Age Simulation Suit

My dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life.

But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk.

Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.

When you stop walking, that's the beginning of the end.

Beyond the obvious (medical care, accessibility, etc), I think technology has a huge amount of untapped potential to make the end of our lives a lot more bearable, and a lot less lonely. TV is one thing - and whether it's a net good or not has been discussed to death, so I won't here - but I wonder how video games might be used. They're a lot more engaging - both generally and cognitively - than TV, you can build and achieve things and feel a sense of accomplishment (yeah yeah pride and accomplishment), there are communities around them, you can play with your family, etc. Even online board and card games would be an option. Have you ever considered showing your dad some simple games?

My grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease.

One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired.

I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.

This! My grandmother adopted a dog late in her life. She walked 10km a day with that dog for nearly 20 years! (That dog was the oldest dog I've ever known). At 92 she was famous in my small village, she was in better shape than some of the 30 year olds!

Then the dog died. Instead of walking 10km per day, she lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. About 3 months later she started getting lost on her way to the supermarket. Fifth time she got lost we decided to put her in a home for demented people. We simply couldn't provide the care she needed any other way. Took a few more months and she stopped recognising us.

I think she outlived her dog by about 18 months, iirc.

She stopped walking, and then age came fast for her.

Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.

She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.

Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.

I have never been a dog person. Now I want a dog.

A couple of neighbors adopt older dogs. We never discussed that specifically, yet it seems to be a smaller commitment lifetime-wise (few years instead of 10-15 for a young dog), and you'd have to train and deal with a puppy energy (which is a great thing if you have the time and energy to engage in it) if you adopt younger dogs, while the older ones seem to be well set in their good behavior ways. Long walks, established routine, no drama. Also of course fostering is a gateway drug into getting a dog as well as good way to learn what dog would be a match for you.

My dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since.

I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit.

Life sucks.

My grandma is 83 and I could’ve written this exact same post.

I know it comes for everyone, but the pace of said spiral is frightening.

Wish we were in a timeframe with more alternatives for rapid loss of mobility and muscle.

One of the technologies I look forward to is exoskeleton. Yes I know it will be used by the army. But the potential to improve elders' lives is huge.

While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.

Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.

When it comes to physical exercise, this is the key fundamental one. Yes, others things help but it is the foundation on which everything else rests.

Alas, it can be taken away without choice, hopefully not.

Aging should be recognized as a disease already. It's long overdue.

I'm 63. I make a point of walking 5Km (3 miles), every morning. I'm usually out the door, by 0530, and back in about 50 minutes.

I was running, but kept getting injured, so it switched to walking, several years ago.

I think keeping my mind occupied is just as important. It's entirely possible that the visual stimulus of her walks was as important as the exercise.

For myself, I make a point of constantly working on shipping software, and constantly learning new stuff. LLMs have been a godsend, for the latter. I had pretty much given up on trying to ask questions, because of the awful, sneering responses that I was getting, more and more.

Disease is abnormal to some "norm". When everyone has it, it's not a disease.

I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.

It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.

Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

> It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable.

Doesn't make it a disease. Dying is a normal part of life as well as the decline before that.

> If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

No, then the people not having cancer would have the disease.

> I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized

That's not how a norm works. You get that by doing trials and statistics, not by wanting it to be different.

Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!

This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.

I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.

It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.

Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.

Why would it be used by the army? Seems like you don’t need the squishy meat filling for that use case.

There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.

I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.

Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.

I’d argue we won’t get those anti aging breakthroughs unless we take it seriously as a disease.

It’s just biology. It can be fixed with enough research. There’s nothing magical or spiritual about aging it’s just another thing for humans to beat.

Lots of people get viscerally up feelings about it though for some reason. Not sure why. I’ve had people spitting purple angry when I say the above.

I wouldn’t call one of the most essential parts of the life process (moving towards the end of your life involuntarily) a disease.

It’s actually very disturbing how people seem not to be worried about the growing potential for immortality. THAT is a disease, if anything.

All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.

That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.

It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".

Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.

I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.

Yeah I think you're right! And it's not just the visual stimulus either! She'd walk through pretty much the entire village, including a few homes that smack in the middle of nowhere. And she'd say hello to everyone she passed! Once in a while she'd stop and have chat...

After the dog died she only talked to people if they came into her home.

I think the social aspect of her walks was very important for her health too. Like you say, it's all about exercising that noggin',as well as the body!

If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.

But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.

In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.

I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.

And the "protective mechanism" humans have against dementia is that they eventually stop being capable of feeding themselves and die.

Which does get rid of dementia alright. But I fail to see that as an acceptable solution.

If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.

But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.

See how unconvincing these platitudes are?

I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.

I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.

That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.

Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.

I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.

i’ll leave you with this to ponder.

It would be pretty weird if george washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc were here with us today. We’d probably still be debating if slavery is acceptable or not LOL.

People complain about boomers hoarding all the wealth and “never letting go” so younger folks can take the reins. Imagine how much worse it would be if those boomers lived until 200?

