Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

haakonsk.blogg.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 230 posts

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

#141

Post by dahart »

reasonattlm wrote: post #131
dahart wrote: post #106

Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking. Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn't vary much and hasn't for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fear…

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1478-7954-8-18 The ongoing increase in life expectancy in developed countries is associated with changes in the shape of the survival curve. These changes can be characterized by two main, distinct components: (i) the decline in premature mortality, i.e., the concentration of deaths around some high value of the mean age at death, also termed rectangularization of the survival curve; and (ii…

This is interesting research! Thanks for the resources. It should be noted that focusing on Switzerland is taking a developed country that has an abnormally high life expectancy in the global context, relative to Africa for example, so it is to be expected that gains in life expectancy are small, and thus gains in longevity can be relatively large by comparison. This doesn't directly support the claims Kurzweil made, even if those claims were true.

I am curious; I think there's a gray area in between life expectancy and true longevity, where it's hard to distinguish between them. (As if it wasn't hard enough already.) It is possible that what we call longevity is increasing right now due to reductions in pollution and other impossible to measure environmental factors. That would mean that increases in longevity are actually increases in life expectancy in disguise.

From the WP article on Longevity:

"The U.S. Census Bureau view on the future of longevity is that life expectancy in the United States will be in the mid-80s by 2050 (up from 77.85 in 2006) and will top out eventually in the low 90s, barring major scientific advances that can change the rate of human aging itself, as opposed to merely treating the effects of aging as is done today."

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

#142

Post by JoeAltmaier »

technofiend wrote: post #139
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason I'd predict a society of immortal conservatives. No risk is worth taking. Speed limits drop precipitously. Traffic infractions become federal offenses. Interest rates drop to nil. Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.

There are a great number of books that explore this subject. Robert A. Heinlein's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children is an early treatment. As you say at least one society (I'm sorry I don't remember the book) became increasingly risk-averse and added to an ever-growing list of death penalty crimes to feed the organ banks. Rather than utopia my fear is that would be closer to the truth.

I don't see death penalty happening in a society where a lifetime could be thousands of years. Its just too harsh, with so much to lose. Perhaps sentencing would grow to centuries.

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

#143

Post by bsenftner »

RangerScience wrote: post #126
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.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4021

Exactly.

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

#144

Post by rpgmaker »

nck4222 wrote: post #4

I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well. Seems a little shoddy.

You are not being a pessimist, is just that the author presented a weak argument.

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

#145

Post by macintux »

dalke wrote: post #118

> According to Ray Kurzweil, as soon as something becomes an information technology, it starts progressing according to Moore's Law My field of chemical information - a subfield of cheminformatics - has been an information technology since the 1800s. It was the Big Data of the 1940s and 1950s, many of the pioneers of information retrieval worked on chemical data (Luhn, Mooers, Taube), and the term "information retrie…

Probably should have obfuscated the link.

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

#146

Post by jsnathan »

dahart wrote: post #106

Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking. Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn't vary much and hasn't for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fear…

> Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't.

Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when, not if.

The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of it that we can manipulate and improve that machinery in vivo.

To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms.

It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades.

I find this an absurd scenario, and therefore believe to the contrary. Science will overcome the level of complexity of human biology, and continue onward even long after that.

Because, putting anthropocentric intuitions to the side, the human body is not the most complex phenomenon imaginable.

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

#147

Post by jcranmer »

chrisdotcode wrote: post #66

> Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years ... [and] will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point another technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already "maxed out" Moore's Law? Aren't hardware manufactures alre…

The confusion here is that people refer to several distinct exponential growths as Moore's Law, and some of them have already faltered.

The CPU frequency growth has halted primarily due to the fact that going any higher means we can no longer cool the chips. Power usage (and, consequently, the heat you need to dispose of) is proportional to the square of the frequency (higher-frequency gates also usually require higher voltage to get the switching times down, which means it's really the cube).

Another aspect is the size of the transistor. Some features are already getting down to the point where it's more useful to talk about them in terms of monolayers--i.e., the exact number of atoms. Some elements of a 14nm transistor are already two or three monolayers in size, and the distance between two transistors is already about 100 monolayers, which puts a hard cap on the maximum possible minimization, since you can't make transistors smaller than a single atom. In terms of the smallest transistors that can be feasibly made, the general consensus is that there is at most around 3 shrinks remaining.

There's another dimension, too: whether or not it's cost-effective to keep doing these shrinks. The 14nm node itself has given Intel lots of trouble, and the 10nm node doesn't look like it's much better. Intel has already been forced to give up its Tick-Tock cycle, and the semiconductor industry as a whole may explicitly give up maintaining Moore's Law as a collective research goal shortly.

In short, then, Moore's Law either ended a decade ago, is just now ending, or will end in a decade, depending on what you want it to mean.

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

#148

Post by paulddraper »

shaurz wrote: post #114
JackuB wrote: post #19

Biologists hate him! This programmer discovered Philosopher's stone with this one weird trick! Anyway: Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow a…

No technology has ever extended life. The so-called gains in life expectancy have only come about by reducing the causes of early mortality and slowing down the diseases of ageing.

I don't see the difference.

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

#149

Post by dahart »

jsnathan wrote: post #146
dahart wrote: post #106

Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking. Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn't vary much and hasn't for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fear…

> Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't. Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when , not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of i…

Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death.

To be clear, I'm not saying it can't ever happen, I'm saying that DeGrey's and Kurzweils claims that it is happening and will come to pass in the next century are bogus.

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

#150

Post by crusso »

arethuza wrote: post #16

As someone who turned 50 this year - immortality being available in 30 years sounds pretty good to me! However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro , published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in…

Yeah, I'm almost your age. When I was in high school, I had naive confidence that medical science would advance quickly enough to prevent my getting "old". I even remember a speech from a principal when I was in middle school, claiming that most of us in my class would live to well over 100 years. I believed him.

Despite that optimism and my very healthy diet and exercise regimen, I deal with increasingly deteriorating knee cartilage, loss of muscle mass, an impinged disc in my neck, decrease in reaction times, typical age-related memory degradation, increase in hair loss, yearly removal of pre-cancerous skin anomalies, failing reading vision, mild hearing loss, etc... you know, I'm getting old. This crap is building up and modern medicine offers no magic bullets to even the most minor of my age-related symptoms.

If I do make it another 30 years and if I'm still mentally with it, I'm sure that I'll be poo-pooing some claim that "in just another 30 years, you may live forever".

I don't doubt that eventually humans will figure out aging and be able to stop it -- but by that time, society will look a lot more like Star Trek with ubiquitous ability to manipulate our biology at an atomic level. Star Trek is at least hundreds of years away, not 30.

Post reply on HN