TMTPST -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a powerful catalyst in the search for anti-aging and longevity solutions, transforming how scientists understand disease, develop treatments and personalize healthcare, said Silicon Valley biohacker Bryan Johnson and physician Carl Seger.

From accelerating drug discovery to enabling highly individualized medical interventions, AI’s growing role in life sciences is reshaping expectations for how quickly and effectively breakthroughs in human longevity can be achieved, they argued.

They shared their insights in a conversation with Jany Hejuan Zhao, the founder and CEO of NextFin.AI and the publisher of Barron's China, during the 2025 T-EDGE conference, which kicked off on Monday, December 8, and runs through December 21. The annual event brings togehter top scientists, entrepreneurs and investors to discuss pressing issues of the AI era.

Rethinking Health and Longevity: Beyond Metrics to Quality of Life

Longevity should be measured by how well people live, not simply how long they survive, two experts said, arguing that extending life without preserving physical and cognitive function misses the true purpose of health innovation.

Johnson, founder and CEO of Blueprint, said the prevailing focus on optimising biological indicators such as blood pressure or cholesterol offers only a narrow definition of health.

“We have certain critical periods in our learning process where, when we're very young, where we can learn languages very quickly. There are times in our life where we have our peak physical capacity, our peak learning capacity, where we experience novelty. And then as we age, we learn, our learning becomes more challenging. We get more fixed in our ways, our body starts breaking down, our brains are breaking down,” Johnson said.

“The bigger goal is to take us back to those most beautiful times of our biological existence. And that's what I believe is going to be possible, that we will be able to take ourselves all the way back to critical periods of learning and experience and novelty and physical ability that most of us adults haven't felt for decades.”

Seger, MD, CEO of Wild Health and Johnson’s chief physician, echoed that view, stressing that longevity without independence and functionality holds little appeal. “You can live a long time in a nursing home, but nobody really wants to do that. People want to be doing the things that they want to do,” Seger said. “And that when people get to their why, whether it's usually ends up being out of some driven from love of they want to see their, they love their kids, they want to see their grandkids, they want to be, not just see them, they want to do things with them. They want to experience life.”

Seger outlined the core pillars needed to preserve quality of life, including reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, maintaining metabolic health, limiting chronic inflammation and muscle loss, and supporting mental well-being.

When asked whether people should prioritise perfect biological metrics or meaningful life experiences, both men said the two should ideally work together. However, if one option has to be made, quality of life would come first.

Metrics are tools, not the destination, Johnson said. A life defined by purpose, connection and growth matters more than a long life reduced to numbers. That said, biological optimisation makes those experiences possible, it’s hard to fully engage with life when the body and mind are in decline, he added.

AI: The Catalyst for Accelerating Longevity Breakthroughs

As the integration of AI into life sciences emerges as a game-changer in the pursuit of anti-aging solutions, Johnson pointed to recent breakthroughs as proof of AI’s transformative potential.

“Google, a model they created, found a legitimate discovery in making a cold cancer on hot cancer, meaning that it could make a kind of cancer detectable in the human body, which then it could be treated. And so now we have AI that is making legitimate scientific discovery,” Johnson pointed out.

“And AIs, of course, are not constrained like humans are. If you build an AI that can do a discovery, you can quickly replicate that AI and make it better. And now you have hundreds of millions of those same AIs working on scientific discovery," he elaborated.

"And so, what we see is the opportunity that we could radically accelerate our speed of discovery, which would give us the opportunity to create new drugs, new vaccines, new ways to treat aging and that we're at the beginning of this mass revolution."

Unlike humans, AI is not constrained by cognitive limits or time; thousands of AI models can work in parallel to analyze complex biological data, accelerating the development of new drugs, vaccines, and therapies, Johnson added.

Seger highlighted AI’s role in personalizing longevity care. Healthcare is drowning in data—from wearable devices, genomic sequencing, and clinical records—but humans lack the capacity to identify patterns across these disparate sources, he explained.

AI excels at synthesizing this information, uncovering correlations that would otherwise go unnoticed, and translating insights into actionable recommendations, Seger noted.

In the short term, AI will streamline healthcare by automating administrative tasks and data analysis, freeing up providers to focus on patient relationships and nuanced care. In the long term, it will enable hyper-personalized treatment plans tailored to an individual’s unique biology, Seger said.

Both experts acknowledged that AI is not infallible,“AI currently makes mistakes. AI is known to hallucinate. So it's not that AI is a perfect tool,” Johnson admits, “but AI certainly does things that humans cannot do. And it's the pairing of AI and human ability at this point, which is what makes the moment different.”

AI handles the complexity of data, while humans bring empathy, ethical judgment, and contextual understanding. Right now, this partnership is what makes our approach so powerful, Seger explained further.

As AI evolves, it will become more reliable, but human oversight will remain critical, especially in healthcare, where lives are at stake, he added.

Addressing Inequity: Making Longevity Accessible to All

A pressing concern surrounding anti-aging technology is its potential to exacerbate social inequality, with cutting-edge treatments becoming luxury goods reserved for the ultra-wealthy. Johnson, who has invested millions in his own longevity journey, pushed back against this narrative.

The most impactful interventions are not the expensive ones, he argued. “Things like sleep and sleep training, nutritional changes, dietary changes, exercise interventions that actually as a whole don't cost that much money. There's other advanced technologies that is used, but those haven't been as impactful is the basic things.”

Seger cited historical precedents to support the idea that accessibility improves over time. Technologies like cell phones, televisions, and electric cars were once exclusive to the rich, but they became mainstream as innovation drove down costs, he noted.

Johnson went further, calling for a societal shift in priorities. “Right now the world prioritizes making money above all other goals. That is, for most people, that is our primary goal in life. And sometimes it's at a pure necessity that people need to, need a place to stay and need to buy food to eat. But then there's, for many people, it's a game of how much money can you make. And so it's a status game,” he said. “Remove from our society anything that causes individual death or collective death or the planet's death and aligns ourselves with AI to make sure it's peaceful and, you know, conducive to a prosperous future. So I'm saying that our system are the way the goals we have in the world today lead to negative outcomes and that we should prioritize health and wellness above all.”

Preserving Humanity in the Pursuit of Immortality

Critics argued that extreme longevity optimization—such as Johnson’s Blueprint project, which involves rigorous tracking of biological markers and strict lifestyle adherence—risks reducing humans to algorithms, treating spontaneity, vulnerability, and even aging as “system bugs” to be fixed. Johnson rejected this notion, drawing a parallel to humanity’s historical relationship with technology.

A million years ago, Homo erectus wielded axes as their cutting-edge technology, he said. If we’d asked them to abandon their axes for fear of losing their ‘essence,’ they’d have missed out on antibiotics, electricity, and all the advancements that make modern life meaningful.

"And so this happens every time a human, you know, whether be homo righteous or homo sapiens, change is inevitable,"Johnson explained.

"It's inconceivable for a lot of people feeling healthy is the best feeling life has to offer," said Johnson.

When the body and mind are functioning at their peak, people will more present, creative, and connected to others. The ‘flaws’ people romanticize—fatigue, brain fog, chronic pain—are not part of being human; they’re signs of biological decline. Longevity technology frees people from these limitations, allowing us to experience life more fully, he further noted.

Longevity is not just about individual biology; it’s about relationships, purpose, and belonging. Our approach at Wild Health integrates these social factors with biological optimization. The goal is not to create robots who live forever, but to enable humans to thrive for decades longer, surrounded by the people they love, Seger said.