If you're looking for medical miracles, this is a very plausible place to find them.
The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term future. Given the incredible prior improbability of intergalactic utopias, there's basically no reason to take the thought-experiment at its word or to value a particularly improbable imagined far-future over the actually-existing present and very likely near-futures.
Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.
Solving AI would allow us to fix ageing, but only if we get it right. Please watch Bostrom’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our...
AI safety is not relevant to exploiting technology to ameliorate senescence.
Absent immediate focussed direct efforts in ameliorating senescence, by the time there is a level of AI technology which can make a dent in medical progress, at least a billion, probably many billion, people will have suffered and died who might otherwise have avoided that fate. And the loss of their productivity will impoverish the survivors - and so cause AI progress to suffer.
I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit).
The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined.
Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything.
I don't understand why AI safety gets more attention. We're already facing our own personal dissolution from natural causes -- a real and tangible existential threat which is already claiming people in the most torturous ways possible. To be brutally honest, I'd rather die quickly in an AI takeover than suffer decades of chronic pain and dementia... and one of these scenarios seems a lot more likely than the other.
Let's get real, take responsibility, and do something about ageing.