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“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after r

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.” Best part of the article for sure

savanaly 9y ago
I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958. EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html
    - notahacker 9y ago
      Focusing on the exceptions doesn't help the rule. You could get an average US house for $20k and a brand new car for $2k in 1956, and a $4k annual income was a comfortable middle class living. Commercial flight wasn't just prohibitively expensive by modern standards in 1856, it was impossible, but you could live on $100 a year at the time. If you want to pay 2118 people to resuscitate you (in the unlikely event the technology is feasible and people are willing and able and developed) you're going to need to invest that money well.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    It is how investments and productivity gains work, however. We are incredibly more wealthy than people of a hundred years ago, in almost every respect.
    - cgag 9y ago
      Yeah, one way I like to think about is if you could trade your current life for being a billionaire 100, 200, etc years ago, would you?
- omegaworks 9y ago
  >their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars. The fed would never allow this to happen. That would be deflation. What we should pray for is $0.25 loaves of bread, $10 rent, and a $1000 minimum wage. We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.
  - vtange 9y ago
    That is still deflation. Deflation is any decrease in the general price level of goods and services. It does not matter if it is due to increased production by advanced AI robots, etc. After all, if you knew you can get something cheaper tomorrow, why spend at all? Like you said, the Fed will run against this.
    - foxhill 9y ago
      because you need food to live. no amount of tightness on spending can delay the necessity of food. it always boggles me why people scoff at deflationary economics with this line of reasoning - i see little evidence that the average person is so wise with spending money today.
      - notahacker 9y ago
        It always boggles me that people scoff at the notion of people deferring many purchases and not investing at all in a deflationary economy because the relatively small fraction of spending which is necessary for survival is likely to be unaffected.
    - omegaworks 9y ago
      I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but if you want to go there, feel free to consult the chart[1]. There's plenty that's become more expensive in real dollars, and there exists a strange cohort of people that believe real wage gains are a form of inflation. My worry is that these same people frequently sit at the helm of our monetary system. My point remains: > We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone. 1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-modern-equivalent-of-bread-and-circuses-to-sate-the-masses-2018-02-12?link=sfmw_fb https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-moder...
OscarCunningham 9y ago
I'm sure most of us spend more than $10000 each year on prolonging our lives (food and rent). It doesn't seem very selfish to do it just once more.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Is $10k the full price of getting this done? I thought it was just the deposit to get on the waiting list.
  - OscarCunningham 9y ago
    Good question. I'm not sure exactly, but it seems the right order of magnitude. Alcor's website says that they cost $80k, and this should be cheaper since they don't need to keep the liquid nitrogen topped up.
- kolpa 9y ago
  Food and rent actually work.
rdiddly 9y ago
I imagine archaeologists of the future will talk condescendingly about us the same way we talk about the ancient Egyptians and their quaint belief that things they did to the body would have some kind of effect in the afterlife. Nonetheless, here in our time, it brilliantly crosses/combines... funeral services, a highly lucrative field scifi, including all its expansiveness the desperate compensatory technological hubris of people who know deep down that the world is quietly going down the shitter and/or narcissism (on which nobody ever went broke)
cwkoss 9y ago
Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people. If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- petercooper 9y ago
  A heads up for anyone interested in such matters, but an episode in the latest season of Black Mirror is specifically about this :-) (Indeed, most of the season is about the ethics of simulated consciousness in various ways.)
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    Great show. Loved season 3. White Christmas in season 2 also touches on this.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  As an alternative here's a outline of a resonable way someone might opensource their mind (credit to DataPacRat): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL3HXSJ1O93jFn3fgu0Rs/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL...
- jpindar 9y ago
  That reminds me of a story, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang, in which people keep AIs as pets. But they don't dare let them on the internet because when they did, trolls would torture them. So the AIs could only live in walled garden type virtual worlds.
- kristianp 9y ago
  Iain Banks' novel "Surface Detail" describes virtual hells where people can be tortured for eternity.
Izkata 9y ago
My favourite: > Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says. It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place [0] we just need to get access to, then all our dreams can come true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon
- taneq 9y ago
  > It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place Like Tahiti. It's a magical place.
ggggtez 9y ago
We don't say the same thing about egyptian pharohs and embalming. We consider it a very interesting treasure of history. I'm sure if embalming was a process that let us revive ancient people, we'd do so because we'd really want to learn from them. Guy needs to not be so pessimistic.
Veedrac 9y ago
That part of the article was frankly outright disgusting. Laughing and mocking people for trying to save people's lives is cartoon bad guy. Making deluded strawman argument in order to discourage life-saving measures is horrifically unethical. Dying is not something to be paraded around as a virtue. I only hope people figure it out sooner rather than later.

