Live Longer with AI

How artificial intelligence is helping us extend our healthspan and live better too

Tina Woods, Melissa Ream

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838645946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

A wakeup call that shows us how to live our best and longest lives through the power of AI

Key Features

• Discover how the latest cutting-edge developments in health and AI are helping us live longer, healthier, and better lives
• Personalize your health, wealth and well-being using technology best suited to help you plan and build up your assets for a multi-stage life
• Understand how we can live our best lives in a post-COVID-19 world and equip ourselves for the next pandemic using technology

Book Description

Live Longer with AI examines how the latest cutting-edge developments are helping us to live longer, healthier and better too. It compels us to stop thinking that health is about treating disease and start regarding it as our greatest personal and societal asset to protect.

The book discusses the impact that AI has on understanding the cellular basis of aging and how our genes are influenced by our environment – with the pandemic highlighting the interconnectedness of human and planetary health.

Author Tina Woods, founder and CEO of Collider Health and Collider Science, and the co-founder of Longevity International, has curated a panel of deeply insightful interviews with some of today's brightest and most innovative thought leaders at the crossroads of health, technology and society.

Read what leading experts in health and technology are saying about the book:

"This is a handbook for the revolution!"
—Sir Muir Gray, Director, Optimal Ageing

"You can live longer and be happier if you make some changes – that is the theme of this book. Well-written and compelling."
—Ben Page, CEO, Ipsos Mori

"Tina's book is a must-read for those who want to discover the future of health."
—José Luis Cordeiro, Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science; Director, The Millennium Project; Vice Chair, Humanity Plus; Co-Author of The Death of Death

About the consultant editor

Melissa Ream is a leading health and care strategist in the UK, leveraging user-driven design and artificial intelligence to design systems and support people to live healthier, longer lives.

What you will learn

• Discover how AI is changing the way we understand the wider determinants of health, how the environment influences our genes and why the solutions for living longer are linked to living greener
• Inform your perspective on how technology can deal with the health emergency in front of us – by minimizing health and wealth inequalities
• Learn why our "life data" is so important and how sharing it will help us develop aging "bio-markers", enabling us to predict and manage dementia and other chronic diseases of aging
• Find out how scientists and doctors are using AI to find a vaccine for Covid-19, make us more resilient to future pandemic threats and pre-empt the next outbreak

Who this book is for

Professionals and general readers with an interest in learning how technology can and is being used to change our approach to aging and help us live longer and healthier lives. No prior knowledge of or experience with artificial intelligence is required.

CHAPTER 5

Building up Assets for the 100-Year Life

"A child born in a rich country today has a very plausible chance of living to 100; while this increase in life expectancy has been happening for decades, we continue to structure our lives the way our parents or even grandparents did. Unless deep seated social change occurs then a longer life is a gloomy prospect, making longevity a curse and not a gift."

— Andrew Scott, Co-Author, The 100 Year Life

In 2018, Earth became home to more people aged 65 years and over than children under five, for the first time ever. The 50-plus population now represents four generations, including the Baby Boomers and Generation X. By 2031, the 50-plus population will include millions of Millennials; Generation Z will begin to join the cohort in 2047.

This growing aging demographic has long been generating concern that this will weaken economic growth as the number of people of working age declines and governments' fiscal burdens will worsen due to higher pension and healthcare costs^[1]. The COVID-19 pandemic will only exacerbate the economic burden.

From an individual perspective, the biggest worry about old age is simply not having enough money. We know that income is associated with happiness^[2], but debates persist^[3] about the exact nature of this relationship. We don't need a huge amount to be "happy." According to a worldwide poll of 1.7 million people from 164 countries around the world published in Nature^[4], the happiest people earn between £46,000 and £58,000 (in UK terms). After that, day-to-day happiness pretty much levels off. However, in order to be able to look back on your life and feel truly satisfied with what you've achieved, the poll found that you need to be earning around £74,000 per year (in UK terms).

It's clear that having more wealth means having better health. Wealthier people have access to better healthcare and access to a more controlled lifestyle; wealth brings stability to one's life. We can, however, clarify that further. Recent research^[5] has now clarified the link between income and a longer life: a study at UCL found that having a net household worth of £488,000 by the age of 50 adds nine years to your life, compared to those with just £28,000 of assets. The study also found that those extra nine years will be lived in good health because more affluent people are more likely to remain fit, active, and independent in their later years. The only snag is that, according to a report from the BBC^[6] in 2019, based on figures from the Resolution Foundation, the average 51-60 year-old only has a total net worth of around £275,000. That falls a long way short of that nine-year life bonus.

