We are beginning to use AI for discovery and design of both drugs and interventions, and by the end of the 2020s biological simulators will be sufficiently advanced to generate some key safety and efficacy data in hours rather than the years that clinical trials typically require. The transition from human trials to simulated in silico trials will be governed by two forces working in opposite directions. On the one hand there will be a legitimate concern over safety: we don’t want the simulations to miss relevant medical facts and erroneously declare a dangerous medication to be safe.
On the other hand, simulated trials will be able to use vastly larger numbers of simulated patients and study a wide range of comorbidities and demographic factors—telling doctors in granular detail how a new treatment will likely affect many different kinds of patients. In addition, getting lifesaving drugs to patients faster may save many lives. The transition to simulated trials will also involve political uncertainty and bureaucratic resistance, but ultimately the effectiveness of the technology will win out.
As a result of these technologies, the old linear models of progress in medicine and longevity will no longer be appropriate. Both our natural intuition and a backward-looking view of history suggest that the next twenty years of advances will be roughly like the last twenty, but this ignores the exponential nature of the process. Knowledge that radical life extension is close at ha.