Imagine how much more fossil fuel we’d be burning if we all lived until 200?

You know how old people tend to get stubborn? Not all, but most? Now imagine if the U.S. government was comprised of mostly people age 100+. Imagine how they would do keeping up with changes that affect youngsters in 2025?

Imagine how bad the housing crisis would be in 2025.

Imagine how unmotivated people would be in day to day life if they knew they’d live to 200 years?

In summary…if everyone could easily live forever, that is not a good thing. It would drastically change society as we know it, and not 100% for the better. I’d argue it would actually make things worse.

Death is literally a biological process that affects all living organisms on this planet, and in the galaxy. Sorry if that’s hard to accept? I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.

What's worse: having a 700 year old Xi Jinping, or having an extra 600 years of entirely unmitigated aging worldwide - with all the death and suffering that entails?

There is plenty of politicians I truly hate. But I don't hate any of them enough to doom billions to an early grave just to get at them.

If you think that Xi Jinping should die, then I can't help but think that a better solution to that would be to actually kill Xi Jinping. Far less collateral damage involved.

>That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.

There's this tendency for people nowadays to take this kind of shitty Black Mirror logic, and assume that the inevitable outcome is the one that maximizes the grimdark factor.

In reality, there's no reason to expect that anti-aging treatments would work any different from something like Ozempic or laser eye surgery. Sure, those were hideously expensive to develop - but are now affordable to upper middle class, and fully expected to get more available over time.

You earn more by selling a $1000 smartphone to everyone than you could ever earn by selling a billion dollar megayacht to a dozen billionaires looking to buy one. With anti-aging tech, the economic incentive to reduce the costs and reach a wider audience is immense. The demand is going to be there: a lot of what the cosmetics industry does now is fight the mere appearance of aging, and that's an industry worth hundreds of billions by itself.

Xi Jinping is worse, by orders of magnitude.

Death is part of the necessary cycle of biology, and in no way is it bad. It’s certainly SAD, but in no way is it bad. Rotting isn’t this horrible mark on your body, it’s the beauty of nature recycling things so that the new has a chance.

Not only that, but could you imagine the absolutely incredible strain on Earth’s resources if we had 50 billion people instead of 8 billion? Global warming would’ve happened ages ago, and we’d be far, FAR beyond it now. In this scenario, it should be obvious nobody has a yacht, let alone a smartphone. There simply isn’t enough to go around here on earth.

There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides “well I won’t be sad about that one particular thing anymore”, which is… really lame when compared against the untold damage this will do.

I’m a little surprised you’re not taking any time to explain the benefits here, because I’m not actually seeing any besides you not having to cope with nature anymore.

Edit: I should also mention that I’m not looking for shitty black mirror outcomes, I’m just looking at the modern world, which continues to stratify massively, and pretty much has (with few exceptions) since time immemorial. Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?

I find it hard to imagine that an 80 years old politician today spends a lot of time thinking of what would happen 50 or 100 years down the line. And things like fossil fuel use are very much a "50 to 100 years down the line" kind of problem.

Now, if that very politician thought that with the way anti-aging technology is going, he'll probably live to 150, maybe 200 if he's lucky? That might change the equation - for the better.

I don't think that "kill everyone to avoid the risk of the political system getting marginally worse" is an optimal solution. I'd rather deal with aging and the shittiness of politics as two separate problems with a minor overlap.

>I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.

I think that this is nothing but socially accepted cope. A load of pseudo-profound bullshit that might be easier to accept than the idea that aging and death are really fucking bad and we aren't doing much to stop them. And that even if we did, we and our loved ones may not be the ones to ever benefit from it.

cope? it’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet. Including humans. Bit of a weird take if you ask me. I know my place so to speak…

I do agree with you that if politicians lived longer, they’d (hopefully) think long term. That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.

Lastly - nobody is suggesting killing anyone here. Feels like i’m being interviewed by a reporter with my words taken completely out of context. This is what being famous must feel like. :) If someone finds a way for humans to live longer I won’t be upset in the slightest. I’m just saying “be careful what you wish for”. That is all. There would be many unintended consequences. Viewing it as strictly a beneficial thing is naive i think.

Man, be easy on yourself. You already have the world to put you down, no need to add to it. Life is complicated and I’m sure that you trying to have a better life and a career is not just for ego. Love yourself a bit.

Yes, cope. "It’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet" is cope. A literal "it's more okay if I rot to death if everything else does!"

Modern agriculture has enabled the human population to grow rapidly without people starving to death, which had "unknown unintended consequences" too. As well as the well known consequence of food being affordable and available to most people worldwide.

I'd take "unknown unintended consequences" over the well known consequences of the status quo. The current consequences is that everyone dies a miserable death. It's a very easy choice.

If you think that the evils of Xi Jinping outweigh the suffering of billions, you should consider killing Xi Jinping. Plenty of people tried killing Hitler, and Xi Jinping is apparently even worse?

>There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides

You mean, besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies? Besides that little incredibly unimportant easy-to-overlook thing?

>Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?

