Live data from Hacker News

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

time.com

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#102
post #43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: You're using it right now. Hopefully.

Do you mean the Internet? How would that be intelligence? Or do you mean my brain? That's not artificial intelligence (at least not obviously artificial!). Edit: Maybe you meant a computer... but that would be quite a long shot. In short, spell it out, guys!

he's talking about the human brain

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you entirely, I'm sure strong AI will be reached. Even if we dropped down onto linear growth, I think strong AI isn't that far away. I just think exponential growth can't continue indefinitely as Kurzweil predicts.

I think his proposition is roughly, that a singular technology grows on an S-curve, but as each one technology slows another picks up the baton and runs with it, and the totality (sum of S-curves) has historically looked exponential, and promises to continue.

Ahh, now that is an interesting angle, but that would suggest that the rate of introduction of new technologies is linear and that every new technology must have a period of exponential growth initially.

(Or I suppose... That the rate of introduction of technologies with initially exponential growth rates is linear. You could ignore those without exponential growth rate provide that a constant number did.)

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#104

I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singul…

How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think. Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least n…

Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think. Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least n…

Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I…

plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and regulating all of that at the same time

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#106
post #58

> W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body. Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculou…

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human I'm curious as to how you support this statement?

Endocrine system, oxygen control, proprioception, and sensory deprivation come to mind as important factors that make us human.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#107
So we are all going to upload our intelligence to a machine that when our physical bodies wear out? And then no more feeling the pleasure of eating good food and drinking good drink? No more joy at mastering a new physical skill? No adrenaline rushes while bombing down snowy hills on skis? No more runners high during a long run? No cuddling with a loved one? I don't know, I guess it'd be better than just dying, but not by much.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain. Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

"Nothing is 'mere'" - Richard Feynman http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/

Funnily enough I was going to say 'mere' but checked myself and suppressed my inner pedant.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#109
post #88
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means you think you just spent $500m on your 'upload' when in reality you just committed some elaborate suicide, launching some other (very similar) chap into immortality. Selfless, but unintentional.

This isn't responsive. You've only answered my question to the extent of defining "same" as the opposite of "other", which is not a lot of progress. So again, what makes this "other" chap "other", and why should anyone care about satisfying that criterion?

Since the process isn't necessarily destructive to the 'original', both entities could subsequently exist simultaneously and lead separate lives. They're now two separate individuals, with an identical memory up to a certain moment. The original will never experience what it is like to be the reproduction after that point, and the reproduction will never know what it is like to be the original after they were branched. It doesn't make the reproduction any less 'legitimate' as a consciousness, but they're definitely not the same.

It'd be another thing entirely if you could join the 'threads' back together, though. Imagine forking yourself into 12 different entities, each living a separate life for 100 years, then reintegrating.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#110
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvote? Was the last sentence considered rude? I can only hope I wasn't downvoted for 'lack of IQ' in not understanding a hint...

Sorry, I think I downvoted by mistake - I went and upvoted a few of your other comments by way of apology. :-)

Thanks for explaining what happened. Upvote and downvote buttons should indeed be farther apart.
Post reply on HN