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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> What do they see as the benefit of the singularity?

Living forever / getting rid of death, fixing world problems, countless amazing technological achievements, colonizing the galaxy. In probable order of happening.

> Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it?

Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

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> Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

http://intelligence.org/research/, also Omohundro's and Bostrom's works.

The universe still dies, so you still die. A trillion years is still quite finite and small.

"Small" compared to what?

Infinity. 80-ish years might not seem like much to you, but to an insect that only lives a few days it might as well be a trillion years. The point I'm trying to make is that living a really long time is not living forever, and even if your death date is the same as the universe however many trillions of years out from now, your still going to die eventually, and still going to worry about it.

None of that disputes the fact that longer is still better (obviously with all else, like quality of life, being equal).

Well, I'd love to worry about it for all the billion additional years. Maybe we'll even figure a way around the problem in this time? Our understanding of laws of physics is far from complete.

Imo, there is no infinity in the real world.

If by "real world", you mean the world of things, then I would agree with you. But the world is the totality of all facts, not the totality of all things.

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