enabled me to make a contribution to hastening the medical defeat of aging. I think my questioners have generally seen in my eyes, however, the recognition that such a point was not realistically in sight. As 2018 draws to a close, I'm truly beginning to wonder.