'To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed': how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about living for ever, it seemed straight out of a sci-fi fantasy. You have everything you could want at your disposal: power, influence, money. But, the problem is, your time at the top is fleeting. In early September, China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about strategies to stay young. "With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality," Putin said via an interpreter to Xi. "There's a chance," he continued, "of also living to 150 [years old]." But is this even possible, and what would it mean for the world if the people with power were able to live for ever? Over the centuries, we have used ever more sophisticated technology to heal ourselves into unprecedented longevity. In the 20th century, it was innovations in public health and medicine that effected this transformation, allowing today's children to live longer, healthier lives than at any time in history.

In an age of breathless predictions and sky-high valuations, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has emerged as one of the best-known skeptics of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, he recently wrote a book about his concerns, Taming Silicon Valley, in which he made the case that "we are not on the best path right now, either technically or morally." Marcus--who has spent his career examining both natural and artificial intelligence--explained his reasoning in a recent conversation with Leah Hoffmann. You've written about neural networks in everything from your 1992 monograph on language acquisition to, most recently, your book Taming Silicon Valley. Your thoughts about how AI companies and policies fall short have been well covered in your U.S. Senate testimony and other outlets (including your own Substack).

I expect navigating the acute risk period to be tricky for our civilization, for a number of reasons. Success looks to me to require clearing a variety of technical, sociopolitical, and moral hurdles, and while in principle sufficient mastery of solutions to the technical problems might substitute for solutions to the sociopolitical and other problems, it nevertheless looks to me like we need a lot of things to go right. For instance, people are still regularly surprised when I tell them that I think the hard bits are much more technical than moral: it looks to me like figuring out how to aim an AGI at all is harder than figuring out where to aim it.[1] Within the list of technical obstacles, there are some that strike me as more central than others, like "figure out how to aim optimization". And a big reason why I'm currently fairly pessimistic about humanity's odds is that it seems to me like almost nobody is focusing on the technical challenges that seem most central and unavoidable to me.

Potential obstacles to obtaining patent protection in Europe for an improvement in a general method for machine learning have been highlighted by a recent decision (T0702/20) from the EPO Board of Appeal. The decision relates to an application for a novel neural network apparatus having "loose coupling", based on an error code check matrix, between nodes of the neural network resulting in an initial configuration of the neural network that was argued to speed up training and operation of the apparatus while maintaining discrimination performance. The differences of the claimed invention over the prior art had been acknowledged during prosecution, but the Examining Division had rejected the Application on the basis that the distinguishing features "do not serve a technical purpose, and they are not related to a specific technical implementation either. They merely pertain to the initial, fixed structural definition of an abstract mathematical neural network-like model". During the Appeal, the Applicant provided several arguments as to why the claimed system did indeed serve a technical purpose which were not found persuasive by the Board. In response, the Board noted that a neural network can, in principle (if difficult in practice), be analysed to replace the inputs to each neuron by mathematical functions implemented by the nodes of the previous layer, and ultimately to obtain a mathematical description that describes the output of the neural network as a function of the input.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.

With 194,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, Huawei is a leading global creator and provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Integrated solutions span across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei Canada focuses on fundamental research and development aimed at solving complex technical problems in emerging technologies like 5G, AI, Human Computer Interaction and Autonomous Driving. With ongoing research initiatives with 10 Universities across Canada and strategic collaboration agreements with several Universities, we support Canada's rich research community.