Nobody asked for it???
Nobody wants it???
You're not paying attention.
I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
Nobody wants it???
You're not paying attention.
I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old.
Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
Around 100k people die from age-related disease every day. I'd be careful to dismiss that as not a problem.
Wearing crafted pieces of glass on my head every waking moment is not normal, but I choose to do it.
It's normal for half of all babies to die in the first year of their life. It's normal for an infected limb to commonly lead to death. Etc.
And I do enjoy life, that's exactly why I want it to be much much longer.
The chain is rather short. You don't even need immortality right away. Longevity escape velocity.
What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.
We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:
1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.
2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
I'm sure humanity can grind through these hard problems in hundreds or thousands of years without AIs.
But I would prefer to be alive, so there's urgency.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
You don't need to "completely update their information about the world" to take in a new idea.
Second time you're not making any sense.
The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.