In “Beyond 120,” a really good Tablet article about radical life extension, Ted Mann reveals he’s come to believe game-changing, age-defying treatments are reaching critical mass, thanks in large part to expanding computational power being applied to the big questions of genetics and biology. The problem he sees is a serious disconnect between discovery and distribution, a product of societal systems not keeping pace with an explosion of science.

An excerpt:

We don’t intuitively grasp exponential rates of change. It’s hard for us to handle and examine them with our imagination because we have little or no experience of them in daily life. Exponential growth in knowledge creation is what’s happening, and this is not merely new knowledge being created faster than before.

Yet knowledge is fundamentally different from a thing, like an iPhone; as the product of a creative process, according to the quantum computational physicist David Deutsch, who has written of this extensively, it is unpredictable in principal. We can’t know what we will discover, nor therefore can we anticipate the dangers that powerful new technologies will present.

As computational techniques and technologies become more deeply integrated into all the sciences, as Deutsch predicts, what we are currently seeing is a rapid change in the rate of creation of new, objectively true knowledge. Deutsch also points out, as a matter of fact, not speculative opinion, that at some point an increasing rate of change of knowledge creation must turn exponential. That’s a physical law. If our knowledge creation processes aren’t disrupted by rising social disorder, increasing political polarization, economic disaster, or any other reason, then they must transform our world more dramatically, rapidly, and irreversibly than internal combustion engines, electricity, the transistor, and nuclear energy have already done.

Yet our existing social institutions and our legal and regulatory structures date in many cases to the 1700s and before. Legal, political, and economic structures were intended to accommodate a much slower, arithmetical, additive, rate of change. The absence of trained reporters at the science desks of major networks and news organizations is also huge problem and a direct consequence of the decay of our traditional news outlets, which were rooted in 16th-century technology and flattened by the digital age.•