I am 56 and must admit that until the COVID-19 pandemic immediately slashed all my income through cancelled contracts, I hadn't spent nearly enough time thinking about the money I will need later in my life. My husband constantly nags me about putting more into my pension, yet it still doesn't take over my more immediate concerns like chasing the next contract or sponsorship deal. Perhaps subconsciously I have been lured into a false sense of security, knowing that as a Baby Boomer I can expect to receive in benefits and services over a fifth more than I paid in tax, at least according to the Resolution Foundation, a British think-tank. But today's workers, like my sons, may not have it so good, and the COVID-19 pandemic may make the long-simmering intergenerational battles go into overdrive.

This once-in-a-century pandemic is expected to create the worst recession in 300 years, eclipsing the Great Depression of the 1930s in the UK. The "new normal" is unleashing a tidal wave of social experiments, and is already creating changes in working practices in two months that would have taken years to happen and will likely persist. While the older generations will be hit hard, others are predicting the youngest will bear the full force of the long-term economic fallout.

The multistage life

Andrew Scott, Professor of Economics at London Business School, co-wrote the acclaimed book The One Hundred Year Life^[7], which sets out the challenges and opportunities that living longer brings. The book describes how as we are living longer we are moving from a three-stage life, split into education, work and retirement, to a multistage life, with periods of learning, building up both tangible assets (such as income, property, savings) and non-tangible assets (like social networks, building up skills in a process of "re-creation").

I read the book when I started my health innovation business at the age of 52, a little over three years ago. It resonated completely and helped me assuage the panic I initially felt as the newbie "oldie entrepreneur" about the time it would take for the contracts and revenue to start flowing (building up my "intangible assets," as they are described in the book). It also helped me manage my feelings of terror that I would fail spectacularly in a youth-obsessed male-dominated tech industry. I concentrated my energy on learning about artificial intelligence, industry disruption, and health technology and went to as many free meet-ups and conferences as possible to expand my networks (again, building up my intangible assets by learning and developing connections in these new areas).

Scott argues that in the UK we need to shift our economy to enable more people to work for longer, as other countries have done and are planning. As a professional "gigster," I have taken matters into my own hands, but companies need to become fit for the times and make it easier for people to live and work flexibly, especially those with caring responsibilities. Every increase in working age by one year is a permanent 1% boost to GDP^[8]. ONS estimates^[9] that if the employment rate of people aged 50 to 64 matched that of those aged 35 to 49, it would add more than 5% to UK GDP, or £88 billion. It would be interesting to see how every increase in working age in terms of the extra GDP gained could translate into greater capacity for the government to fund care.

Andrew and his co-author Lynda Gratton published the follow-up book^[10], The New Long Life – A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World in May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic just when the lockdown was in the process of being partially lifted. Scott argues that our experience of the pandemic has served a far deeper purpose—it has been a dramatic stress test of our individual resilience and collective arrangements, revealing the insecurity of our lifestyles in the face of a sudden drop in earnings, and the importance of our social networks and contact with partners, family, friends, and neighbors, that many of us took for granted.

The pandemic is calling for a complete overhaul of the social contract, which was being hotly debated and discussed before the virus unleashed its havoc.

New map of life and extra time

MIT Sloan School of Management predicts^[11] that given the average level of savings in advanced economies, many people currently in their mid-40s are likely to need to work into their early to mid-70s; many currently in their 20s (many of whom could live to be over 100) will be working into their late 70s, and even into their 80s. Yet, while many people know they will have to restructure their lives and careers, corporations are unprepared, compounded by governments and institutions slow to respond with policies to facilitate the societal shifts underway. This problem has only been made more urgent to address given the pandemic.

Julia Randell-Khan is a consulting fellow on the New Map of Life initiative at Stanford University's Center on Longevity^[12], led by Professor Laura Carstensen. It aims to change narratives about growing old to conversations about long lives and to identify and implement the changes needed so that people can live well for a century of more. Longevity demands rethinking all stages of life, not just old age—recognizing that as we have been living longer, the years added to our lives have been in the middle, and not at the end. Indeed, this "extra time" is the focus of Camilla Cavendish's excellent book of the same name. This extra time requires a fundamental rethink of how we live our lives and may be defined more by extending our vitality than by preventing disease.

A future more focused on maintaining health and well-being could extend that time further, especially as technologies harnessing interoperable data on health and lifestyle will lead to the creation of products and services to keep us healthy and well, as we describe later in this chapter.

