Gigaom AI Minute – October 20

Transcript

A new study came out in Nature by McGill University biologist Brian G Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi which came to the conclusion, based on studying data since 1968, that there is no detectable limit to how long people can live. There may be a limit, but the study says that they can't detect what it is, and it may be that there isn't one at all.

This poses a really interesting question even though the number of centenarians, people who live to 100, continues to rise and is at an all-time high, the number of people who have lived to 125 remains stubbornly at zero. Simply, no one has ever done it before. This leads some to suggest that there simply isn't a way to extend human life beyond a certain point. This is one of the many questions we hope that artificial intelligence can help us solve.