Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It's a little unintuitive, but consider the tarantula. The female tarantula lives 8 years; the male tarantula only about 2. This is because it's advantageous for females to live longer. For the males, it's more advantageous to live for shorter periods, so they age and die earlier.
You're not going to be able to treat aging because it's programmed in. The only solution is to fix the source code.
That's incorrect. Our genes don't care if they carry on by reproduction or by living longer in a single individual, but we care. How a body ages after reproductive age is in an evolutionary blind spot. Individuals with mutations that promote longer life aren't passing those genes on so the selective pressure if very small.
We don't have a clock that runs out of time. We just keep accumulating long-lived damage (misfolded proteins, advanced glycation endproducts, etc) until its enough to cause pathologies, from which we eventually die.
You are not the cells that you were a few years ago. Most have been replaced. But there are certain types of damage that your body can't fix, which is where an engineering approach could come in (for example, say we could have a vaccine that would make your body target beta amyloids in your brain, so you'd clear those misfolded proteins before they accumulate enough to give you alzheimer's).
Yes, we keep accumulating damage. But we have mechanisms to control that damage. And clearly there's not a set limit on it. Tarantulas that only live 2 years are not constrained by cell damage. Cell damage is allowed to happen.
How about people who just don't think getting sick and frail looks like fun? People who don't want to lose loved ones, who think that 100-200k people dying each day is a tragedy, and who think that we and future generations should have a choice on the matter (you can refuse any therapies that are developed if you want, but shouldn't make the choice for others).
I bet you're not against finding a cure for cancer or malaria. Why would you think it's ridiculous to try to find a cure for the diseases of aging?
Cancer is, effectively, a form of aging, which is why it's so damn hard to cure. Fortunately, it's what happens when one cell breaks down. Most other aging happens to all your cells, all at once.
Secondly, the argument on tarantulas does not rest on group selection at all. For any one male tarantula, he spreads his genes better by living 2 years than living 8. Long living male tarantulas don't do as well, presumably because of some trade-offs between reproduction and lifespan. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory
1) His work in the field of Artificial General Intelligence
2) His desire to see human rationality turned into something a bit more organized and easy to spread (see his post cycles at lesswrong.com).
