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Pretty much. I'm less excited. Because I was super excited 50 years ago when we were at the bottom of the S-curve on computers and I had no idea they would even
by ChuckMcM 6y ago
Pretty much. I'm less excited. Because I was super excited 50 years ago when we were at the bottom of the S-curve on computers and I had no idea they would eventually be commandeered to rip off my parents. I think of it as a "wider" view of the impacts vs a "narrow" view of the benefits.
For me, the nagging question is what happens when biotech has figured out biological systems to the point that everyone stops aging/dying[1]. Does that 10 billion people, give or take, become "the humans" for the rest of time?
[1] Lots of evidence that there is no "reason" for cell senescence, it's just an evolutionary afterthought (you succeeded in reproducing, now go die) and like other things can be "fixed."
- pmichaud 6y agoI wish I could find the source, but when I've looked into this in the past I was reasonably convinced that the population would go up a bit, but not catastrophically, with the basic idea being that people die all the time for lots of reasons, only one of which is "aging" (aging is multiple things, blah blah). So people's lifespans would be much longer on average, but not infinitely long. Something more like 300 or 400 years, with a pretty big standard deviation.
- astrange 6y agoIs not dying even a good idea? It might be the best way to create a stable system at society level - crash-only computing works pretty well in practice compared to never-crashing systems like Lisps. Main problem is we take too long to build a replacement person.