Can you explain why amazing technologies like cars and smartphones and air travel became available to the masses, instead of being hoarded by a dozen uber-rich uber-powerful billionaires?

The short answer is "economics". Do you expect anti-aging technology to be exempt from economics somehow?

My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.

My takeaway from this chat is that one of us is content, and the other is petrified of death. :-)

Anyways thanks for humoring me. Enjoy the rest of your day!

Aging is rough. I feel for you. My parents are a bit younger but I'm starting to pick up on things that make me realize they're getting older. Thanks for sharing

There's an overwhelming and abundantly clear reason they are referred to as man's best friend. I guess I was fortunate to always grow up with dogs, but I can never really understand people that don't pine for dogs. Now, I can understand not wanting the added responsibility in some situations, but the amazingness of a dog companion is one of the most mind blowing things about the whole nature of human existence. The presence of dogs through evolution legitimately made humans the way they are today and the reverse for what dogs are. It's really wild. I also don't get people that treat their dogs like humans or kids though. It's a dog, don't bring it in a restaurant.

Also lots of empirical evidence that dog owners live longer.

I mean if you are saying you make a lot of money, hire someone to go and get him moving, if he would accept it anyway.

I've never thought of this usecase and I think it's fantastic.

Agreed. But the pessimist in me fears that some people might fall back to that much too soon instead of adopting healthier lifestyles.

Spending R&D in something like this is much more important that building fancier hearing aids. Universal subtitles would be a life changer.

Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.

Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.

There's quite a lot of aging research going, maybe will get something concrete in the next 10-20 years (maybe too late for her) but it's at least something

I don't know, muscle atrophy, cancer etc. are all mostly caused by aging. The current paradigm is kind of whack a mole which won't take us very far.

We need to understand the aging better still like what is actually going on and what are the main drivers (even here is dispute among scientists)

I kind of agree but on the other hand I think it would also change the calculus a lot, if the dictator was going to live to 700, wouldn't it be more likely for someone to act and try to get him out because now the calculus might be that it's just better to wait it out than try to set anything up?

It's a bit hard to visualize that kind of world because so many other things would also be different, and if the politicians were chronologically like 500, they would biologically be still much younger so maybe the mind would allow for much more plasticisty and that would allow them to be more open to new ideas.

I can't see how there wouldn't be a revolution if the rich had all this anti-aging technology and the plebs would sit there and watch.

People like to cope a lot, they are fine with playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases and putting the 90 year old through chemo, but treating aging (the actual root cause)? OH MY GOD MUH NATURE

Holy cope.

There's way more aging research now than like 10 years ago, I think the field is also starting to understand that playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases on a 80 year old is not really the winning strategy.

There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.

Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.

It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.

> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?

Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.

If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.

I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.

I hear you with the running thing. I disliked walking, so I moved somewhere nice and got a dog and that helps tremendously.

You both have good and valid points of view but this site deserves a higher level of decorum.

We have a lot to thank for the passing of power from one generation to the next over the past millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. I imagine the next enlightenment or the next freedoms to be won will require older generations to “move on.”

This YouTube video is directly responsible for me getting a dog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocV7Hpj9keM

While the video is very impressive - my main reaction was to think how incredibly cool that type of dog is. So I eventually ended up getting my own Samoyed and it's been a hugely positive impact on my life.

NB I pretty much like all dogs now - but I love Samoyeds.

Or maybe the scenario where they lift a truck that is stuck in the sand.

I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.

That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.

To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.

An exhaust air bag jack and a plank or five squaddies can already do that job.

That's what aging is. Aging is the process of rotting to death in your own body. There's nothing "benign" about it.

Humans learned a lot of ways to sugarcoat it. Many ways to cope. But if I told you that I want to create and unleash something that would make billions suffer, getting worse over decades, and all afflicted people would eventually die?

You'd call me a twisted monster, rightfully so.

And yet, when I propose we do the opposite, you say "no, it's natural, it's benign, rotting to death is fine actually, everyone does it".

It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.

Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.

Couldn't you do this with $500 in some Xreal Airs and a mobile phone running Parakeet right now?

Now this is some of that top-shelf cope I've heard about.

I wasn't going to respond because this comment is so dense, but I feel like it's valuable to the conversation to point out: wtf do you mean "people"? I've literally never met anyone who shares my view on this.

Less than the cope in this thread though. MUH NATURE, MUH WISDOM, MUH 8000 YEAR OLD PUTIN. Have you thought about the 5000 year old Kim Jong Un yet?

Conscious senescence makes up less than 0.01% of my self-aware life.

You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.

Those look bulky, to support exactly the kind of feature creep I think will always be a problem with this category. I think there are a LOT of people who would simply not consider wearing them until the form factor is close to normal glasses, but it would be hard to convince any product manager not to expand into videos/games/music/AI/etc.

I know my folks already watch movies with subtitles for this reason, and I would think sight issues can be calibrated for if the product is a pair of glasses? But idk how AR tech works with e.g. farsighted people who use reading glasses.

What's the feature creep you see them support?