Longer does not always equal better. The quality of the extended lifespan is key. But, if you could guarantee quality of life, there is still a bimodal distribution I find among my peers - "Why would you want to live forever?" and "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?"
FWIW, I'm in the "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?". Think of all the things to do and learn and experience and relearn. Ask me again in 10,000 years though.
I was of the "live forever" ilk for a long time, but now I don't think I would. If you think about it when people say they would want to live forever, there are some disclaimers there. Such as: assuming society remains generally decent. Imagine being stuck in some horror show of a society where you are a heavily abused slave for centuries. Or maybe someone decides to imprison you in isolation for a really long time. Then there's the fact of seeing everyone you care about die, which would seem to get really old after a while.
Plus, I'm kinda developing an intense curiosity about what's after death. Maybe just the void. Maybe wakeup in a simulation to some dreary existence. Maybe float around on clouds with a harp. I have no idea and it drives me crazy sometimes! (not to curious, because what if the afterlife is awful!)
Genuine belief: I think we already have an excellent example of what the afterlife is like- try remembering what your experiences were like in the 14-odd billion years the universe existed before you were born.
Lots of fascinating thoughts and philosophy and experimentation and readings on all this stuff. I was deep into it during college and a lot of my 20s. I got back into it a bit during the pandemic year (I'm 50 now), mostly spurred by reading "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene (a fantastic, science-based look into what we have figured out about consciousness). Plus turning 50 makes you realize the 20 year old version of yourself really is a whole different person. Not to mention parenting, and how your 12 year old is absolutely a different human than when he was 5, and seeing them realize it. Life is weird.
I wish I could remember the book or author, but I remember reading a scifi story some years ago in which a main part of the world was indefinitely extended lifespans and health-spans.
A couple of items that shifted the readers' perspective were the 28 year old character who misstated her age as 104 to make herself seem more interesting, and that many people in the 400-500 year-old range picked up high risk sports as out of growing boredom with multiple careers and pursuits...
(if anyone recognizes and remembers the story, it'd be great to know what it is!)
I’m also in the “why wouldn’t you want to live forever” camp, but for selfish reasons. I’m of the opinion that for our species and society, a limited lifespan is a net benefit, as a motivator and as a way for popular opinion to change. Generally I do not think people are good at changing their stances, especially as they age.
Or, people are not good at changing their stances as they approach death. In game-theoretic “explore vs exploit” terms, the closer you get to the end of the game, the less value there is in exploration. If people lived to 200, would we see 150 years of “young and reckless” or 150 years of “old and stodgy”? I tend to lean toward the former, but of course nobody knows for sure.
I fall under this belief too. I think people also over estimate the lack of exploration done in older years. Culture changes too fast for a lack of exploration strategy to exist in older populations. In developed nations it is far more acceptable to be gay, an ethnic minority, etc than it was 50 years ago. While this still takes longer than we'd like it is faster than what you'd expect if we required people to die off for culture to change (we've all but forgotten discrimination of Caucasian minorities, like the Irish and Polish, that was so prevalent even in the 60's and 70's). Things have drastically changed since the 90's even.
I'd also argue that another factor in the "explore vs exploit" strategy is fear (which encompasses fear of death). If you view your world as dangerous then it makes sense that you should focus on an exploitation strategy over an exploration strategy. The world is becoming far safer (despite American perception) and I think this is helping accelerate this cultural change too. I'd expect that if we lived to 200 we'd treat people in their 50's/60's like we do people in their 20's now, and I'd expect them to act similarly too (under the premise that health degrades in this new age system as our current age system).
Though honestly we'll never know until we do it. I do think fear of trying it is dangerous though. One of our advantages as humans is the fact that we tend to use an exploration strategy more than many other species. We've also gotten pretty good at mitigating risk while exploring dangerous territories. But that's how we push forward technological advancements.
"Ask me again in 10,000 years though" - PERFECT response.
I figure it'd take 10,000 years to gain enough knowledge to know what all your options are!
If the DO ask in 10,000 years, you should ask them what they are doing there and tell them not to bother you for a few hundred thousand years while you try a few things out.
Interesting take. However, consider that if one could learn multiple lifetimes of knowledge in one, it might achieve the same result. I’ve been developing a mindset called omnidisciplinary thinking (or “Thinking OMNI”) which encourages us to Engage with the Root of ideas and thought patterns in order to recognize and leverage their interconnectedness. The Root assumptions we make influence heavily how we can express and explore ideas. One can only express in a given language what that language allows. Right now, we have a boundary- and disciplinary-driven engagement with both knowledge and organizational structures which while a valid way to see the world isn’t the only way. The Thinking OMNI thought pattern is being made rigorous as we speak, yet even an intuitive understanding of it can help you today to manage complexity and reduce uncertainty.
Check us out on YouTube—“Omni Artisans”. If one could reduce the amount of effort it takes to accrue knowledge and drive powerful experiences, would one need to live forever per se?
