Actually AI will impact China much harder than the US. Here we have driven down employment to the point where a significant portion if the population only get a meager foodstamps to survive. LA has gone from a working class city to a city where a large amount of the working population are homeless living in their vehicle. A tiny elite living forever has really profound economic implications in a system of winner take all. How long can inequality be pushed exponentially before the system breaks down for everyone.
Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
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Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#12While I agree with Kurzweil's stuff on computing per dollar increasing exponentially, in that it has for a long time now, I'm skeptical of the lifespan thing. There doesn't seem particularly good experimental evidence - our life span is longer because of less childhood death but it seems old people have always maxed out in the 70-100yrs old range.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#13Ray Kurzweil is Deepak Chopra.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#14Religion for techies. Apocolyptic millenarian beliefs (Singularity)? Check. Transcendence and life after death? Check. Belief in purity and rituals (Vitamins and workout routines)? Check. Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . . It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
Yeah but that's like saying antibiotics are casting out ill health demons for techies. Some similarities but important differences also.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#15Religion for techies. Apocolyptic millenarian beliefs (Singularity)? Check. Transcendence and life after death? Check. Belief in purity and rituals (Vitamins and workout routines)? Check. Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . . It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
Yep. Kurzweil has been banging this drum for a long time. I read Spiritual Machines a long time ago and found it to be a simple rehash of 90s-Extropian tropes - utility fog, uploads, all the goodies needed to glue science-fiction nerdbait to a thin rehash of Christian rebirth millenarianism.
The book went away in one of my periodic purges, or I'd check to see if he changed his dates.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#16Religion for techies. Apocolyptic millenarian beliefs (Singularity)? Check. Transcendence and life after death? Check. Belief in purity and rituals (Vitamins and workout routines)? Check. Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . . It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
I'd only add that it's another way to manufacture hope for people who have been left behind by how unbelievable most religions are.
I've been trying for years (and will continue trying) to switch my parents hope for an afterlife with a hope that cryo will work. There is definitely no afterlife, but cryo might eventually work. That's how I see most of these "living forever" positions. It's just a more intellectual hope to have, where you at least break reality into possible and impossible before choosing something to believe.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#17Religion for techies. Apocolyptic millenarian beliefs (Singularity)? Check. Transcendence and life after death? Check. Belief in purity and rituals (Vitamins and workout routines)? Check. Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . . It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
Which is not a bad thing.
Religion developed to cope with the unavoidable misery of human existence through a coordinated belief in an imaginary afterlife free of that misery.
Enlightenment, science and technology showed us that most of this misery could be alleviated by advancing our technologies and social structures, while also revealing the imaginary nature of ideas of an afterlife.
The tragic thing is that we might live in the worst time of all: religion is obsolete, yet the transformative changes possible through technology might very well stay out of reach during our lifetimes.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#18Ray has been thinking about this stuff for thirty years. He has a knack for getting positive press, which goes back to his time in high school. His ideas reveal the narrowness of his experience in the world: it appears that he has only the vaguest notions of what the lives of most humans currently on the planet are actually like. If he understood humanity beyond the confines of Silicon Valley / Route 128 / Davos, he…
Re actual problems he has done a lot on reading machines for the blind.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#19That's a pursuit in the wrong direction.....
Hidden underneath the quest for immortality is the eternal quest of freedom from all known and unknown bounds. Unfortunately enough, this quest, when expressed from the confines of the apparatus called "mind" shows up as ego which is limiting, self serving and divisive. To experience the real singularity and immortality one needs an instrument which at its very core is limitless and that my friend is "consciousness". The reason current scientists have not been able to understand the limitless and eternal nature of consciousness is their fundamental assumption which is "matter gives rise to consciousness". Unless this assumption is turned around to "consciousness gives rise to matter" until then this quest for immortality will remain just that, a quest and never a realized goal.
At an individual level, we don't have to wait for the Ray's or Singularity of the world, this quest can be completed by each and everyone of us, by focusing our attention within. Attention is the expression of our consciousness in our physical being, and by focusing it within we can break free from the limitations of our 5 senses and the endless maze of thoughts. It is at point of liberation we will realize that we are all immortal beings who where focused in the limited dimensions created by the illusory mind and are all interconnected by the inherent Singularity of cosmic/unity consciousness.
Meditation or focusing within is the first step towards a successful quest of Singularity and Immortality.
Re: Ray Kurzweil thinks we could start living forever by 2029
#20By "we", what percentage of the 1% top richest people are we talking about? Indians are dying because of heatwaves, Bangladeshis dying because of floods, Californians because of forest fires... Maybe if the elite build their Elysium-like fortress they'll make it, but my feeling is the vast majority of humans will be killed by climate change. And not within he next 50-100 years, more like 10-20.