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Comment by joewhale | Hacker News Reader

Aging isn’t a problem. It’s normal.

That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.

> Racism is normal

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.

Just because a certain behaviour doesn't show up in a certain stage of life, doesn't mean it isn't an inherent behaviour. Babies don't talk. Talking is still an inherent behaviour of humans.

Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.

Small children typically ignore race, but there does seem to be (at the very least) a cultural tendency towards racism as people move into adulthood. There is a good book about it called "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria...

People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.

Animals eat their disabled children. Humans should also do it then, since it's normal or natural.

Around 100k people die from age-related disease every day. I'd be careful to dismiss that as not a problem.

And them not dying would be an even bigger problem on pretty much every single metric I can think of

Yes, people grow old, but I don’t think there’s a rational fear people will ever live forever. However, there are diseases and conditions that are age-related that if solved would improve people’s quality of life, especially the last decade or two of their lives.

I believe it would be a far greater problem if those people didn't die. Aging populations are a huge problem around the globe and unless we'd improve the quality of life to such a margin that octo- and nonagenarians are able to care for each other, I think we're all better off with people dying of old age.

It's a problem for me.

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.

That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out

That's why I said "chance".

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.

How many intelligent are they?

I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.

That's just a desire for a legal way to murder people (by waiting). It's entirely understandable, but we'll have to find another way.

> we'll have to find another way

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.

I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields outside politics.

Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.

It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.

Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.

You know what's stagnating? Being dead forever.

We define normal by what is common and familiar. But that has no bearing on what ought to be.

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.

Dying because I cannot function adequately due to poor vision is normal.

Wearing crafted pieces of glass on my head every waking moment is not normal, but I choose to do it.

It can be both

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