If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too • Hacker News Board

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#91

Post by morgante » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:45 PM UTC

nness wrote: post #80

dghf wrote: post #36

> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live. Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder). In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population d…

If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years? (since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)

The probability of dying every year stays the same, but the probability of dying in one of those 9,000 years is cumulative.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#92

Post by anexprogrammer » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

However appealing this might be for some, I hope we "solve" global population growth first.

Of course that means we need an ethical, voluntary, way of keeping population in check.

Which infers true sexual equality, or you get one child policies as successful as China's.

Or we have an exponential increase in lifespan and ever more people chasing those finite resources.

So, it's going to be a world very different from ours, or it's going to be a bloody mess.

May you live in interesting times?

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#93

Post by adventured » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #38

I consider myself a transhumanist, though even I can't help but notice that these advances always seem just close enough so the author might manage to benefit from them shortly before he expects to die. Kurzweil did the same thing. I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scien…

The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor.

I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opposite is most common when it comes to great technological leaps forward. Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground. Among the very few people that recognize the time as being ready, will be the person that actually invents said leap technology. And it may even be by accident, the ground was primed and an inventor in a garage put the pieces together (ala the inbound virtual reality revolution, it was all skepticism skepticism skepticism for decades, until the ground was primed to leap forward, while most weren't even looking at it).

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#94

Post by rendezvouscp » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #84

rusanu wrote: post #70

Oxygen[0] by Nick Lane makes a pretty compelling argument why this will not happen. With perfect health you can at best achieve ~120 years age. I think this paper A unifying view of ageing and disease:the double-agent theory[2] covers some of the arguments in the book. To give a simplified view, the big obstacles are a) a technology capable of repairing damaged mythocondrial material in a living organism and b) a tec…

I'm pretty sure that you can replace a significant number of my neurons without changing "me".

That’s a great question that’s been pondered by philosophers for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Here’s a fun video talking about the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#95

Post by ant6n » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:47 PM UTC

neuromancer2701 wrote: post #50

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.

Why wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years. There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.

Even if you can stay at 150 for 850 years, if you want kids, you might want to start somewhere in the first century.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#96

Post by koralatov » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

cushychicken wrote: post #68

One of the better societal aspects of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was the concept of "Meths" - super rich people who could effectively afford to live forever by inserting their consciousness into new bodies (or "sleeves" to use Morgan's terminology). One of the downsides of this was that, since the rich lived effectively forever, they only accumulated more and more wealth in greater and greater quantities, and li…

The Meths differ from the modern-day superrich only in that they live on to continue concentrating wealth, rather than passing it on to their offspring to continue as has been the case throughout human history.

I quite enjoyed the book, and the idea of sleeving was pretty interesting and well-explored. It was kind of sad to see that most people worked their whole lives to save enough to re-sleeve simply so that they could live another life doing, effectively, the same. On the flip-side, it was quite well-observed that the eternally young Meths actually suffered from extreme cynicism and boredom.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#97

Post by ant6n » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

anexprogrammer wrote: post #92

However appealing this might be for some, I hope we "solve" global population growth first. Of course that means we need an ethical, voluntary, way of keeping population in check. Which infers true sexual equality, or you get one child policies as successful as China's. Or we have an exponential increase in lifespan and ever more people chasing those finite resources. So, it's going to be a world very different from…

The trick is not to 'use up' finite resources. There's lots of energy coming from the sun. And matter can and should be recycled.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#98

Post by Udo » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #93

Udo wrote: post #38

I consider myself a transhumanist, though even I can't help but notice that these advances always seem just close enough so the author might manage to benefit from them shortly before he expects to die. Kurzweil did the same thing. I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scien…

The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor. I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opp…

> may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs

Not in this case, no. I realize your argument is mostly generic, too. Everybody understands that some problems are expected to have these kinds of revolutionary solutions or no solution at all. However, reading a mind into the computer and then executing it is not a matter of figuring just one missing thing out.

A workable solution requires us to be able to decipher and efficiently digitize the fine structure of the brain. Acquiring missing pieces of technique or technology is a necessary but not sufficient piece of this specific puzzle's solution. There is no sudden eureka moment where it all falls into place, it's just a near endless chain of painstaking detective work in biochemistry.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#99

Post by thatcherclay » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

My issue is that while medical technology may progress at an exponential rate, so too might the challenges of repairing our biology. So yea, we may be getting way smarter, but the problems may keep getting way harder, and then it is not as self evident as this particular article makes out that we are all going to be immortals.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#100

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Mar 08, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #93

Udo wrote: post #38

I consider myself a transhumanist, though even I can't help but notice that these advances always seem just close enough so the author might manage to benefit from them shortly before he expects to die. Kurzweil did the same thing. I used to do yearly blog posts on the current state of whole brain emulation, and we are very very far away from any breakthrough there. So far away in fact that some prominent neuro scien…

The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor. I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opp…

A breakthrough may not be of any use to those already around. Likely a genetic manipulation would allow newborns to have a longer lifespan (many mammals have different lifespans already; it may be programmable). Adults may have changed in ways that make it ineffective. So we'd grow old among a rising generation of immortals.