I want humanity to love forever simply because I don’t want anyone to have to experience their parents dying, and everyone older than them slowly fading and passing away in pain.
It’s a shame that so many people think about death in a personal way, forgetting that before you die, you will have to watch the last generation whom you know and love go to the grave.
I read an article a few weeks ago, a guy said that past 75 he wouldn't seek treatment for cancer. I thought that was a nice medium between getting enough time to see the grandkids and not letting it drag on in pain and suffering for everyone. So basically as many healthy years past 75 as you're lucky enough to get, and no more.
Yeah I think the point was not to do any of the drastic treatments that you might if you were younger. Some of them end up prolonging agony, and that's not worth it unless you are younger.
For representative democracy though I think we can experiment with assigning voting weights to age ranges, in a way that allows fresh ideas to exist from people that have a different level of collaborative society in their formative years
Several parliamentary democracies have weighted voting, but thats usually in favor of corporations ie. City of London and Hong Kong
> For representative democracy though I think we can experiment with assigning voting weights to age ranges, in a way that allows fresh ideas to exist
The problem here is that you would be brushing off the concerns of an older group by simply asserting that "they're old and holding us back" without considering that perhaps someone who had been around for 500 years might have far more insight and quite literally had already lived through whatever political experiment some twenty-somethings want to vote for. Not criticizing you specifically but I've seen this mentality before w.r.t. old people and voting.
Us older folks have also seen a lot of "new" ideas from the younger ones that have been repeatedly tried and failed. No need to try them again.
A healthy democracy needs the young for new ideas, and the old to warn them about the experience with those "new" ideas.
It's like software. The new guy just gets 'er done. The old guy says "your quadratic algorithm won't scale. did you encrypt the password database? did you make a backup? did you set aside money for the tax bill?"
Bingo. Quantity is worthless without sufficient quality. I would rather be healthy and strong and die at 80 than sickly and bedridden for the remaining decades and die at 120.
Any improvement to lifespan will necessarily improve healthy lifespan.
(And for my part, I'll always take those extra 40 years, no matter the condition, because that's 40 more years for medical science to advance and solve more of those problems.)
In my experience this reflexive "more is better" attitude only leads to unhappiness. the more I've abandoned this kind of thinking, the better my quality of life has become.
> Any improvement to lifespan will necessarily improve healthy lifespan.
Will it? I don't see why it necessarily will do so.
And even if it does... if it gives you 10 more healthy years, and then 20 more bedridden years, for a net gain of 30 years, is that really a gain? Or do the 20 bedridden years make the 10 healthy years not worth it?
Many of the same things affecting lifespan are the same things that cause age-related degeneration. Any medical improvement to lifespan will almost certainly be an improvement to health. (There are non-medical things that could improve average lifespan without substantially improving average health, such as reducing causes of fatal accidents, but those wouldn't improve maximum lifespan, only average lifespan.)
And yes, of course it's a gain. You could always choose not to take those extra years, if you really don't want them. It's good to have that possibility available.
When I worked in the office, I thought I could never work at home because I'd be too distracted. Once I started working at home, I realized that WFH is really good for me and that I'd never want to go back to the office. I suspect that if I do have to go back to the office, I'll find some advantages to being back in the office and enjoy it.
I use Chromecast with Prime. Mine's from 2016 so I don't know if they stopped supporting it on newer models.
Everything else though, I agree with. Big tech, like any monopoly, does not play fair.
The really awesome part about Dawn (and musicality) was how open she was to the beat and the sound. One of my favorite videos is of her dancing to Bhangra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwsTIp2KDfc
I highly recommend The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert if you like this topic. A great read that tells you about the extinction-level event that we are currently part of and, is most likely, caused by us (i.e., humans).
Another recommended read (which I’m in the middle of right now) is The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen.
Coincidentally I’ve just reached the Permian mass extinction event, where the author discusses how the ammonites clocked out in a later mass extinction. A related species, Nautiluses, have survived till today and are now at risk of extinction because humans prize their beautiful shells.
We humans are atoms in the scope of geological time, but time will tell if we prove to be atoms of Uranium in Little Boy...
Does it matter? I'm no theologian but if the robots take over, isn't that God's will? I'd rather put my faith (and money) in ethics research and really hope that we gradually become sentient robots (by replacing parts of ourselves) instead of ending up in a Terminator-style war with AI.
In Catholicism, there is a distinction between God's permissive will and God's active/perfect will.
God's permissive will is what God allows to happen, even if he does not desire it. God, for instance, gives us free will, which entails the ability to sin, but God does not desire that we sin.
God's active/perfect will is what he actually desires for us.
Counterpoint: since god is omniscient, he knows perfectly what his action or inaction will cause, present and future, from the subatomic level to the edge of the universe. A being like that can't possibly pretend to give humans free will, he knows exactly what they will do, we're like "PRINT HELLO WORLD" programs to him.