Consumers will increasingly realize that aging is malleable and this will motivate them to keep healthy too. The wider determinants of health, including education, environment, nutrition, and income, all influence the rate at which we age. Across a variety of measures, such as cognitive function, physical strength, mortality rates, and incidence of diseases, people are in effect aging more slowly. This highlights how we need to distinguish between how many years since you were born—your chronological age—and how fit and healthy you are compared to other people, in terms of your biological age.

Policymakers should recognize that while chronological age is a useful predictor of health outcomes, it is not the best predictor of people's needs and abilities. There is an increasing need for policies more aligned around biological age and people's individual circumstances. By focusing on biological age, our policymakers and business leaders may respond differently to emerging needs and trends. Certainly COVID-19 has stimulated real ingenuity in and zeal for more work on biological age in the scientific community, with a dizzying array of studies looking at how to build up resilience to future pandemic threats by targeting the mechanisms of aging. A particular area of interest is immunosenescence—recognizing that the immune system becomes impaired with age—and another is interrupting the underlying mechanisms linked to "metabesity," causing the chronic diseases of aging, as explored in earlier chapters of this book.

Beyond the science, there is also the whole debate around how people will work, retire, and pay for their later years. How will lifelong learning evolve? How will people live in their homes and in what types of communities? How can people build up their assets for a longer life? These are all the questions that the Stanford Center on Longevity's^[13] New Map of Life is exploring.

In my interview with Julia Randell-Khan, she highlighted the mismatch between policies that focus on a much shorter life with the reality on the ground for those of us who are living much longer. Big areas such as education and work need to be completely redesigned and remapped around the need for lifelong learning, for example. She argues for the sort of programs being offered at the National University of Singapore, for example, that encourage older people to keep developing their skills, so they can keep being effective learners with the mindset to keep reinventing themselves.

She says that it is about being curious and open to new things and new experiences, which includes trying out technology to see how it could help us have better lives.

Most important, though, is connecting this to having a sense of belonging, purpose, and worth at every stage of life. It links to the human spirit and looking after your fellow humans, moving beyond the individual to embrace community and new social compacts to support long lives. She cites research on social engagement that shows how people with very little from a socioeconomic point of view can derive a huge amount of value and sense of worth from contributing and being part of their local community.

In Japan, "living with purpose" is called "ikigai," and in Costa Rica, it's a "plan de vida." The words literally translate to "reason to live" and "life plan," respectively. A 2014 study found that having a purpose was associated with a lower risk of mortality^[14]. According to John Day, MD^[15], author of The Longevity Plan^[16], whether your goal is to beat cardiovascular disease or cancer, or even to live a long and healthy life, study after study has found an association of purpose in life with all kinds of better health outcomes—an effect that stands regardless of age, sex, education or race.

Expecting good things to happen^[17] may be key to a long life too. People who were optimistic had greater odds of achieving "exceptional longevity," or living to 85 and beyond, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences^[18].

Optimistic people are more likely to have goals and the confidence to reach them, so optimism may help people cultivate and maintain healthier habits. Previous studies^[19] have found people who are highly optimistic have a lower chance of dying prematurely from stroke, heart disease, and even cancer.

Technology and longer lives

On the point of technology, I caught up with my good friend Bradley Schurman, formerly Director of Global Partnerships with AARP, founder and CEO of Demogera, and an expert on social policy and innovation in aging, to get his views. I spoke with him before the COVID-19 pandemic struck and then again afterwards (where he is keeping busy writing his own book on the Super Age at his home in Washington DC). He highlights two trends running in parallel. AI is becoming more and more embedded in our everyday lives, and we're also developing a collective interest in living independently for longer. They coincide where you have AI embedded not only in the home, through devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home or other devices like Nest, but also into everyday monitoring devices like Fitbit or Apple Watch.

He explained that these devices will help not only measure our overall health long-term in a more effective way and give our physicians better real-time longitudinal data about our health, but they'll also enable us to live independently for longer: "that's everything from the light-touch stuff, like tech that monitors sleeping patterns, or motion sensors that light a path the bathroom in the middle of the night, to the hidden device, the hidden innovations that are embedded in devices like the Apple Watch."

He adds that within the home, AI can learn behaviors, and we're starting to see outcomes from that with fall prevention, for example. But for all the good that there is with AI, there are some challenges as well, which come mainly from the speed at which this transition is happening.

While it will be and already is a job killer for some industries, it also presents new opportunities for new industries to develop. I agreed with Bradley that the hiccup with all of this is that, essentially, our entire education system is built on a medieval model. How do we get all people, and older people in particular, to understand the value of upskilling t...