Editorial

The Rational Imperative to Aim High

Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey

‘‘Ninety-nine percent of people believe they can’t do great things, so they aim for mediocrity.’’—Tim Ferriss

H igh-risk, high-gain technological endeavor isbecoming increasingly fashionable. Efforts such as the

Ansari X Prize and the sequencing of the human genomemay possibly lay claim to having kick-started a new cultureof breathtaking ambition—and it is perhaps, therefore, nogreat surprise that the figures who shot to public prominenceon the strength of those two projects, Peter Diamandis andCraig Venter, have now teamed up to tackle aging in theform of Human Longevity, Inc. But more recently the trendis burgeoning, albeit, for now, mainly restricted to Cali-fornia. Arguably the most conspicuous leader of all in thisregard is Elon Musk, who has succeeded in taking not onebut two firms to success in ventures that no one in their rightmind would have thought reasonable, namely Tesla andSpaceX. Other important examples include the large in-vestments in nuclear fusion that feature among the portfoliosof two other internet billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel.

But this is not, yet, a legitimate basis for satisfaction,let alone complacency, on the part of those of us working inpioneering technological fields. Why not? Simply because itis too limited and, ambitious though it may be by historicalstandards, not ambitious enough. All of the efforts listedabove were performed in the private sector and with the goalof making big profits reasonably soon, with the exception ofthe X Prize, and even it only slightly counts as an exception,because its main attraction to competitors was the profit tobe had down the road as a result of the technology devel-oped, rather than the prize pot itself. This inherently imposesa pretty ironclad restriction on the anticipated time frame forprogress. For efforts that are likely to take upwards of 20years to come to genuine fruition, such as (wait for it) themedical defeat of aging, a standard commercial modelseems inapplicable—although Calico, set up by Google as acompany, seems nevertheless to be saying that it will take areally long view in terms of profitability.

Areas not attractive to investors, especially if they arealso unattractive to governments (as high-risk, high-gainprojects generally are), are the province of philanthropy.Yet, as of now only a very few of those with personal wealthsufficient to make a big difference have recognized this tothe point of providing substantial funds on a purely phil-anthropic basis. SENS Research Foundation has been priv-

ileged to benefit from a few of those exceptions, but farmore is needed.

So, where does philanthropic funding go? Over-whelmingly, it goes to areas that, while indisputably laudable,are either not technological at all or are not technologicallyambitious at all, but are unlikely to be profitable anywaybecause they will benefit those without the means to pay.Indeed, some of the world’s largest philanthropic organiza-tions (the Gates Foundation comes particularly to mind) ex-plicitly prioritize efforts that specifically help thedisadvantaged, rather than ones that will help everybody butnot for a long time to come.

My purpose in setting out this quite well-known state ofaffairs is to ask the key question: Does this bias in philan-thropy against high-risk, high-gain efforts make sense? Inposing this question, I must start by clarifying why it is areasonable question at all, because your first thought maybe: Why should a philanthropist’s choices need to have anyobjective justification? Surely one can do what one likeswith one’s money, without needing to explain one’s deci-sions to anyone? I am not at all disputing that. Rather, I amfollowing the lead of a rapidly growing community that hascome together under the banner of ‘‘effective altruism’’(EA). The EA community starts, by and large, from theethical standpoint of utilitarianism, i.e., the view that thebest action to take at any point is that which maximizes totalhappiness and minimizes total unhappiness, and it seeks toidentify those philanthropic causes that give the best valuefor money by that metric. In this way, it does not challengethe right of donors to give where they may; rather, it seeks tohelp those donors whose explicit goal is to make the mostdifference to make choices that achieve that end. There arequite a few such donors, including (I suspect) some ex-tremely wealthy ones, so I believe that the EA community isdoing the world a very important service.

It turns out, however, that the merit of high-risk, high-gainphilanthropy is a topic of considerable controversy within EAcircles. A view held by some prominent EAs is that thereshould be a built-in—and indeed strong—bias against suchprojects, because there is an unavoidable tendency, for whichone must compensate, to be overoptimistic about how likelysuch a project will be to succeed and how soon.

SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, California.

REJUVENATION RESEARCHVolume 17, Number 5, 2014ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.DOI: 10.1089/rej.2014.1627

413

As you might expect, I do not agree. Sure it’s great tohelp the disadvantaged, but I am convinced that in the longterm humanity suffers as a result of aiming high too rarely.Moreover, those who have the vision to see how truly pio-neering technological progress might be achieved are fewand far between, and the proof-of-concept work that is allthat is required to elevate the idea to the point where it is nolonger high-risk tends to be relatively inexpensive. So evenif the total philanthropic pot were fixed (which is a distinctlyfragile assumption in the first place), the loss to less pio-neering causes from even a 100-fold elevation of support forambitious ideas would be negligible. And above all, thecharge of over-optimism is misplaced, because makingmore effort to make a given breakthrough will still cause itto be made sooner than without the extra effort; however,that may compare with how long it was initially expectedto take.

Accordingly, I call on all those in a position to increasephilanthropic funding to ambitious causes—whether that bethe wealthy, their friends, and colleagues, or anyone withwide influence—to acknowledge that we are currentlymissing opportunities to alleviate huge quantities of futuresuffering by working insufficiently hard to reach for thestars. Whether it be aging, climate change, pandemics, orany other phenomenon that causes or risks causing wide-spread suffering, we must try harder to hasten the process ofconsigning it to history.

Address correspondence to:Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey

SENS Research FoundationMountain View, CA

E-mail: aubrey@sens.org

414 DE GREY