Re: life extension advocacy plans (fear of Tithonus) --> survey

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:11:29 MDT


Reason wrote:
>
> ---> Spike Jones quoting Mike Lorrey
> >> I personally expect anyone with a more normal
> >> expectancy who is 30-35 today to make it to the point where practical
> >> immortality is attained.
> >
> >I pretty much agree with Mike on this, which is why I
> >am willing to go to extreme measures such as CR to
> >scratch for just a feeeew moooore yeeeears. Im 40. spike
>
> --> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
>
> > How old am I? Old enough to vote. Anything else is on a need-to-know
> > basis, and you don't need to know. But to my mind, the worry is whether
> > my *grandparents* make it to the Singularity. I seriously doubt that even
> > the old fogeys among us will miss the train. If you're under forty, you
> > essentially have a cast-iron guarantee that you won't die of old age. You
> > may be hit by a truck, die of a premature heart attack at fifty, or have
> > an artery eaten by goo, but you won't die of old age. Hope this cheers
> > y'all up.
>
> I really don't see this; really, really not. It just doesn't sound plausible
> to be so absolute about this; it begins to seem like an issue of faith in
> technology, in everything working out ok. Consider even just the trial and
> error is-this-working timescales...
>
> Anyone want to roll out some numerical- and factual- based arguments on one
> side or the other?
>

Well for starters what do you think of the Singularity concept and
the hard data and graphs Kurzweilai.net has?

P.S. Did you see that news I posted about sequencing your whole DNA in
about 2 hours? What's interesting is that in many cases recently we
seem to be actually exceeding the Kurzweil graph predictions. So I
consider them to be conservative.

-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/



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