121–130 of 133 posts
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Forest for the trees. Let me put it this way: Octocentarians clinging to life and hoarding resources to themselves would be a tremendously ugly thing in my eyes.
clinging to life Curse those doctors and cancer researchers. hoarding resources to themselves The economy is not zero-sum. If we cure aging, 80 year olds will be producing goods and services of value rather than living off welfare.
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Advocates of immortality are completely oblivious to the social challenges this will bring. Not oblivious to them, but social challenges are so much more fixable than being dead that it should be a no-brainer.
Personally I think fixing death problems is only a matter of technological progress. And in general technological problems are much easier than social ones as social problems sometimes do not admit technological fixes ;) With the problem I outlined above, modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon. It is easy imagining l…
When you rephrase that to: "150,000 people die every day, and you want that to continue because changing the definition of 'human' feels a bit weird" it starts to look like less of a compelling argument.
There are lots of reasons why developing life extension technologies will cause social and economic upheavals and potentially huge ripples, but fear of possible problems is not enough to make me say "well, I'm glad people died to avoid those problems".
And I am aware that happiness could be faked, but then what incentive would you have for living a good life and accomplishing stuff instead of living like a vegetable, as many drug addicts are doing?
Am I a drug addict today? Why would I be more likely to be a drug addict in 100 years?
And if you can't be happy, since that's the ultimate goal of everybody, than what's the point to all this?
Because we can (maybe) and because if we can, it's worse if we don't.
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That's sort of the theme of this site, no? We have reddit and such for this kind of writing.
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There is much more interesting (and useful) to hackers than pure startup and tech news.
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I like this quote by Isaac Newton "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Sums up the futility and the selfish enjoyment of a life of intellectual pursuit for me.
I read it as saying that throughout his life, he continued to experience child-like wonder at the richness of the world, and is trying to be humble about the size of his contribution to history. YMMV.
I have only just a minute, only sixty seconds in it, forced upon me, can't refuse it, didn't seek it, didn't choose it. But, it is up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it. Give account if I abuse it, just a tiny little minute - but eternity is in it."
Which I interpreted to mean that life is really about process. It's very distracting to focus on long term goals in many cases, as it can cause you to overlook the steps that need to happen each minute, especially if you think that you can make up that minute later. Long time scales also force you to make impossible predictions about how long you'll even be alive(which can be underestimated as easily as over estimated).
Yes and no. The good news: if you're in your 20s now, you have 60 or 70 years of life left, and scientific advances being what they are, they'll probably be mostly good years. That's a lot of time. Also, the common trope about poets and mathematicians peaking at 20 is the exception, not the rule, and doesn't apply to modern times anyway (mathematics is so specialized that modern mathematicians are just getting starte…
If you want to climb the corporate ladder, you better enjoy every day working late nights, striving for great reviews, etc. Your title means only as much as you want it to. Life doesn't have to be a race to the top. Your Startup doesn't have to have a billion dollar IPO for you to be happy. Enjoy refining your product, providing great service to people, the struggles and stress of acquiring funding, the ups and downs.
I came to similar conclusions of this author after reading Camus' The Stranger (and many other Existential books thereafter) in high school.
There's no meaning to life other than what you make of it. This author finds meaning in building things, seeing things grow. Other people find meaning to their lives by shining shoes and are just as happy. Or at least they find contentment in what they do, which in many ways is better.
> what do I want to see grow? What do I want to build? The problem is that in the vast majority of cases, unless you managed to build something successful by the time you die, then your work will die with you and nobody will care. The article makes the tempting assumption that progress is monotonic, and that the work that you do will eventually find its use. I don't think this is right -- the vast majority of stuff e…
I don't agree that most stuff created gets thrown away or forgotten, especially in the sphere of intellectual achievements.
We live in the age of the internet, or as I think of it - 'perpetual memory'. Storage is cheap, communication is free, search is instantaneous and context is being built through sites like Hacker News, for example.
So the real question is, in my opinion, are you proud of your choices? Are you proud of how you spend your time? Do you meet your own standards? Do you want to attach your name to your work, your intellectual achievements?
If the answer is yes, how can it not make you happy? We live in an age where our needs for food and shelter are easily met (at least in the US), and we can afford to pursue the higher elements of our hierarchy of needs. If we achieve self-admiration, then does outside validation even matter?
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If reasonattlm is right, it may be worthwhile for me to work my tail off and sacrifice peace of mind in the short term in order to live forever in the long term. So what he says is somewhat relevant.
You're assuming "working your tail off" has something to do with becoming rich. I've seen little evidence to that effect and a great deal that contradicts is. No one worked harder then the miners and few died poorer.
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Personally I think fixing death problems is only a matter of technological progress. And in general technological problems are much easier than social ones as social problems sometimes do not admit technological fixes ;) With the problem I outlined above, modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon. It is easy imagining l…
modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon. It is easy imagining living a 1000 happy years, but would you experience happiness at all if you were less human? When you rephrase that to: "150,000 people die every day, and you want that to continue because changing the definition of 'human' feels a bit weird" it starts to l…
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't fix it. Heck, it may even make us less selfish; we may end up for example actually caring about our planet.
But in order to do that, there are more hard problems to solve first -- tyrants will be the first to achieve longer lives, capitalism will not work anymore, we need won't be able to have children, yes we do sex for fun but we also feel the need to reproduce so doing sex will be a lot less common, we'll have to work for all of our lives as wealth will become static, there will be no more entrepreneurs, whatever brain we'll have will have limited capacity so we'll forget meaningless details like our childhood (the happiest period of life for many people).
Even seemingly simple problems are actually big -- for example, right now death is fair, but what will happen after living 1000 years with your loved one until one day when she'll get hit by a bus? Then it won't be fair anymore and you'll most likely go mad.
And the biggest problem I'm seeing -- once the genie gets out of the bottle, it stays out. People need to at least make an attempt to fix these side-effects before solving death, not after. We cannot then say -- oops, this is was a bad idea, we'll just revert.
I've had family members die. It's painful, but at least you can live with it. And if the problems that I'm thinking about won't get solved first, I'm pretty sure that fixing death is a bad idea.