Ever because the two-year-old version of myself discovered that death was a thing and, worse yet, a so-far inevitable thing for humans, it’s felt clear to me that one way or the other beating death ought to be a top priority for our species.

When the human genome project succeeded, I used to be more like 35 years old, and my optimism on the timeline for curing aging increased — as did my confidence that AI would probably play a big role within the strategy of achieving human superlongevity. The quantity and intricacy of genomics data were obviously just an excessive amount of for the human mind to handle — let alone proteomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, and all the remainder. Complex interactions between multiple biological networks operating across body systems and scales would obviously be higher understood with AI assistance.

Unsurprisingly, as my very own age has advanced (I’m now 56, egads!), the issue of extending human health span has come to intrigue me increasingly more. And the more I’ve learned concerning the biology of aging, the clearer it’s grow to be to me that there is no such thing as a one problem that causes aging and possibly nobody treatment to cure it. Slightly we must always aim for a cocktail of therapies addressing the complex cross-connected problems unfolding in various elements of our bodies as we become old.

The hard-core transhumanist in me feels sometimes that saving human bodies is possibly not probably the most critical thing — why not only upload our minds into some type of more reliable substrate as a substitute? But my old-fashioned humanist side feels that regardless of how advanced the AGI and VR and robotics tech we create, there shall be an intrinsic moral and aesthetic value in healing the historical deficiencies of the human body and creating healthier bodies that more fully realize the fantastic thing about what it’s to be human.

When I made a decision to place some attention on the aging problem in 2001, shortly after the completion of the human genome project, I started off by applying various machine learning algorithms to genomic datasets and curating the BioAtomspace , a metagraph knowledge base of biological data within the memory of (what in 2008 changed into) the OpenCog AI system .. after which experimenting with the Probabilistic Logic Networks reasoning system for biomedical discovery.

After co-founding SingularityNET in late 2017, it only took around 6 months for me to collect my SingularityNET colleagues and a few of my friends from the biomedical world together to place our heads together about use AI, blockchain and genomics to make a synergistic attack on the aging problem — leveraging my prior work in the world and whatever other recent methods and insights might be mustered. An early type of Rejuve was created in 2018 as a project to be incubated inside SingularityNET Foundation, with a view toward eventually spinning it out by itself.

And now, in 2023, the time has come. Rejuve has grown and transformed loads because the preliminary 2018 version and has blossomed into two coupled projects — Rejuve Biotech, focused on the mix of AI works and hands-on lab work aimed toward discovering longevity therapeutics; and Rejuve Network, a blockchain-based network of longevity enthusiasts, healthcare practitioners and longevity and AI-oriented scientists, aimed toward bringing people, data and other resources together to work toward cures for aging.

The necessity for blockchain to cure aging could also be just a little bit less obvious at first than the necessity for AI — but it surely becomes totally clear when one thinks concerning the insatiable need of recent AI algorithms for data.

AI has shown tremendous power to remodel data into insight. But often, the largest challenge in practice is to search out the fitting data to feed into the AI. Within the longevity context, this is certainly the case — most relevant biomedical datasets are kept proprietary in Pharma-company databases, and even those which might be in principle made publicly accessible are sometimes revealed in practice only to researchers from the fitting countries and/or affiliated with the fitting universities, corporations or government agencies.

The crazy thing is, in fact, the biomedical datasets being hoarded by Big Pharma mostly pertain to the bodies of extraordinary medical patients, who very rarely profit in any respect from the worth their data is providing to Big Pharma… and who would, in just about all cases, decide to make encrypted versions of their very own medical data freely available to any serious researcher.

Reforming the medical establishment is a large, though worthy, job. A complementary path is to route across the establishment by collecting data directly from individual people … then pooling this data for AI analytics, using these analytics to find recent therapies, and rewarding the people whose data helped discover these therapies. Rewards can come each as preferential and discounted access to the therapies and as some type of a share of the worth generated by selling the therapies to those that need them.

That is the core value proposition of Rejuve Network — which is initially rolling out to network members via the Rejuve Longevity App, which lets users input data about themselves to feed the Rejuve AI mind and, in exchange, to receive each details about their very own path to healthy longevity and tokenomic rewards. The information gathered in this manner shall be stored securely and with proper anonymization after which used to feed AI-powered therapeutics discovery by the scientists at Rejuve Biotech, by Rejuve Network’s internal team, and by other research partners, including researchers who take part in Rejuve Network’s decentralized research collaboration platform, the Generative Cooperative Network.

From a SingularityNET view, Rejuve Network is significant from multiple perspectives. To start with, it helps fulfill our mission to create helpful AI. As narrow AI verges toward AGI, it’s extremely essential for the growing AI for use for human profit — not simply because human profit is, well, good, but so the AI has the experience of richly compassionate interaction with its human mind-parents. The Rejuve Network, because it grows, will leverage a number of other SingularityNET projects, from TrueAGI’s extensions of the OpenCog Hyperon system to HyperCycle’s super-AI-optimized blockchain infrastructure and NuNet’s flexible decentralized computing fabric, etc.

Most significantly, it can help create utilization for the AGIX token, which powers the entire SingularityNET ecosystem — already from launch, the Rejuve Longevity App will use the AGIX token to power the Bayes Net model it uses to offer the app user feedback on their path to healthy longevity based on the information they’ve input.

For all these reasons, it’s very exciting to see the RJV token — used initially for rewarding data provided by users into the Rejuve Longevity app, with other broader functions to follow — being minted and put on the market to the community. I’m very pleased with everyone who’s worked together on the Rejuve project for the previous few years to get us thus far. And I’m very enthusiastic about every little thing that is going to bring, especially concerning the very real prospect of eliminating and reducing a number of human suffering as longevity therapies are discovered and rolled out over the approaching years. There’s a lot work yet to be done, however the launch of the Rejuve Network represents a big threshold event within the history of the applying of AI and blockchain to the hunt to increase human healthspan.