(I'm expanding here on a chat I had with Sebastián Campanario for his article for La Nación on the hype factor on AI and longevity technologies.)

In a world with some very, very wealthy people — a topic for a different article — a fascinating fact is how little and badly they invest on longevity technologies. The obvious caveat is that wealth buys privacy, so the evidence is mostly in the absence of it but, on the other hand, many of the ultra-wealthy love publicity as much as anybody else, this kind of thing does tend to leak, and, most tellingly, even the rich that specifically invest on, talk about, and use longevity technologies do so in ways that are either

• of dubious plausibility (like cryogenics),
• known to have very low impact ceilings in humans (like supplements and diets),
• or very far from the possibility of actual impact (most basic research).

Correspondingly, there's a glaring underinvestment on validating and deepening the small handful of applied possibilities that have a non-zero chance of significant impact. It's as if people at the beginning of the 20th century were investing on the deep chemistry of hydrocarbons (useful in the long term) and on improved horse carriage technology, but not on car engineering.

There are at least four ways to look at this:

A pessimistic observation is that as public investment on science in most countries is failing to keep up with its economic and societal potential, discretionary applied research choices by very rich people are a significant factor in the direction and speed of technology advances: the private apocalypse bunker budget alone, well-invested, would accelerate enormously the outcome — and not just the market size — of applied longevity research.

The optimistic observation (yes, I can do those too) is that a private monopoly on longevity technologies by the ultra-wealthy would not be exactly good for democracies already bruised by exponential inequalities and problematic economic mobility.

Generically, this is another example of the relatively low correlation between wealth and outcomes in areas where technology hasn't advanced enough to have both functional tools and a solid consensus behind them. Wealth can buy most things, but the choice of what to buy (or what to build, for the richer and more ambitious), particularly where there aren't still consensus choices, depends on the discretionary judgment of somebody who, no matter how accomplished in other, very profitable areas, doesn't necessarily have a good gut feeling for, for example, the relative possibilities of longevity technology. (While the societal impact of Twitter, on balance, is probably highly negative, it has made at least given us multiple examples of how significant power and/or large wealth acquired in technology advanced activities doesn't automatically translate in good judgment elsewhere, although it does usually translate into difficulties accepting this.)

Finally, there's an entrepreneurial way of framing the situation, which is valid for individuals, companies, and countries: While richer competitors have a natural advantage in the race for truly significant longevity technologies, most entities' investment is at best inefficient and at worst a dead end. There's a diminishing but real window of opportunity where targeted investment can still get ahead of incumbents in what would be a technological and societal shift as important as AI or the energy transition. How long this window will last is unknown: these opportunities disappear very quickly when they do.

But as far as I can tell it's still there for whoever can and wants to go for it.