I took a philosophy of religion course as an undergrad that spent a long time exploring whether the concept of free will is compatible with an omniscient God. I really enjoyed it, even if it made my brain swirl a little. Here's a wikipedia page that sums up the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will
Obviously, there are plenty of theists, Christian or otherwise, who don't believe this to be a fatal argument, and you can find many of their viewpoints online. One such resource, from the Catholic Encyclopedia, is here: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06259a.htm
> Obviously, there are plenty of theists, Christian or otherwise, who don't believe this to be a fatal argument
Well, of course there are. We humans are flawed and will ignore what we don't like if that helps us believe we're right. This isn't a proof of truth, but of bias.
A religion course spending a long time trying to answer naturally a supernatural question is another proof of the great effort put into rationalizing fantastical beings. I doubt the question was answered satisfyingly, but even if it was, the next question is answering how Jehovah negotiates with the gods of other religions so humans keep their free will.
Edit: downvote instead of reply, that's precisely was I'm talking about.
> But I still don't see why the answer is to pray rather than exhort people to do something about it.
Asking people to pray is asking them to do something about it.
Not just in the trivial sense that prayer is an action (though that too), or that the specific prayer is asking God to do something (though, again, that too), but more deeply in the sense that prayer is, in Catholic thought, not a onidirectional communication but a dialogue, and praying for an intention is the beginning of discernment of what, if anything, God wants the praying person to do to serve others and make God’s will manifest in the area prayed for.
As for why he isn't exhorting more specific action, that's not what the venue of this call (the Worldwide Prayer Network) is for. The issues raised in that venue are often ones on which the Pope advocates more specific responses in other venues, though.
Praying doesn't exclude a more "physical" action. When a catholic is praying for something, they should actively pursue the goal. The New Testament (James 2:14-26) states it explicitly. "Faith without deeds is dead" - praying is just one of many things people can do, sometimes the only thing.
Because most people can't exhort people to do anything about it. Don't quote me, but I imagine the majority of Pope Francis's followers are in third world or developing nations. Praying is all they can do to help.
That doesn't mean that Pope Francis shouldn't do something more concrete, and from the looks of this article, it seems like he's trying to.
> Earlier this year, the Vatican, along with Microsoft and IBM, endorsed the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” — a policy document containing six general principles that guide the deployment of artificial intelligence.
From a secular perspective, prayer is a way to align our conscious with our subconscious. The higher and lower order desires. The logical with the emotional. Prayer changes the world by changing the prayer.
I'm no expert, but I believe there is more to it then that. According to the Catholic church we all have free will, and with that comes the responsibility to keep these kinds of things under control.
I know for example the Pope and Catholic church consider it a sin to pollute and say we have a moral responsibility to keep global warming in check.
There are some other Christian religions that are more deterministic about this and think "Let Gods will be done" in regards to both AI and pollution, but I am not sure how popular they are
That makes sense to me. I guess I was hoping for something stronger and more in line with "don't pollute God's creation" rather than "let's pray on it" but perhaps that's the first step to an exhortation to keep in mind the delicate balance between humans and machines.
Setting aside whether Deep Learning can do everything, would you want to do everything with deep learning? We don't use Quantum Physics for mechanical engineering, we use Newtonian Physics because it is at the right abstraction level for these purposes. Similarly, there are other abstractions possibly to talk about causal reasoning or consciousness (he did say everything!)
Also, he mischaracterizes Symbol Systems. A symbolic system has two important properties - Composability (you can combine parts to make new things just like words are combined to make sentences) and Distal Access (a part can stand for something else. For e.g., a word like Justice stands for a complex concept. Very similar to naming something). Nearly 40 years ago, Newell also talked about the various levels of an AI system - Implementation Level, Algorithmic Level, and the functional level. Neural Networks etc are at the implementation level, Deep Learning lies at the Algorithmic level, and symbolic systems are at the functional level (i.e., they describe function not how that function is implemented). A symbol system is not at odds with a neural network or deep learning although there are those who say that neural networks can never implement a symbol system.
With the improvements in speech recognition, NLP, speech generation, I wonder how long before we can quickly spin up a network of false personas simply to provide "witnesses" or verify false information, or even provide alibis.
This depends on the actual prosecutor never attempting to participate in the case. Plus, I imagine that the penalty for getting caught defrauding a court is pretty steep.
If people using the tool come up with the same designs/artwork, it's pretty clear the tool is responsible. If people have very different outcomes using the tool, then the people are responsible.
What makes it difficult is that we are just entering into a phase where a little bit of knowledge and artistic ability when combined with the right tool can take you much farther than either of those alone. And it's not just paintings but also music or even creative writing (using something like GPT3).
A lot of people talk about minima because thats the language we have for analyzing optimization techniques. Deep Learning is still new enough that there is lots of low hanging fruit to explore including empirical approaches and applying existing theoretical tools to try and explain DNNs. The community is slowly moving towards developing new tools specifically for deep learning properly analyze these networks and prove stuff (bounds, convergence etc) about them.
FWIW, I'm in the "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?". Think of all the things to do and learn and experience and relearn. Ask me again in 10,000 years though.