AI, LONGEVITY AND THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

Live to 150!

In 2009, I stood on a stage in Stockholm and said three words: live 150 years. Half the audience laughed. The other half rolled their eyes. I was twenty-nine. A physician. A neuroscientist. An entrepreneur in a longevity field that did not yet exist. It was not meant as provocation. I meant it.

It was like swearing in church. Longevity was not even a concept in Sweden back then. And there I stood, claiming that death is an engineering challenge we will one day defeat.

Benjamin Franklin said there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. But what if he was wrong? At least about the death part.

Death and I have a personal relationship

He tried to take me for the first time when I was three years old, during a flight through the snow on a mountain between Iran and Turkey. I have seen him up close. Felt his breath against my skin. And I decided early — not with words, but with every cell in my body — to dedicate my life to fighting him. Surrounded by death in childhood, I became obsessed with life.

One of my first patients at the clinic where we focused on preventing disease and extending life was a fifty-five-year-old, well-trained marathon runner. He came mostly because his wife nagged him. During a full-body scan, we found a small shadow on his liver. Early-stage cancer. Six months later, he called with a trembling voice, after surgery: "You saved my life."

I burst into tears. From joy. I had won against Death once again.

I used to tell my patients: stay healthy for the next twenty to thirty years, and you will probably experience the technological revolution that allows you to live, in principle, forever.

The science has arrived

Seventeen years later, the science is there — even more extreme than I imagined. Within a decade, we will likely have nanorobots clearing cancer cells from the bloodstream, AI upgrading our brains, and a mapping of the aging process that lets us cut and paste genes to stop aging itself. For the first time, we can dream of a world without disease. And perhaps, one day, master life and death.

But. These days, I mostly try to hide when I hear the word "longevity."

Right now, longevity hype is screaming from every direction. Everything is marketed wrapped in this word. Influencers and billionaires turning themselves into test subjects. It is exciting that interest has exploded. But the point is being missed entirely.

It is not your eight o'clock bedtime that will give you two hundred years. It is not your cold plunge routine that is the revolution. The revolution I am talking about is so radical that it resets everything we know. Like the time before and after electricity.

The part no one is talking about

Today, everything is about me, myself, and I — optimising my values, my metrics, my years. But meaning is rarely found in a metric. It is found when we do something for someone else. It is found in a child's gaze, in a patient who calls back, in a conversation that someone will remember long after you are gone.

In the longing to live longer, we must not forget to live now.

The great question is not whether we can live longer in the future. We can.

The great question is what we do with the time we have now.

The real mission is not to live to one hundred and fifty.

It is to make those years worth living.

— Mouna