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Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

Larry Ellison is 80. Masayoshi Son is 67. Both have said that anti-aging and eternal life is one of their main goals with investing toward ASI.

For them it's worth it to use their own wealth and rally the industry to invest $500 billion in GPUs if that means they will get to ASI 5 years faster and ask the ASI to give them eternal life.

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Side note: I’ve read enough sci-fi to know that letting rich people live much longer than not rich is a recipe for a dystopian disaster. The world needs incompetent heirs to waste most of their inheritance, otherwise the civilization collapses to some kind of feudal nightmare.

I’m cautiously optimistic that if that tech came about it would quickly become cheap enough to access for normal people.

Altered Carbon!

With how healthcare is handled in America … good luck to poor people getting access to anything like that.

Life extension isn’t happening for minimum 30 years, if ever. Hopefully, maybe it won’t be this bad by then???

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule

Or “dropout regularization”, as they call it in ML

the fi part is fiction

Reasoning from science fiction isn't a particularly strong approach. And every possible future is distopian - even the present is distopian in a practical sense. We have billions of people who live well below any standard I woudl consider acceptable.

Reasoning from science fiction is just stupid. A story first and foremost has to have conflict: if it doesn't there is no story, and thus all the stories have one.

Science fiction also follows the anxieties of the time it is written in, as well as the conventions of the subgenre it's representing: i.e Star Trek doesn't have drones or remote surveillance really. Though it does accidentally have LLMs (via the concept of holodeck characters).

Sometimes science fiction is well grounded. It isn't science fiction but something like Orwell's Animal Farm is a great example - actually closer to an argument laid out in narrative form.

Great science fiction is grounded in conflict, as is human nature. There is a whole subtext of conflict in this, and other threads about AI: a future of machine oligarchs, of haves and have-nots. Great science fiction, like any great literature, is grounded in a deep understanding and a profound abstraction of humanity. I completely disagree that reasoning by science fiction is stupid, and the proof is in the pudding: science fiction writers have made a few great predictions.

Yeah imagine progress without the planck quote "science progresses one funeral at a time"

I've read enough sci-fi to know that galaxy-spanning civilisations will one day send 5000 usenet messages a minute (A Fire Upon the Deep), in the far future humans will develop video calls (The Dark Forest) and Muslims will travel into the future to kill all the Jews (Olympos).

What’s a good sci fi book about that?

Can we wait until our political systems aren't putting 80+ year olds in charge BEFORE we cure aging?

Larry especially has already invested in life-extension research.

Chat gpt -> ASI-> eternal life

Uh, there is 0 logical connection between any of these three, when will people wake up. Chat gpt isn't an oracle of truth just like ASI won't be an eternal life granting God

If you see no path from ASI to vastly extending lifespans, that’s just a lack of imagination

Yeah I mean you already need super human imagination to get to ASI so at that point you might as well continue in the delirium and throw in immortality in the mix

The world isn't run by smart people, it's run by lucky narcissistic douchebags with ketamine streaming through their veins 24/7

Funny, because the direction ML is going is completely the opposite of what is needed for ASI, so they are never going to get what they want.

People are focusing on datasets and training, not realizing that these are still explicit steps that are never going to get you to something that can reason.

that's a bit of a stretch - why take the absolutely worst case scenario and not instead assume maybe they want their legacy to be the ones who helped humanity achieve in 5 years what took it 5 millennia?

Mark my words, anything that comes of anti-aging will ultimately turn into a subscription to living.

I wonder if they watched Prometheus (2012)

ASI?

Artificial Super Intelligence :P

Nice try, Larry, the reaper is coming and the world is ready to forget another shitty narcissistic CEO.

Probably shouldn't be firing their blood boys just yet ... According to Musk, SoftBank only has $10B available for this atm.

I wouldn’t exactly claim him credible in anything competition / OpenAI related.

He says stuff that’s wrong all the time with extreme certainty.

I would even say that he's now consistently lying to get to what he wants. What started as "building hype" to raise more and have more chances actually delivering on wild promises became lying systematically for big and small things..

Elon says a lot of things.

Funding secured!

While doing a lot of "gestures".

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