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Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

Are you horrified at the idea that we still use screwdrivers when power tools exist ?

Wordpress does the job. It's not particularly good at anything, but it works damn well. Wordpress is 40% of all sites in the world.

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I'll be horrified if we're still using screwdrivers in 100 years.

I'm ready for brain uploads and immortality and unlocking the rest of the galaxy for exploration. I'm tired of everyone turning to dust.

Take yourself back to 1960. Mankind has never once been to space, though there have been endless efforts to achieve such. The next year Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space, Alan Shepherd follows shortly behind him. The following year the President gives a riveting speech about putting a man on the Moon. 7 years later, we land the first man on the Moon. And then do it repeatedly - to the point that dozens of men have walked on the Moon. In 1971 we put the first space station into space, with men began living in it for weeks at a time.

All of that over ~1 decade. Can you even imagine where we'll be in 50 years?

You're there today.

> Can you even imagine where we'll be in 50 years?

If we're not careful, buying slightly faster smartphones.

Another day older and deeper in debt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

Yet 2023 is barely different from 2013.

According to the World Bank, global poverty has decreased by nearly 20% during that time; the rate of decrease for those in extreme poverty has been even greater.

That's something like a billion and a half people who absolutely think the world is different between 2013 and 2023.

It'd only be 1.5 billion people if 100% of the world was in poverty. They're referring to relative rates. E.g. if 5% of the world was in poverty and now it's 4% then you have a 20% decline. But the bigger point is to be wary of metrics. The overwhelming majority of global poverty comes from extremely rural locations where money has relatively little use, yet people get by quite comfortably.

Putting these people in an urban job where they then earn $3 a day is then considered progress, regardless of impact on quality of life. For instance the biggest contemporary driver in decline of poverty has been the rise of China. It saw people go from raising large families in rural areas to living in densely packed cities, making iPhones for $3 a day in factories surrounded by suicide nets.

I'm obviously not saying economic development is bad, but that measuring it by metrics is stupid, especially the way the World Bank does which is simply looking at a fixed level of $ consumption/production. What should matter is quality of life. That's obviously what you're referencing, but the metrics are not.

To be fair, did 1970 really feel that different from 1960 for the average person?

Also, between 2010 and 2020, cancer death rates declined from 173 to 144 per 100,000 population, i.e. a 17% decrease in the US [1].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...

There Will Be Screws.

(and rivets. Joints. Pipes. Flanges, if we're unlucky)

And all of those things if we're lucky. If we're unlucky it will be edges of chiseled stone. If we're really unlucky it won't be anything at all.

And what kinds of tools do you think will be used to the assemble data center racks where you wish to “upload” yourself? :-P

Brain uploads don't cheat death. Let's say you made a digital clone of your brain. Your last thought would be "oh shit I'm dying". The description of you is not the thing you inherently try to protect, but the physical brain itself. Your brain's contents change quite often compared to the medium.

This just boils down to the dualism/physicalism argument. Physicalists would say that the mind is software and state, and they can be copied or moved just like a VM can be moved (e.g. Vmotion) from one host to another without any internally perceived interruption. The brain is just the host.

The real answer is likely that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. In reality there is no mystical magic that makes us special. There is no one right answer for "the best way to cheat death" because it's all about satisfying a moving target of how comfortable you are with the fact that there is nothing intrinsically special about consciousness. Saving the brain is at least a concrete thing that satisfies most interpretations of identity.

Prepare for disappointment.

screwdrivers are a very good example of the Lindy effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Well sounds like you're gonna be disappointed.

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