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Comment by zzzzzzzza | Hacker News Reader

imo having a kid now is like buying a horse (or maybe 2 horses). By the time a baby born today would have graduated college, there's a good chance we'll have achieved artificial general intelligence. Pretty much impossible to say what exactly would happen at that point, but, in the past kids were a pretty immediate roi, they could work on the farm, more recently arguably the roi is possibly negative but, for instance, one of my uncles takes care of my aging grandparents; but if we are anywhere near to agi a kid wouldn't even be useful for that. I mean I like kids but we're talking easily 250k+ dollars for a single one. In practice for me it would be a lot more than that since the cost of my lifestyle would go up dramatically. (source: am 25 year old american male)

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I love this comment. It was precisely my attitude eighteen years ago.

I was supremely confident that Moore's Law and work by AGI researchers would usher in the Singularity well within my lifetime, and that my offspring would either be incorporeal AIs or corporeal AIs in robotic shells. I would be uploaded into a giant virtual connectome powered by a Dyson sphere and live a thousand subjective lifetimes in a real year. My life insurance policy named Alcor as the sole beneficiary and I wore a bracelet with pre-vitrification instructions on it.

Now I have two human biological children, and Moore's Law has given us duckface selfies on Instagram celebrities and consumerist bliss via StitchFix. All the AGI researchers of that time have given up and gone into human bias control and polyamorous relationships in intentional communes with other futurists or disappeared into sketchy Chinese universities. Kurzweil will die ignominiously.

The exaflops of global processing power that the AGI researchers of 2001 wish they had is here, and is being harnessed to the valiant purpose of ensuring you can watch double anal videos in high definition in your Uber ride en route to the gastropub recommended by Yelp.

Mark my words today. Give it a decade or two. Humans don't want to ascend. They want to consume. Every technological advancement we make will go into facilitating this.

And being a parent is actually pretty cool.

I think the path to ai is a little bit clearer today than it was back then.

Also, Kurzweill is currently a head of engineering at google, not that I'm a rabid fanboy.

I agree technological developments can play out unexpectedly, in some ways I am more "amish" than my peers (e.g. no cellphone (I use google voice on my laptop), I have a whitelist of websites I allow to display images, I use adblock to block out portions of certain websites e.g. suggestions on youtube/stack overflow).

But on the other hand, the year of the linux desktop is finally here, and with new os's like nix or guix, you can have a much more fine tuned and deep control over your operating system. Technology also gives us tools to take back control from some of it's more dystopian society level side effects.

Even if my expectations about AI completely dissapointed me, I still think it would be a good idea to wait 15 years to have kids anyway just for reliable genetic engineering.

Also for the record I think it will be a dyson swarm, and I am unsure if our machine overlords will bother "uploading" us, I would suspect they'll keep us around as a museum piece lol. Maybe earth will become like a modern day native american reservation where some equivalent to gambling is allowed and we all get handouts from the machines while what's left of our culture that's not amish amuses itself with our various "soma" (brave new world) equivalents.

Perhaps my imagined future world really isn't that different from yours XD.

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