savanaly 9y ago

I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.

kingbirdy 9y ago
That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958. EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html
  - notahacker 9y ago
    Focusing on the exceptions doesn't help the rule. You could get an average US house for $20k and a brand new car for $2k in 1956, and a $4k annual income was a comfortable middle class living. Commercial flight wasn't just prohibitively expensive by modern standards in 1856, it was impossible, but you could live on $100 a year at the time. If you want to pay 2118 people to resuscitate you (in the unlikely event the technology is feasible and people are willing and able and developed) you're going to need to invest that money well.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  It is how investments and productivity gains work, however. We are incredibly more wealthy than people of a hundred years ago, in almost every respect.
  - cgag 9y ago
    Yeah, one way I like to think about is if you could trade your current life for being a billionaire 100, 200, etc years ago, would you?
omegaworks 9y ago
>their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars. The fed would never allow this to happen. That would be deflation. What we should pray for is $0.25 loaves of bread, $10 rent, and a $1000 minimum wage. We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.
- vtange 9y ago
  That is still deflation. Deflation is any decrease in the general price level of goods and services. It does not matter if it is due to increased production by advanced AI robots, etc. After all, if you knew you can get something cheaper tomorrow, why spend at all? Like you said, the Fed will run against this.
  - foxhill 9y ago
    because you need food to live. no amount of tightness on spending can delay the necessity of food. it always boggles me why people scoff at deflationary economics with this line of reasoning - i see little evidence that the average person is so wise with spending money today.
    - notahacker 9y ago
      It always boggles me that people scoff at the notion of people deferring many purchases and not investing at all in a deflationary economy because the relatively small fraction of spending which is necessary for survival is likely to be unaffected.
  - omegaworks 9y ago
    I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but if you want to go there, feel free to consult the chart[1]. There's plenty that's become more expensive in real dollars, and there exists a strange cohort of people that believe real wage gains are a form of inflation. My worry is that these same people frequently sit at the helm of our monetary system. My point remains: > We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone. 1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-modern-equivalent-of-bread-and-circuses-to-sate-the-masses-2018-02-12?link=sfmw_fb https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-moder...

OscarCunningham 9y ago

I'm sure most of us spend more than $10000 each year on prolonging our lives (food and rent). It doesn't seem very selfish to do it just once more.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
Is $10k the full price of getting this done? I thought it was just the deposit to get on the waiting list.
- OscarCunningham 9y ago
  Good question. I'm not sure exactly, but it seems the right order of magnitude. Alcor's website says that they cost $80k, and this should be cheaper since they don't need to keep the liquid nitrogen topped up.
kolpa 9y ago
Food and rent actually work.

rdiddly 9y ago

I imagine archaeologists of the future will talk condescendingly about us the same way we talk about the ancient Egyptians and their quaint belief that things they did to the body would have some kind of effect in the afterlife. Nonetheless, here in our time, it brilliantly crosses/combines... funeral services, a highly lucrative field scifi, including all its expansiveness the desperate compensatory technological hubris of people who know deep down that the world is quietly going down the shitter and/or narcissism (on which nobody ever went broke)

cwkoss 9y ago

Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people. If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
petercooper 9y ago
A heads up for anyone interested in such matters, but an episode in the latest season of Black Mirror is specifically about this :-) (Indeed, most of the season is about the ethics of simulated consciousness in various ways.)
- cwkoss 9y ago
  Great show. Loved season 3. White Christmas in season 2 also touches on this.
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
As an alternative here's a outline of a resonable way someone might opensource their mind (credit to DataPacRat): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL3HXSJ1O93jFn3fgu0Rs/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL...
jpindar 9y ago
That reminds me of a story, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang, in which people keep AIs as pets. But they don't dare let them on the internet because when they did, trolls would torture them. So the AIs could only live in walled garden type virtual worlds.
kristianp 9y ago
Iain Banks' novel "Surface Detail" describes virtual hells where people can be tortured for eternity.

Izkata 9y ago

My favourite: > Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says. It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place [0] we just need to get access to, then all our dreams can come true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon

taneq 9y ago
> It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place Like Tahiti. It's a magical place.

ggggtez 9y ago

We don't say the same thing about egyptian pharohs and embalming. We consider it a very interesting treasure of history. I'm sure if embalming was a process that let us revive ancient people, we'd do so because we'd really want to learn from them. Guy needs to not be so pessimistic.

Veedrac 9y ago

That part of the article was frankly outright disgusting. Laughing and mocking people for trying to save people's lives is cartoon bad guy. Making deluded strawman argument in order to discourage life-saving measures is horrifically unethical. Dying is not something to be paraded around as a virtue. I only hope people figure it out sooner rather than later.