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

haakonsk.blogg.no

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

#111

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.

Not really. Only the wealthy would have access to this technology, the poor would still have normal life expectancy. Society would look the way it does now (stratified), just more so.

Over 100 years most 'rich' only tech ended up getting cheap. (computers, cars, air travel).

So, you might have ultra rich at 850, rich at 800, and the masses at 750. But, having access to 100 years of refinement the 750 year old's ongoing treatment is likely far cheaper.

Though IMO, this is all wishful thinking. 1,000 years ago people thought they where close to unlocking immortality, and we are likely just as wrong.

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

#112
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not want to stop people from dying?

overpopulation? not enough resources? first let's solve these, so we can have number of humans exploding (exponentially, maybe). if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster

Why would it? People always seem to assume that with extremely long lifetimes, humans would still reproduce at roughly the same age as they do now. I just don't believe that would be the case.

So many things change with lifetimes that long and it seems more likely to me that the human timeline would adjust to the new lifetime. Physically maturing into an adult may take the same amount of time, but now it's a tiny fraction of your overall life. You may spend 50 or 100 years in secondary education, then another 200 in a career at which point you should have enough money put away to live on the interest.

And it's at this point, when you're 300+ years old that you start having children. On this timescale, you'd still see more generational overlap than we have today, but no so much that overpopulation is a concern.

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

#114
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.

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

#115
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you re-read the post, that's actually not his argument.

He's saying that the older someone is the more their ideology defines them, which is itself probably inaccurate. And he says that that "could be a problem."

He's arguing about ideological stagnation. That's bad regardless of just about what the ideology is and whether you agree with the particular.

To quote Max Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." That's as true of anything as it is of science.

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

#116
post #44
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too

Your argument is "we don't want more old people because I disagree with them ideologically." Shoddy at best.

That's not it. The problem is that individuals have cognitive biases. People rarely change their minds. As a society, this is offset by a slow, regular replacement of its members.

If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.

That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.

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

#117

This article seems inherently flawed in its assumption that a. the exponential growth of computing power will keep up, despite the numerous technical and physical boundaries imposed upon them, b. computational power will solve many of the unknown inner workings of the human body, and c. that being aware of, and understanding those inner workings allows us to modify the human body in such a way that we can 'rejuvinate…

Moore's law has not been an exponential increase in technological capability in general. It has only been an exponential increase in one particular technology - more of the same. I see no evidence that the development of novel technology in general has sped up in any way.

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

#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 retrieval" and concepts like stop words (as part of KWIC) were presented at chemistry conferences.

The doubling period for chemical information is 15-20 years.

Citation indexing is another offshoot of 1950s information technology. Scientific publication grows by about 5% per year (says http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909426/ ), so doubles every 15 years.

Either 1) those are not information technology fields, in which case, why not? or 2) "according to Moore's Law" means generally "has exponential growth", not the more specific doubling every two years.

With #2 firmly in mind, consider "and that's the main reason why we can expect medical technology to advance exponentially in the future."

How do we measure "advance" in medical technology, how do we know it isn't already an information technology field, and why should we expect the doubling rate of under 20 years?

Finally, here's a quote from someone who "served on the advisory council of [a longevity] organization, along with the chairmen of a number of major US corporations":

> Why has the problem of aging been such an intractable one? Up until [recently], the prevalent view of scientists had been that the task of controlling aging was fundamentally impossible. But today, such a consensus no longer exists. Many researchers now believe that their predecessors failed, not because their goals were misguided, but because the tools and the level of sophistication they could bring to the task were inadequate. Moreover, it is argued that progress has been hampered because funding has been scarce, and researchers concerned with aging have been too few and far between. ...

> Growing public and private support for aging research reflects the scientific community’s own increasing commitment. Today, aging research occupies unprecedented numbers of highly talented individuals, not only specialists in gerontology, but researchers from other disciplines as well. These include biochemistry, endocrinology, immunology, neurobiology, genetics, and cell biology, to name only a few.

I'll give the link to where that quote comes from, but before following the link, when do you think it was written? http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p107y1983.pdf .

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

#119
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solutio…

That's basically what he was arguing. "Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground."

Those problems you're talking about will be figured out bit by bit, and only once all those things are figured out, will someone realize "Oh shit, we're at the point where this is possible now!" while everyone around them isn't paying attention and still thinking "It's impossible. It's impossible."

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

#120
We are way too far from really understanding our own biology to be able to predict such an over-the-horizon end result.

I don't even know if we'll be able to reliably cure toenail fungus in the next 20 years - much less be able to solve a significant number of problems with aging in 30 years.

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