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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#81

Post by ferguess_k »

Henchman21 wrote: post #56
ferguess_k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society? I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal. With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.

The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing . The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.

Well it is the leading elites that matters. The public, as you said, does not really mean much.

We are just human resources.

Re: More Everything Forever

#82

Post by FredPret »

LunaSea wrote: post #39
bryanlarsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs. We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.

And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.

> seem to not be enough

This is an impossible way to get to a useful conclusion. Provide stats if you're going to make a claim like "the world is bad"

Re: More Everything Forever

#83

Post by blaze33 »

> The “ideology of technological salvation”

On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".

I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.

Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.

Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!

Re: More Everything Forever

#84

Post by [deleted] »

psalaun wrote: post #76
cgriswald wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enem…

In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand…

[deleted]

Re: More Everything Forever

#85

Post by janalsncm »

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.

I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.

Re: More Everything Forever

#86

Post by janalsncm »

blaze33 wrote: post #83

> The “ideology of technological salvation” On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!". I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it s…

We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.

If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.

That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.

Re: More Everything Forever

#87

Post by margalabargala »

aeturnum wrote: post #73
margalabargala wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 years optimistically? We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade. We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications. It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedb…

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".

Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.

Re: More Everything Forever

#89

Post by janalsncm »

feoren wrote: post #63
bee_rider wrote: post #34

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so,…

> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Huma…

Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.

But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.

Re: More Everything Forever

#90

Post by bko »

robocat wrote: post #78
bko wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?

[deleted]. Not funny

Yes, that was the joke.
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