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"I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years" - Wilbur Wright "It is apparent to me that the possibilities of t
by duncan_bayne 10y ago
"I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years" - Wilbur Wright
"It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere." - Thomas Edison
"There has been a great deal said about a ... rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon ... I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing. and I feel confident it will not be done for a very long period to come. I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking." - Dr. Vannevar Bush
Edited: what I meant by the above is that humanity has a solid track history of mis-estimating the pace of progress in new fields.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- krastanov 10y agoBut mis-estimation goes both ways. Most academics were very optimistic about early general AI, for instance.
- duncan_bayne 10y agoAbsolutely. Also, there was a lot of misplaced optimism about helicopters replacing cars. But either way, I don't think the pessimism is justified.
- Idontagree 10y agoI just find it a little difficult to believe that the one thing to have truly plagued mankind for all his existence (death) has suddenly received a serious blow. It has literally never happened before (as far as we know), and I'm not saying it can't, but current technology is like an infant if you consider it in the scale of what could be. I don't think death is just some easily fixed malfunction, but maybe many do.
- chongli 10y agoI don't find it that hard to believe. I think of doctors as highly trained mechanics. We've already figured out how to keep old cars going forever. Humans are several orders of magnitude more complex but the basic idea is the same: fix the problems that kill you, one at a time.
- dwaltrip 10y agoHow is death the "only thing" that has truly plagued mankind? What about the need to eat? Relieve ourselves? The need for love and social connection? These are universal as well, and there are many other things that we have always been faced with.
- oli5679 10y agoI accept that its impossible to forecast the future with certainty. Sometimes humankind makes amazing breakthroughs that domain experts did not see coming (and sometimes progress is much slower that anticipated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II I wouldn't assign a probability of 0 that humans make the breakthroughs needed to see many of us becoming double-centurions. However, the last hundred years of medical research hasn't made much meaningful progress in preventing the rapid death of centurions, so I assign a probability far lower than 1.
- bsder 10y ago> Edited: what I meant by the above is that humanity has a solid track history of mis-estimating the pace of progress in new fields. There is a difference. Annual probability of death does NOT appear to be a distribution that we just have to expand. If it were, we should have had some human get to 150 years old by now--there appear to be real internal biological limits that kill us off before that. Having to remove (likely multiple) real hard limits from the human biological system is a very different problem. You will likely have to get them all before you get any extension. Of course, once you do that, you will likely get a HUGE extension.