What would you do with another thirty years of life? Would you travel, write a book, continue to work? Who would you spend your time with? What would you accomplish? Whatever it may be, it’s worth thinking about — because age-reversing technologies are accelerating at an exponential rate, making the future come faster than ever imagined.
But before we dive into these stunning advances in technology, you might be wondering what exactly the term ‘exponential technology’ even means. Put most simply, exponential technology is any technology that doubles in power while dropping in price on a regular basis. This is also known as Moore’s Law.
Entrepreneurs who understand the vast power of Moore’s Law have developed many of the most successful companies in the world today: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Tencent, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Netflix just to name a few. Likewise, the technologies accelerating at this rate today include some of the most potent innovations in the world and are contributing greatly to advancements in human longevity.
Exponential Growth in Biotechnology
Biotechnology is one such area that is growing at an exponential rate, serving as a major catalyst in extending human healthspan. Take a look at these comparisons to see just how far we’ve come in the past couple of decades:
Genome sequencing: The Human Genome Project took 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first genome. Today, it’s under $1,000 per genome and takes less than one day. Within two years it could cost as little as $100 and be completed in one hour.
Data storage: In 1981, if you were to store your uncompressed genome, a 1-gigabyte hard drive of storage cost half a million dollars. Today, it’s 50 million times cheaper at under 1 cent per gigabyte.
Computation: In 2021, the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine-2 set the world record as the largest integrated circuit chip — 8.5 inches to a side, housing 2.6 trillion transistors. Compare that to Intel’s first computer chip in 1971 that had just 2,300 transistors on it, at $1 each.
Communications: Smartphones today have more computational power than most governments in the world had 30 years ago. In the next 5 years, networks promise to connect every person on Earth, offering everyone the ability to upload health data or get support from medical artificial intelligence (AI).
Because of these groundbreaking advancements, sooner than later we will all have our own personal AI that will collect and monitor our health data, enabling us to ultimately become “the CEOs of our own health,” and thus take the necessary steps to extend our healthspan.
AI, Neural Nets, and Protein Folding
Perhaps the most important exponential technology transforming our lives this decade is AI. Machine learning came first, using algorithms to analyze data and make predictions. Then came neural networks, inspired by the biology of the human brain. What’s fascinating about these layered circuits is that they are capable of unsupervised learning from unstructured data — simply unleash a neural net on the internet, and the system will do the rest.
The success of neural nets over the past five years is nothing less than breathtaking. In 2017, DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero became the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go with zero data, and instead, learning by playing itself over and over and over again — called reinforcement learning.
What’s incredible about this is that AlphaGo Zero’s neural networks can be used to help solve what’s been coined by scientists as the “grand challenge of biology” — which asks the following question:
“Given an amino acid sequence, can you predict the ultimate three-dimensional protein structure that would result?”
Here’s why that’s important: Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. They are large complex molecules, made up of chains of amino acids, and what a protein does is largely depending upon its unique 3D structure. Figuring out what shapes proteins fold into is known as the “protein folding problem” and if solved, scientists could develop a myriad of new treatments for diseases.
AlphaFold is the latest version of AlphaGo Zero from DeepMind, is the solution to that grand challenge, and is opening the door to the development of entirely new avenue of low-cost and highly accurate drugs.
AI and Drug Discovery
As AI converges with massive data sets in everything from gene expression to blood tests, novel drug discovery is about to get 100-fold cheaper, 100-fold faster, and more intelligently targeted. Soon, AI will be able to generate novel drugs to target any disease, overnight — and also design drugs that are specific to individuals.
One company that’s blazing the AI drug discovery trail is Insilico Medicine, founded and led by CEO Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, who has essentially reinvented the drug discovery process by applying generative adversarial networks (GANS) — which have been previously used to create one-of-a-kind, fake human faces — to pharmacology.
The results are “an explosion in potential drug targets and a much more efficient testing process,” says Zhavoronkov. “AI allows us to do with fifty people what a typical drug company does with five thousand.”
Right now, Insilico is using the system to hunt down new drugs for cancer, aging, fibrosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, diabetes, and many others — and are also in the early stages of using AI to predict the outcomes of clinical trials in advance of the trial. If successful, this technique will enable researchers to strip a bundle of time and money out of the traditional testing process.
Microbots and Precision Biologics
One company, Bionaut Labs, has made the Academy Award Winning science fiction film Fantastic Voyage come to life with their remote-controlled microbots that travel through the body to deliver drug treatments in precise locations. This is a crucial advancement in the treatment of many diseases, because many treatments — like chemotherapy for cancer, for instance — affect the entire body, resulting in significant side effects.
Bionaut Labs’ microbots, called Bionauts, are remotely controlled by magnetic forces — and once they’re in the desired location, are triggered to release their payload. Their accuracy is on par with a surgeons’, whose standard deviation falls into the single-millimeter range. Today, Bionauts can deliver biologics and small molecule therapeutics with unprecedented accuracy, and there’s much more on the horizon.
