There’s average years of life expectancy, and then there’s average years of healthy life expectancy.

According to Dmitry Kaminskiy,  co-founder and managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, an investment firm focused on AI, the latter figure is about 10 years lower than the former.  For now. 

Kaminsky is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs who believe AI will have an awful lot to do with our capacity to live longer - and better - lives.  When interviewed for an article at Singularity Hub that pointed out that the US spent $1.1 trillion on chronic diseases in 2016, with diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and Alzheimer’s among the most costly expenses to the healthcare system, Kaminsky called it “the major negative feedback on the national economy (that is) creating a lot of negative social [and] financial issues.”

To help address those issues, Kaminsky’s Deep Knowledge Ventures has committed about £7 million ($9 million) over the next three years to an accelerator program that has been proposed by the Longevity AI Consortium, an academic-industry initiative at King’s College London that aims to provide intellectual and financial capital intended to jumpstart AI-centered life extension companies.

Kaminskiy estimates that there are now about 20 such investment funds dedicated to funding life extension companies.

According to the article, a number of reports have been written lately about the science and challenges of enhancing longevity, one of the most recent of which is an overview of the role of “Biomarkers” in longevity. “A biomarker, in the case of longevity, is a measurable component of health that can indicate a disease state or a more general decline in health associated with aging. Examples range from something as simple as BMI as an indicator of obesity, which is associated with a number of chronic diseases, to sophisticated measurements of telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that shorten as we age.”

In Kaminsky’s vision of the future of healthcare, “people would be able to monitor their health 24-7, with sensors attuned to various biomarkers that could indicate the onset of everything from the flu to diabetes. AI would be instrumental in not just ingesting the billions of data points required to develop such a system, but also what therapies, treatments, or micro-doses of a drug or supplement would be required to maintain homeostasis.”

Only sophisticated, AI-based algorithms, Kaminskiy argues, can make longevity healthcare work on a mass scale, but at the individual level.