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Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

There is a real possibility that in the next few decades some of these therapies might work.

The book Lifespan by Dr David Sinclair is really interesting. Sinclair is a professor at Harvard. He's highly optimistic that something will come of the various ideas looking at slowing aging.

https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150...

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There's a real possibility that some of those therapies might work in the next 6.5 years, as per Greg Bailey @ Juvenescence.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2019/08/26...

He did an AMA on Reddit a few days ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eorio3/hi_im_david_si...

So when it happens, will we stop having kids? Because our current population and lifestyle do not seem sustainable. I only see population increasing and lifestyle being more burdensome on environment.

Ironically, if people that care about the planet don’t have kids to save the planet, you will be left with more people that don’t care about the planet down the road

I don't know about you, but some of my teachers and favorite musicians had far more of an impact on my attitudes toward the environment and having children than my parents ever did.

This fallacy that the only way to fix the world is to make kids of your own that will make it better is ridiculous.

I don't have interest in having kids. But I guess that if I was facing immortality or the prospect of reaching twice my age I would be even less interested on having kids.

I imagine people with access to anti aging therapies would postpone having children further and further.

Just let immortal people have no more than one kid. That way the population (of immortals) can double at most.

Then non-immortals can have as many immortal kids as they want, so immortals can still increase without bound.

maybe immortal people care even more about the longterm well being of climate / ecosystem?

I already did!

population will plateau

One can only hope that it wont be yet another hyper inflated bubble like ai is now.

Ai is hardly hyper inflated. Everything from your phone to cars to planes use ai and machine learning one way or the other.

But it's not actually AI, it's just programmable probability.

Which is what modern AI is - neat linear algebra that can perform certain tasks that are commonly associated with human cognition.

How and when did this become the definition of AI? I feel like we techies lost an important distinction by simply accepting the marketing appropriation of the term. What do we now call real AI?

It was that way from very beginning. It's Artificial _Intelligence_ , not an Artificial Human.

So is your brain. But it's not even yet programmable.

The brain is not programmable?

It really depends on your definition of programmable, I can see how it could be argued both ways.

It's only programmable in the Matrix movie.

Today's real world requires you to practice before saying "I know kung fu".

This is a simplistic, incorrect view of biology.

Well, we happen to call that AI nowadays.

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