If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at the stake.)
If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break.
I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.
I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"
Consider this, those that command most resources will be able to get this tech, not you. This isn't everyone gets an iPhone. It's the richest get the best health insurance.
If it was invented in isolation of all other tech, it would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.
More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.
Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care.
But this isn't in isolation, the changes to AI and robotics, even without AGI/ASI or von Neumann replication, will make us unfathomably better off by 2050 (and with, no more labour). What does "rich" even mean when anti-aging stops being a choice between "snake oil" and "in mice"?
> It would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.
Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is earning more extracting money from the richest people buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed by their AI offerings.
The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales, rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.
> First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless and rights deprived people than regular citizens.
Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.
Though even if you did, that would still be a demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
> Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period, before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if they take a year starting from bashing rocks with pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current human life expectancy.
> Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
> It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one
Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
> Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study happened, but it was also low-value in addition to being unethical).
> Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation.
It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation, as full automation requires anything that a human can do, and we can already do "build robot".
If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.
> Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last. And it's only "probably" because there's a reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar system over that time scale.
And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any economy deserving of the description "fully automated".
But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...
28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for, say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a human), and we get that energy and those materials by eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy that this planet can provide without violating entropy or being magic.
> We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically.
Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
> It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.
Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.
> Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last.
You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
> Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
> Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
Only if you don't shoot yourself in the foot in the process.
> Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
> Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
> Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
> Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
You don't have to do it all from scratch. First variation can be built by humans, then the rest can be maintained by machines long term. It's like bootstrapping a compiler versus having compiler write/build itself and hardware.
> I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
You aren't a Von Neumann replicator. Or at least not a useful one. No human can construct hammer, chairs and PCs given sequence of DNA. Unless you have to learn it yourself, which defeats the purpose, or you have to raise a new one from scratch for 18 years.
Previous statement indicated that they are necessary for full automation, implying they are useful when it comes to generating artifacts useful for humans.
> The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
Sun is stable? Could have fooled me. How are the solar flares?
> So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of the worst ones?
No one said to kill off all of humanity. Certainly 'bad' people have died in the long (short) history of humanity without the remainder of the species disappearing.
Life doesn't occur without death. Death is a necessary component. Life _comes from_ death.
I think you misinterpreted the response. They said "humanity" but probably meant "every single human".
You said: "It’s extremely important that we [die] — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans"
Their retort is that this is a very blunt instrument. You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
I'm ambivalent on the question of improving healthspan and longevity, but I agree with the other person that this is a bad argument against it.
> You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I was not advocating for killing. Killing is an unnatural process.
It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc.
Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.
You live in society, not alone on far side of the moon. In any society including worst communism terror Earth has seen, the worst and most potent humans bubble up to the top, always, without exception.
No mechamism to wipe this clean means absolute dictatorship with no end in sight, you always see it even in democracies, strong persons tend to bend rules as they like and the only stopping power is re-election force, or you end up eith some form of forever putin.
Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly. Even for just avoiding endless dictatures its necessary.
I think you are mixing up concepts. Curing mortality doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be killed.
Authoritarian regimes don’t end because the dictator gets old and dies, they end because the people rise up against the oppressive government. If mortality was the liberator you imagine it to be then North Korea would already be rid of their nightmare.
> Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly.
There is no real correction though.
Because for every person who you think that you helped, you should know that those people are going to eventually die anyway, meaning that it was all for naught.
Comprehensive, as in extensively but not necessarily totally? And why as a species rather than as countries, given we don't have a single world government?
Equality issues still exist, but compared to 1924?
Is literacy is a social issue or not? 31% to 87%.
Is extreme poverty? 54% of about 2 billion, now 10% of about 8 billion, reduced in absolute numbers and not just as a percentage.
We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger, homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money. We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments) that will not let us solve them because that would mean their own death.
I agree with the spirit of your argument but maybe not the villains you've chosen. Given legislative capture is absolutely a thing I think your criticism is more effectively pointed at the individuals and organizations responsible for funding reelection campaigns for the politicians that aren't obviously servicing the needs of their notional constituency.
> accessing the entire repository of human knowledge
I know this is a common trope, but just think about how far it is from the truth. And not just because of business secrets, classified information, privacy rules and so on—think of the signal to noise ratio, the vast quantities of "fake news", propaganda, misconceptions, not to mention how hard it is to find reliable and detailed information about niche stuff. Information is vastly more accessible than ever before, but we still have a very long way to go.
Many not-even-that-obscure topics hit “you’ll need to go get a university press book that’s not online to continue” surprisingly fast. Any decent used book store is full of information that’s not online.
Library Genesis is the only reason this is even kind-of close to true.
As someone who grew up alongside the growth of the Internet (and remembers a time before it), I gotta say it hasn’t lived up to the hype.
If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break.
I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.
I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"