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What reason do you?
to propagate my genes
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I would recommend re-reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a companion story then. Maybe you'll get to underhand techno-pessimism as something more than the the result of people "forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real".
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/ Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.
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> Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30. I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothi…
Many of the innovations we take for granted today followed a very similar pattern, including the backlash. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments.
This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows.
I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".
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to propagate my genes
I got a vasectomy a number of years ago in my mid 20s with 0 kids. I exist to experience things like love, hydrofoil surfing, skiing, and the journey to try to do more of these things. There are many people or trained models that could say I have a wasted existence of sorts, but the universe’s ending will always be the same no matter how many times the power dynamics on earth and beyond shift.
He has been pitching the idea that human longevity is accelerating. For example, scroll to the very bottom of this essay and check out the plot: https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...
Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.
I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.
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Well our purpose is to turn low entropy into high entropy, that's what drove the existence of life. If machines can do it faster then they'll win out eventually.
It's interesting: on balance life increases entropy. Yet it also produces pockets of ultra-low entropy; states which would be staggeringly, astronomically unlikely to be witnessed in nature. So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
Life is a rounding error in the energy and entropy balance of the solar system. And even on earth we barely amount to much.
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https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/ Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.
I haven’t read any of this work. Where would you start?
If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists.
Edit: „The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“ can be read at https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
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I am familiar with NLP and persuasion techniques, and when I started feeling it creep in as I read this story, I started skimming. I have learned that a compelling vision alone does not mean it is correct or even wise. The analogy is not correct. I know that burger is rich in taste and marvelous. It is also my opinion that it is an illusion, and lacks substance. There is so much more to the cosmos than science, thoug…
Where in the story does NLP (I guess you mean "Neurolinguistic programming" and not "Natural Language Processing") factor in?
I've often had the thought that I will probably just miss the singularity due to my age, but people like my nephews will have a greater chance at experiencing it.